📍1632 Division Street, Baltimore, MD 21217, USA
1908 – 1925“I was born at 1632 Division Street in West Baltimore in 1908, in a thriving Black neighbourhood of churches, shops and rowhouses. My mother, Norma, was a kindergarten teacher who believed education was everything, and my father, William, worked as a railroad dining-car waiter and later as head steward at a whites-only club. Our family had roots in Baltimore going back generations, and our home was full of books and opinions. My father loved to sit in the courthouse and watch trials, and he brought the cases home to the dinner table. He taught my brother and me to argue: he would challenge every statement we made and demand that we prove it. I used to say we argued five nights out of seven. My father never told me to become a lawyer, but he turned me into one. At school I was lively and sometimes in trouble, and my principal's favourite punishment was to send me to the basement with a copy of the United States Constitution. By the time I left school, I knew the whole thing by heart. At Frederick Douglass High School I starred on the debate team, and I went on to Lincoln University. The University of Maryland's law school would not admit Black students, so I went to Howard, where I learned how the law could be used to fight segregation. In time I won Brown v. Board of Education and became the first Black justice of the Supreme Court. Baltimore remembers me with a statue outside the federal courthouse, and with the Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center in the neighbourhood where I grew up.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today