Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. Growing up in Baltimore, Marshall experienced a lot of racial discrimination that shaped his passion for civil rights. The city he lived in had a death rate for African-Americans that was twice that of Caucasians, and due to separations of white and colored, Marshall was forced to go to an all-black grade school. One time he was unable to use the bathroom because all public restrooms were reserved for whites. Marshall's first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Thurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston
