At the time, Thurgood Marshall was the head of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There were four cases that were combined into the overall court case known as <em>Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka</em>, which was argued before the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, and decided in 1954.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to serve on the Supreme Court. He was the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court Justice.
