Poetic justice: Thurgood Marshall gets even: unable to attend the law school of his choice, he went on to lead the crusade against segregation.

• Author: Williams, Juan

In 1930, Thurgood Marshall a lanky honors graduate fresh from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, realized that the law school he hoped to attend did not accept black students. Though the University of Maryland School of Law was just blocks from his parents' home in West Baltimore, he decided it would be a waste of time and upsetting to even bother to apply.

Marshall went to Howard University Law School, a private school founded to educate former slaves, 40 miles away in Washington, D.C. He couldn't afford to live in Washington so he had to commute. His mother pawned her wedding ring to pay the higher tuition. Marshall graduated from Howard No. 1 in the class of 1933.

But he held a grudge against the law school, that had never given him a chance. In the tare 1970s, Marshall told an interviewer that he had dreamed about "getting even with Maryland for not letting me go to its law school."

Only a year after graduating from Howard, the 25-year-old Marshall put a newly devised strategy for fighting segregation to the test: He would net challenge the segregation law itself but attempt to show a violation of the equal rights promised to all citizens under the Constitution. He persuaded a black Amherst College graduate, Donald Gaines Murray, to apply to Maryland's law school. As expected, Murray was rejected. Marshall had Murray write a letter to the university asking why he'd been denied admission. The university responded with a letter affirming its ban on black students and Marshall used it as the basis for a lawsuit against the university.

The case went to court in June 1935, and a Baltimore City Court stunned lawyers on both sides by ruling that Murray must be admitted.

The case became a template for legal attacks on segregation in...