1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
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Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was sworn in on Oct. 2, 1967. As chief counsel for the NAACP in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall was the architect and executor of the legal strategy that ended the era of official racial segregation. He was born in Baltimore, the great-grandson of a slave, and studied at Howard University under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston, graduating first in his class in 1933. As the NAACP’s chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, he argued more than a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to be solicitor general of the United States, where he again argued cases before the Supreme Court but this time on behalf of the U.S. government. For 24 years on the high court until retiring in 1991, Marshall challenged discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and vehemently defended affirmative action.
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