While deciding the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case the Supreme Court heard arguments from a lawyer who would one day be a justice himself: Thurgood Marshall. In 1954 Marshall was no stranger to the men of the high court. As a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he had argued cases before the Court for ten years, starting with the appeal of W. D. Lyons, a young man unfairly convicted of murder, in 1944. The Lyons case was one of the few that Marshall lost: he eventually won twenty-nine out of the thirty-two cases he represented.

The Brown decision was one of his most significant victories. As Marshall biographer Carl Rowan wrote, "There may never have been any days of oral argument before the Supreme Court to equal the depth of passion, the agony of the justices, that erupted...