"A child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi...has the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for." (Thurgood Marshall)

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, listeners can get caught up to speed on the lives of America's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

Nobody is a bigger testament to that fact than Thurgood Marshall, the African-American lawyer who successfully argued the Brown v. Board case. Today Marshall is best known for being the first Black Supreme Court justice, but that history setting precedent has come to overshadow the instrumental work he did as chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Marshall argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone in history and would win nearly 30 of them, including the seminal Brown v. Board case.

Marshall was eventually appointed as an appellate justice by President Kennedy and was a very natural choice for the Supreme Court when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him. The appointment of Marshall made history, but Marshall left an indelible mark on American jurisprudence as a liberal anchor on the court for more than two decades. Naturally, he was a progressive voice on the issue of civil rights, and he also took strong stances on criminal procedure cases, including ardent opposition against the death penalty and the strengthening of legal protections for criminal defendants.