Thurgood Marshall was America's leading radical. He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the history of the American society. However, he is the least well known of the three leading black figures of this century. Martin Luther King Jr., with his preachings of love and non-violent resistance, and Malcolm X, the fiery street preacher, are both more associated with the civil rights struggle in the popular mind. Thurgood Marshall, eradicated the legacies of racism and segregation by means of the courtroom which had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than the efforts of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.
             Marshall's deep faith in the power of racial integration came out of a middle class black perspective in turn of the century Baltimore. He was the child of an activist black community that had established its own schools and fought for equal rights from the time of the Civil War. His own family, of an interracial background, had been at the forefront of demands by Baltimore blacks for equal treatment. Out of that unique family and city was born Thurgood Marshall, the architect of American race relations in the twentieth century.
             After the Reconstruction period, African Americans had won freedom, however segregation still plagued the lives of all Black people. One area where blacks experienced discrimination was in real estate. "Many white people did not want to live with blacks. This caused the white real estate agents to practice what was called block busting."(Aldred 44) They would go into white neighborhoods and tell the owners that blacks were about to move in. The owners would sell their homes cheaply to get away from the incoming blacks. The real estate agents would then sell those homes, at much higher prices, to blacks. This type of racist behavior was exemplified in all aspects life. African Americans could only take so much of this; they cried out against th...