It’s the birthday of Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), one of the leading lawyers to use the law in the fight against institutional racism and the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court, on which he served for 24 years.

(Full disclosure: it’s also the birthday of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), but after reading a bit about how thoroughly he mined the suffering in his own life for literary material, with perhaps the teensiest propensity toward hypochondria, he just sounds too exhausting to write about. I think it’s this heat wave. Normally I’m all for blowing every little ache and pain way out of proportion.)

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was a major troublemaker in school. The teacher’s punishment for such students was to send them to the basement to study the Constitution, which is how Marshall first came to work his way through the Constitution, paragraph by paragraph. (Well done, Teacher.) He continued his hell raising at Lincoln University in Chester, Pennsylvania, and was even expelled at one point. (Spoiler alert: he eventually straightens out.) He then studied at Howard University Law School, where he was mentored by Charles Hamilton Houston, the first black lawyer to win a case before the Supreme Court.

After law school, Marshall began practicing law and was soon on the staff of the N.A.A.C.P., where he worked against segregation first at the graduate school level and then on down to the elementary school level. Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, most famously Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, a case that is still studied by law students today. He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961 (after the nomination was held up for several months by southern senators), was named U.S. solicitor general in 1965, and was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court on August 30, 1967. At first, Marshall was one of a liberal majority, but by the time he retired, the Court was largely conservative and Marshall was known as “the Great Dissenter.”

Amusing factoid: Marshall’s name was originally “Thoroughgood,” after his paternal grandfather, but Marshall changed the spelling to “Thurgood” when he was an elementary student because he “got tired of spelling all that out.”

When Marshall told his fellow justices of his plans to retire (1991), Chief Justice Rehnquist gave him a big ol’ bear hug and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wept. Marshall died of heart failure at the age of nearly 84, survived by his second wife and two sons.

Do something to forward the freedom of all humans on this sweltering July Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.