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GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says one of its first black students has died.
News outlets report J. Kenneth Lee died last week. A funeral for the 94-year-old was Monday in Greensboro.
The university says in a statement that Lee was one of four African-American students who helped integrate the campus. The four had joined a lawsuit filed in 1949 that led to the desegregation of the university's law school.
Thurgood Marshall was then-director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and represented Lee and the other plaintiffs in the suit. Marshall later became the U.S. Supreme Court's first African-American justice.
Lee enrolled in the law school in 1951 and became a prominent civil rights attorney in Greensboro after graduating. His career spanned more than five decades.
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