Tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall

Abstract

Thurgood Marshall is a fabulous cook. In 1965 he invited me and my wife to his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in New York and made a crab gumbo, okra and all, that I remember to this day. I was told that I had his grandmother to thank. With a loving irreverence that was fully deserved, she greeted his decision in the late 1920S to study law by insisting that he also learn to cook, so that he always could be sure of a job. Given the racism rampant in Baltimore, or for that matter, in America at that time, no one could possibly have imagined that.Thurgood Marshall would someday have the greatest legal career of the twentieth century: chief counsel for the petitioners in Brown v. Board of Education, judge on the Court of Appeals, Solicitor General of the United States, and finally, Supreme Court Justice.