How to Celebrate the Life of Thurgood Marshall

His eulogy in the Washington "Afro-American" says it all: "We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Thurgood Marshall."

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Poker Chips
• Biographies Of Thurgood Marshall
• Copies Of The U.S. Constitution
• Playing Cards
• Airline Tickets
• Plane Tickets To Atlantic City

1. Read "Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary" by Juan Williams. It will introduce you to the fun-loving Baltimore boy who grew up to become the architect of American race relations in the 20th century - and the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
2. Visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and ponder the impact of Justice Marshall's life work, including his most famous legal case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. His victorious argument before the Supreme Court paved the way for public-school integration throughout the country.
3. Take a virtual tour of the Civil Rights Museum if you can't make it to Memphis. (See civilrightsmuseum.org.)
4. Curl up with the U.S. Constitution. If that strikes you as a less-than-rollicking way to spend an evening, remember what an NAACP activist said of Marshall in his days as a civil rights lawyer: "We didn't know about the Constitution. He brought us the Constitution as a document like Moses brought his people the Ten Commandments."
5. Delve into the works of Justice Marshall's hero, the black anti-slavery writer Frederick Douglass.
6. Take a trip to Atlantic City, the one place Justice Marshall could escape autograph-seeking admirers in his later years. Play a little blackjack, order room service, and if you've always thought you'd like to be famous, think again.
7. Throw a party in Justice Marshall's honor and have the gang over for poker. It was his favorite lifelong pastime.

Tips & Warnings

• When your kids misbehave, don't despair. Simply find creative ways to correct them. In high school, Thurgood was a mediocre student and a cutup. His teachers punished him by making him read the U.S. Constitution aloud. By the time he graduated, he knew it by heart.
• Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908. President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the high court in 1967, and Marshall always insisted he would serve the duration of his lifetime term. He intended, he said, "to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband." He didn't make it. He retired in 1991 and died of heart failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital on January 24, 1993. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.