The Highest Tribute is my first picture book. And it’s a biography of Thurgood Marshall who was the first Black Supreme Court Justice and also a landmark Civil Rights attorney in many major cases leading up to that, including Brown versus Board of Education, which overturned school segregation and paved the way for a lot of other laws that would help promote integration and equality.
And the title, The Highest Tribute, is drawn from a Thurgood Marshall quote that says, ‘in recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.’ And so the arc of the book is about Thurgood persisting through challenges and, you know, being committed from the time he was very young to this idea of civil rights. You know, it starts out by saying that when Thurgood Marshall was in second grade he decided that if there was something he didn’t like about the world, he would change it.
And he started with his own name. His birth name as Thoroughgood, but he shortened it when he was very young. And that’s just one example of many times when he said, hey, I don’t like this I’m going to change it. And, of course, the biggest example of that was segregation. He said I don’t like this, I’m going to change it. And it took decades, but he succeeded.
And so that’s the arc of the story, but, you know, I think through his work he clearly was paying the highest tribute to humanity. Right? He was saying I will use my life, I will use my resources, I will use my talents to create equality in this world for everyone. And so I end the book by saying something like, you know, by doing this work he has paid himself the highest tribute. And so that’s where the title comes from.
Part of what surprised me about researching him was how little his story was reflected in children’s literature. And I was delighted to learn that he was quite a gregarious fellow who enjoyed, you know, telling stories and connecting with people and it sounds like he was a really enjoyable person to work with and really, really positive.
And he definitely always worked as part of a team. He was never alone in his work. He had, you know, many, many colleagues who argued cases with him, who worked over briefs with him, who supported his work. And, you know, so he, in my mind, is a really good example of how it does take a community to make change. We hold up these heroes as individuals, but there’s always this group, this community around them that is really supporting and enforcing and making possible the work that they do.
And so it was delightful to learn about his mentors and the people he mentored and his family and to see that he was more than the little snapshot that we reduce him to of, you know, lawyer, a Supreme Court Justice, right? To see him as a whole person was pretty compelling.
