A special friend gave us a memento that we keep in a special place in our home. It is a small stone that reads, “Friends are our chosen family.” As I write this, appropriately on Valentine’s Day, I think about close friends of mine and the lifelong friendship of two extraordinary men whose lives I wish to acknowledge as we celebrate Black History Month. The two men are Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Attorney Wiley A. Branton, Sr., who was also my father-in-law. Thurgood and Wiley’s friendship began in the mid-1950s when Wiley was a young lawyer in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Thurgood was a lawyer in NYC, working for the NAACP. Wiley was a local lawyer who was asked to handle cases in the South when the NAACP could not send a lawyer from New York to handle the case. Wiley A. Branton and Thurgood Marshall on the steps of the Supreme Court after the court’s decision Cooper v.Aaron, commonly known as the Little Rock Nine case, which provided for ...