PERSPECTIVE ON THURGOOD MARSHALL : A Man Who Remembered History : At the pinnacle of American government, Marshall kept in mind the injustices of a segregated America.

When I opened the note from Justice Thurgood Marshall on a spring day some 15 years ago, I found that it was hardly a form letter. It was clearly dictated by Marshall himself, and it contained one of the bluntest, most stinging rebukes I could ever have imagined.

A young Supreme Court reporter for the Baltimore Sun, I had written Marshall to ask whether he might be willing to tape-record his reminiscences of growing up in Baltimore’s black community. I had just finished for the Sun a similar interview with the Baltimore-born civil-rights leader Clarence Mitchell, and hoped Marshall might be willing to do the same thing.

The reply went right to the point. “You probably don’t even know the racial history of your own newspaper,” Marshall wrote. “If you did, you wouldn’t even ask. If I ever decide to do something like that, I’ll do it with the Afro-American.”

That episode showed two things about Thurgood Marshall.

First and foremost, he remembered--every minute, in every way, even down to the smallest detail. Thurgood Marshall never forgot where he came from. Years later, at the pinnacle of American government and Washington society, Marshall kept in mind the injustices he had suffered in segregated America, and those that blacks continue to suffer today.

Secondly, Marshall was a warm person, who rarely let his views of history and institutions carry over into animosity against individuals.

Indeed, I discovered to my surprise that, after turning down that interview request, Marshall regularly took my calls to his Supreme Court chambers. For several years, we had an odd telephone relationship, in which, every couple of months, he would pass his own earthy judgments on the workings of the court, often punctuated by his own wheezy giggles.

With Marshall’s departure, the Supreme Court lost its first and last link to the grass-roots social history of this country, and to the legal segregation that was part of daily life for a century after the abolition of slavery.

Marshall had seen it all firsthand--the separate schools, buses, swimming pools and drinking fountains; the racist cops and governors; the interrogations and forced confessions of suspected criminals; the restrictive real-estate covenants and bans on interracial marriage.

His sense of the common touch extended beyond issues of race. On the Supreme Court bench, some of his colleagues worshiped the abstractions of the law. Marshall had a way of bringing things back down to earth, even if it meant intimidating some lawyers in the process.

“Money. Isn’t that what this case is really about?” he would ask. Then, as some corporate lawyer would begin stammering for an answer, Marshall would spell it out for emphasis: “M-O-N-E-Y.”

Ironically, I think that Marshall also represented, in a way, the Supreme Court’s and the country’s few remaining links to a time of hope. He symbolized an era when it seemed that if you simply broke down the legal hurdle of segregation, you might open the way to equality between whites and blacks.

To be honest, we should admit that Marshall is lionized today not only because of the unchallengeable greatness of his legal victories for civil rights, but because his choice of methods was relatively unthreatening. His life seemed to suggest that the battle for fair and equal treatment of blacks in this country can be won largely inside the courtroom.

Ever the realist, Marshall himself knew well the limits of those courtroom victories that he and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund achieved. Indeed, in his later years, in some of his dissenting opinions on the court, he pointed out that, without some extra help to make up for the nation’s history of slavery, Afro-Americans would never achieve full equality with whites.

When the court ruled in 1978 that a white man, Allan Bakke, had been subjected to racial discrimination by an affirmative-action program giving special help to black medical students, Marshall was furious that the court had suddenly and belatedly become so eager for racial equality on behalf of whites.

“The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment,” he wrote. “Today’s judgment ignores the fact that for several hundred years, Negroes have been discriminated against not as individuals, but rather solely because of the color of their skins.”

Thurgood Marshall had guessed right about me. When I wrote him that note, I didn’t know very much about the racial history of Baltimore, or of the generally unquestioning and acquiescent role its leading newspaper had played in the city’s segregated history.

I would later come to learn some of this history--how Thurgood Marshall woke up daily at 5 a.m. to commute from Baltimore to Howard University Law School in Washington because theUniversity of Maryland’s law school didn’t admit blacks; and how, in Thurgood Marshall’s words, “there wasn’t a single department store (in Baltimore) that would let a Negro in the front door.”

But I learned of these injustices, as eventually most Americans will,only through books and interviews. Thurgood Marshall knew them from his own experience. His gift to America was that he did battle with these injustices, conquered them and never forgot them. For that, America will never forget him.