Rico McGowan stopped feeling like a kid a long time ago.
"People say 27 is young -- well, I swear I should be farther along by now," said Mr. McGowan, one of the youngest lawyers at the Baltimore firm of Shapiro & Olander.
Mr. McGowan is in a hurry. As a child, he had to grow up fast after his father died. As a student, he felt pressure to excel while his mother borrowed money to support his law school education. And now, as a graduate, he is racing to prove himself as a black lawyer in a profession that is largely white.
Black leaders in Annapolis recently honored Mr. McGowan with a Martin Luther King Jr. Drum Major Award for his community work. They praised him as a student at the University of Maryland Law School and for his achievements in the year since then.
The award was a validation for Mr. McGowan. The Annapolis native remembers struggling to find a route out of the city and into a career. He remembers stopping by a friend's office in Annapolis and being told blacks just don't become lawyers.
"I was talking to someone for advice, someone I don't want to name, and the person said to me, 'You don't want to be an attorney. White people aren't going to hire you, and black people aren't going to seek you out -- they're going to find white lawyers,' " he said.
But since then, Mr. McGowan has clung to his law career like a life preserver. In law school, he joined dozens of clubs and associations, winning honors and friends in many of them. He tried to bring extra focus to minorities on campus by creating a diversity committee at the law school and creating a lecture series named in honor of Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice who was black.
And in his senior year, as head of the Student Bar Association -- the equivalent of student body president -- he led fund raising for low-income communities, organizing year-round food drives and holiday parties for homeless children in low-income communities.
Now Mr. McGowan can see those neighborhoods from the windows of the firm's towering downtown office building.
He says he doesn't want to forget that community work, although he hasn't had time to do much of it lately because of the frequent 65-hour weeks required at his new job.
Mr. McGowan always has had his work cut out for him. His mother, Trudi McGowan, scolded her son if he brought home a C on his report card. She paid for cabs every morning so that Rico and his older brother, Commecel, could go to the best public schools in the area. The children commuted to school every year while the family moved between Bywater Mutual Homes, Admiral Farragut Apartments and other Annapolis housing developments.
It was a life the McGowans lived without George McGowan, the father who died when Rico was only 18 months old. Mrs. McGowan likes to say her son is a replica of his father.
George McGowan qualified to become a corporal in the Marines but never was awarded the rank in discriminatory times. So instead, the elder Mr. McGowan took a job in the Social Security Administration's law library in Woodlawn and read the books as he stacked them. He took a second job selling suits at E. J. Korvettes in Baltimore and used the extra cash to buy things for his family, such as a set of encyclopedias.
Rico McGowan read those encyclopedias long after his father died. When Rico graduated from Annapolis Senior High School, he worked his way through college selling suits at Woodward and Lothrop in Annapolis. And when it came time to choose a career, he, too, gravitated toward law.
Now Mr. McGowan and his friends are pooling their money in an "investment club," and they hope to buy property or a business. bTC He and a friend are planning to open their own law firm one day.
Although the direction at this point is unclear, Mr. McGowan is in a hurry to get there.