By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

Earlier this spring the New York state legislature enacted and Governor David A. Paterson signed legislation designating May 17 at Thurgood Marshall Day. May 17, of course, is also the anniversary of the day on which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the case that, in declaring racially-segregated schooling unconstitutional, destroyed the legal foundations of Jim Crow in America. So, it is entirely appropriate to join the anniversary of Brown with a day that honors the life and achievements of an individual who played a central role in leading the Court and the American people to that decision and the righting of a grievous wrong. In 1993 Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. delivered one of the eulogies at the funeral of Thurgood Marshall, which was held in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Jordan, a member of the board of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., which Marshall had founded, wrote about the meaning of that event for him in his 2008 book, Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out. We include both reflections here.

The passing of Thurgood Marshall, whose casket rested before me in the great sanctuary of the Washington National Cathedral, was a sad contrast to the sense of revitalization, hope and relief that just days earlier had attended the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton—the first Democratic administration in a dozen years, and one whose victory and progressive outlook stemmed from the social revolution Thurgood Marshall had played so central a role in forging.

Thurgood Marshall was a guardian of this nation’s greatest treasure. He was a keeper of the flame of the American ideal. Both an advocate and a tribune of freedom, he appeared at a critical historical moment to help rescue from the dustbin of hypocrisy that glorious declaration of the Constitution: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The concept was so perfectly put – and so imperfectly realized until Charles Hamilton Houston, the great attorney and dean of Howard University Law School, began in the early 1930s to execute his grand strategy to destroy the legal bulwarks of segregation. A crucial element of that plan was the formation of a civil rights “brain trust.” This diverse collection of brilliant attorneys – some black, some white – was spread throughout the country. Some had been waging such battles on an individual basis for years. Houston’s great contribution was to provide a tactical, strategic and intellectual coherence to the disparate efforts and, beginning in the early 1930s, reinforce their thin ranks with numerous Howard Law graduates –such as Thurgood Marshall. He had excelled under Houston’s relentlessly rigorous regime that had made Howard Law the West Point of the Black America’s freedom struggle.

Marshall, graduating first in the Howard Law Class of 1933, set the standard for all to follow. Howard Law was in fact Marshall’s second choice for legal training. A Baltimore native, he had wanted to return home after graduating from Lincoln University, the historically black college in Pennsylvania, and enroll in the law school of the University of Maryland. But his application was rejected because he was black. Three years later, as a freshly-minted law graduate, Marshall, working with Houston, successfully sued the University of Maryland law school to admit a black Amherst College graduate, Donald Gaines Murray.

Tutored at Howard in both the utility and the majesty of the law as a force for justice, Thurgood Marshall used that knowledge, and his courage and commitment—and his wiles—to show America how to live up to its convictions. He cleared the brush, so to speak, blocking the nation’s vision of and progress toward a more perfect, a more just union.

Marshall did that by, following the strategy Charles Hamilton Houston had devised: systematically challenging the legal bulwarks of racism in voting rights, housing, and, most of all, education—and by winning cases. His record as a Supreme Court practitioner was extraordinary. He won twenty-nine of the thirty-two cases he argued as the NAACP counsel before the Court. That superb Supreme Court record continued when President Johnson appointed him Solicitor General of the United States in 1965. Representing the government, he won fourteen of the nineteen cases he argued before Johnson in June of 1967 nominated him to the Court itself.

One can’t overestimate the magnitude of Thurgood Marshall’s achievement as an astute legal technician and tactician and as a persuasive advocate in the courtroom. He did battle with a legal system which until then had paid little heed to the exalted words of the Constitution. He and his fellow pioneers endured constant indignities in the courtrooms of the South—and the constant threat of physical harm outside the courts—as they tried case after case in places where the lives of black Americans, no matter how well educated, counted for virtually nothing.

But Marshall and his colleagues were also armed with something more than technical know-how and courage. They were armed with an understanding of the promise of America and the appeal of that promise to all Americans. And, finally, they were armed with a faith in the flexibility and adaptability of the Constitution—the faith that its words and the rhetoric of the American Ideal had provided enough “give” in the American system to encompass, finally, black Americans’ right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thurgood Marshall believed in the Constitution of the United States. He believed that those words had a meaning beyond mere rhetoric; that if followed and applied properly, they offered America a way out of the “half-slave, half-free” paradigm it had followed since kidnapped Africans were first brought to Virginia’s shores in 1619.

This was at first glance an extraordinary confidence to have in the moral capacity of white Americans during the 1930s, when antiblack bigotry seemed as pervasive and violent as in the early 1900s. But other astute observers of the racial scene also discerned that momentous forces for change were percolating beneath the society’s white-supremacist surface.  In the early 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist and author of the masterwork on race in America, An American Dilemma, expressed confidence that American could overcome its profound legalized bigotry. His optimism, he said, lay in the reality that America, unlike every other country in the West, had “a living system of expressed ideals for human cooperation which is unified, stable and clearly formulated” and “that Americans, for all their differences, for all their warring and rivalries, were bound by a distinct ‘American creed,’ a common set of values that embodied such concepts as fair play and an equal chance for everyone.” Nearly half a century later, Marshall would describe the Constitution to the journalist Carl Rowan, as “the greatest body of laws set out ever, and what to me, and to many people, is so extraordinary about it is that at this late date you find that it works.”

At his death, one of Marshall’s former law clerks, Yale Law School Professor Paul Gewirtz described Marshall as having “an heroic imagination.” “He grew up in a ruthlessly discriminatory world,” Professor Gewitz went on. But he “had the capacity to imagine a radically different world, the imaginative capacity to believe that such a world was possible, the strength to sustain that image in the mind’s eye and the heart’s longing, and the courage and ability to make that imagined world real.”

Thurgood Marshall’s heroic imagination inspired me as a boy growing up in Georgia to dream of what was possible for my own future. In the late 1940s, I went with my father to an NAACP mass meeting and for the first time heard Marshall speak. His determination and confidence that blacks would gain their civil rights were so thrilling that I said to my father as we were walking from the meeting, “Daddy, I’m going to be a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall.” My father said, “Okay, son.” But he was looking at me as if I had lost my mind.

My father, however, missed part of the importance of Marshall, and of the men and women who were with him on the front lines of the struggle. They inspired by example. They not only gave black men and women, and boys and girls the courage to face the often bitter present. They also gave them—gave me—the courage and the hope to dream that the future for black people could be gloriously different.

I never wavered in my determination to be a civil rights lawyer and to attend Howard Law School. When I enrolled in September 1957, Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, gave one of the first major addresses of the school year. “This,” he said, with tears in his eyes, “is Charlie Houston’s law school.”

Marshall and the “Inc. Fund,” as it was colloquially called, used the Law School’s moot court room to rehearse arguments they would present in Supreme Court cases. These were informally formal sessions: with Law professors from Howard and elsewhere and other attorneys sat as the judges and grill the LDF presenters to expose weaknesses in their arguments. These were glorious moments for my classmates and me as we listened to the courtroom presentations of not only Marshall, but such legal icons as Oliver Hill, Robert Carter, Constance Baker Motley, Jack Greenberg, William T. Coleman, and Robert Ming. During the breaks, we crowded around them, starry-eyed and seeing ourselves after law school following in their paths.

My sense of connection with Marshall and his work became more direct, though still distant, after I graduated. In 1960, while working as a law clerk for Donald L. Hallowell, the great civil rights attorney from Atlanta, I immediately became involved in the preparation for the lawsuit that led to Charlayne Hunter (now Charlayne Hunter-Gault) and Hamilton Holmes enrolling in the University of Georgia and ending its whites-only status. I didn’t think that Marshall even knew my name. But in 1961 during the NAACP annual convention that summer in Philadelphia, Ruby Hurley, the NAACP’s regional field director for the Southeast, and my supervisor, took me over to Marshall and began to introduce me. Marshall interrupted. “I know this boy, Ruby. He worked with Hallowell on the University of Georgia case.”

His words made me stand a little taller at that moment, and, to my deep gratitude, his interest in me and support of me continued. In 1967, shortly after Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, I petitioned to practice before the Supreme Court. Wiley A. Branton, a lawyer for the Little Rock Nine and dean of the Howard University Law School moved my admission to the Court. Branton also moved my admission to the Arkansas Supreme Court and I served as his deputy at the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. Branton was a former Inc. Fund lawyer and longtime friend of Marshall’s. After the swearing in,  I looked for a moment directly at Marshall and he, while keeping his face impassive, quickly but unmistakably winked his eye at me. My mother told me later that that gesture was like the laying on of hands.

Even so, although I was a disciple of Thurgood’s, I never spent much one-on-one time with him. But we each felt a tacit bond that went very deep. This led to one of the signal honors of my life—being asked by his wonderful wife, Cissy, to give one of the eulogies at his funeral. It came as the direct result of Marshall’s hearing me eulogize Wiley Branton, in the very same Washington National Cathedral in 1988. Thurgood and Cissy had sat in the second pew, amid a great host of civil rights veterans. After I had finished speaking, Cissy later told me, Thurgood turned to her and simply said, “Cissy, get Vernon.”

Washington National Cathedral
Mount Saint Alban, Washington D.C.
January 28, 1993

The world is with us today…For the life and the teachings of Thurgood Marshall shine brightly all across the globe.

People, in far away places, many of whom may never have heard his name, aspire to live in the glow of the flame of liberty lit by Thurgood Marshall.

And people here in our nation breathe more freely because he lived among us, because he fought the good fight to secure their rights, because he used the lever of the law and the Constitution to propel his countrymen and women into a new era in which America came closer to its cherished ideals.

To those of my generation, growing up in the segregated south, Thurgood Marshall was more than a crusader for justice…more than a torch bearer of liberty…more than a wise and learned man of the law.

He was a teacher who taught us to believe in the shield of justice and the sword of truth; a role model whose career made us dream large dreams and work to secure them; an agent of change who transformed the way an entire generation thought of itself, of its place in our society, and of the law itself.

Picture, if you will, the inescapable power of the beacon light Thurgood Marshall beamed into our cramped and constricted community — a community in which the law ordained that we could only attend segregated, inferior schools; a community in which the law ordained that our parents be denied the right to vote; a community in which the law ordained segregation in the courtroom and exclusion of our parents from the jury box.

It was Thurgood’s mission to turn these laws against themselves, to cleanse our tattered Constitution and our besmirched legal system of the filth of oppressive racism, to restore to all Americans a Constitution and a legal system newly alive to the requirements of justice.

By demonstrating that the law could be an instrument of liberation, he recruited a new generation of lawyers who had been brought up to think of the law as an instrument of oppression.

Those of us who grew up under the heel of Jim Crow were inspired to set our sights on the law as a career — to try to follow him on his journey of justice and equality.

So while all Americans are indebted to Thurgood Marshall’s accomplishments, we who grew up in the sunlight of his deeds owe a special debt of gratitude.

We have heard much today about Thurgood Marshall’s legal prowess, his extraordinary accomplishments, his burning devotion to justice, his influence on generations yet unborn.

But we must also acknowledge Thurgood Marshall, the family man.  He truly loved his family — the source of his love, the focus of his love, the anchor in his life.

It is no accident that his sons, Thurgood and John, are involved in the law.  Thurgood, Jr. is a lawyer who served as counsel to Senator Gore and Senate Committees.  He is currently a lawyer on Vice President Gore’s staff.  And John is a Virginia state trooper who led the Clinton-Gore motorcade from Monticello to Washington.  His sons were his pride and joy. His love and admiration for Jean and Colleen, his daughters-in-law, were endless.  His grandchildren, Melanie, Cecelia and Thurgood William, turned this tough, no-nonsense justice of the supreme court into putty.  He was always melting, giving in and giving up when they visited him.  Edward Patrick was born three weeks ago. Thurgood never saw him, but flashed a wide smile when told of his birth.

Then there is the love for his dear wife, Cissy, who everyday in every way for 37 years, Thurgood was constantly, insistently, urgently saying to her, “Cissy, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! And, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.’”

We thank you, Thurgood, for your legacy of family and friendship, love and caring, crusading, and leading. Your voice is stilled but your message lives.

Indeed, you have altered America irrevocably and forever.

Finally, as a life long Episcopalian, a former vestry man at St. Phillips in New York and a frequent congregant at St. Augustine’s here in Washington — a man of faith — we hear you today in this National Cathedral reminding us of the biblical injunction:

Thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself.

We hear you reminding us “to do justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with God.”

And we hear you reminding us that the battle is not over, the victory not won, to be ever vigilant, to fight on until justice rolls down like water and righteousness a mighty stream.

In our sadness and distress, we hear you comforting and consoling us with the words of C . Austin Miles:

I’m living on the mountain underneath a cloudless sky,

I’m drinking at the fountain that shall never run dry,

Oh yes, I’m feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply,

For now I’m dwelling in Beulah land.

Farewell, Mr. Civil Rights — farewell, Mr. Justice Marshall — we thank you for all you have done.

“Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”.

Reprinted by permission from Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out, by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., with Lee A. Daniels, Public Affairs (2008) .