Fanfare for an Uncommon Man: THURGOOD MARSHALL

Last Wednesday, Thurgood Marshall lay in state in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the U.S. From 10 in the morning until 10 that night, a steady flow of people filed past his casket, which was draped with a flag and supported by the same bier on which Abraham Lincoln's coffin had rested. By evening, the number of mourners had reached nearly 20,000.

The Justice would have been surprised by the breadth and intensity of this outpouring of gratitude. A strong and consistent liberal, he was no sentimentalist. He possessed a rather dim view of human nature, a view nurtured by his constant battling against social cruelties and reflected by the nature of the stories he loved to tell.

The Justice's skillfully rendered tales were seldom sweet. He liked to tell his law clerks about the time he confronted a "moderate" white-supremacist politician in the Jim Crow South with the fact that contrary to the segregationist promise of separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites, the whites in the state had a school for nursing while the blacks had none. The politician told Marshall that he could get the state to build a school for blacks, but that Marshall had to allow the politician to use his own methods. Marshall agreed, whereupon the politician immediately called a press conference and announced that he had just witnessed a most sickening spectacle: a white female nurse washing the back of a black man. The politician then demanded that the state legislature immediately appropriate money for "a nigger school" so that this sort of thing would not happen again.

The money was appropriated, the school was built, and some good was accomplished, albeit by foul means. Justice Marshall's telling of this story could elicit laughs. But it also imprinted upon the minds of scores of clerks the degradations that the Justice -- and many millions of other blacks -- had had to endure.

As a realistic appraiser of human nature, Marshall knew that people often quickly forget those things that should never be forgotten. When I clerked for him in 1983, I heard him bitterly grumble about the way that in his view, many people seemed to have forgotten completely the civil rights champions of the '30s, '40s and '50s: people like Roy Wilkins, Walter White, William Hastie and Charles Hamilton Houston. I got the impression that Justice Marshall felt that he too had been slighted in favor of those who led the protest demonstrations of the '60s, particularly Martin Luther King Jr. At last week's memorial services, however, people from all walks of life showed their appreciation of how indelibly he has marked our society. Beneath a portrait of the Justice that was displayed alongside his casket, a mourner placed a copy of the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case in which Marshall the lawyer successfully argued that the Constitution prohibits racial segregation in public schooling. At the bottom of the first page of the opinion, the anonymous admirer wrote, "You shall always be remembered."