This past Sunday, May 17, the Episcopal Church remembered Thurgood Marshall, a day established by the General Convention in 2009 to celebrate the life and work of this life-long Episcopalian as “Public Servant, Lawyer, Jurist and Prophetic Witness.” Not coincidentally, May 17 also marks Thurgood Marshall’s landmark civil rights victory before the U.S. Supreme Court when, in 1954, he successfully argued the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. The doctrine of “Separate but Equal” was ruled constitutionally invalid by the Supreme Court and American public schools were required, by law, to desegregate.

The official Episcopal biography of Thurgood Marshall appears in the current lectionary of holy people, A Great Cloud of Witnesses, and is included here as part of this reflection. This short bio is important because it is respectful, careful and thoughtful, and honors and celebrates without turning Thurgood Marshall into someone he never was. It also reflects the official church-wide recognition that Marshall deserves. Take note, however, that this is a biography of a dedicated Episcopal churchman whose faith informed and helped shape his judicial decisions and his public life, and is not a full biography of Marshall, who died 27 years ago.

Thurgood Marshall has great affinity with the Old Testament prophet, Amos, from whose Old Testament book the first reading for the liturgy to be celebrated on Thurgood Marshall’s “feast day,” is taken. Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate…But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos: 5:15,24). As the prophet he was, Amos’ commitment was to justice and righteousness, but he was also seen as quick to rebuke and slow to comfort. As sports analogists might say, Amos played prophetic hardball. So did Thurgood Marshall, for example in his work as Legal Counsel for the NAACP and the Head of its Legal Defense Fund, but this was a “hardball” leavened by his commitment to his Episcopal faith.

Prominent African-American civil rights advocate and lawyer, author and Federal Court Judge, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. has described his experience of seeing Thurgood Marshall arguing a case: “With controlled outrage, Marshall eloquently asserted the constitutional promise of equality for Sweatt, for all African Americans and, it seemed, for me personally.” (Black Issues in Higher Education 14:25) (The famous Sweatt v. Painter case (1950) dealt with the admission of African Americans to the University of Texas Law School. Sweatt was the plaintiff and Painter was the President of the University of Texas.)

Over his lifetime, Marshall’s church life was centered in three African American Episcopal parishes: (1) Saint Katherine’s in Baltimore where Marshall was born in 1908 and lived until he moved to New York in 1936. Marshall was also confirmed at Saint Katherine’s. (2) Saint Phillip’s in New York City where Marshall lived for almost three decades and where he was active on the Vestry and served as Senior Warden and Deputy to the 1964 General Convention; and (3) Saint Augustine’s in Washington, DC where he and his family worshipped from 1965 until the years before his death in 1993. Could it be that the great gift of these three African American parishes was to offer comfort and support and guide Thurgood Marshall in his faith, to help him face injustice, and to use the judicial system to fight it without giving in to the rage that Judge Higginbotham experienced?

This notion of rage raises several questions, perhaps the most important of which is whether there is such a thing as justifiable rage. Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, teaches us that there is “justifiable rage,” in fact, such rage abounds in Scripture. The real question, though, is what we would do about it if such rage resides in us. If we consider the life of Thurgood Marshall, a life filled with both denials and racism, discrimination and prejudice of all kinds, and a variety of threats including death, we can understand and even accept his rage.  For most of his life, Thurgood Marshall lived in a segregated universe with a cultural landscape for Whites and a cultural landscape for Blacks. Imagine living like that! And imagine the rage. 

The argument can be made that Thurgood Marshall stands with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as one of the most important figures in the American civil rights movement, though perhaps the least well known and celebrated. We know this. And we know that Martin Luther King Jr. preached justice and peaceful protest while Malcolm X argued that separatism was the way to move forward. Thurgood Marshall, on the other hand, fought racial inequality and injustice through the courts. This call of service became the balm for his rage. Marshall’s declaration of service was grounded in his geography of faith, a faith which was nurtured by the Episcopal Church, especially by those African American parishes where he found care and comfort, and he could be himself and let Grace do its work.

In his book, The Call of Service, Robert Coles quotes Dorothy Day: “There is a call to us, a call to service that we join with others to try to make things better in this world” (Coles, p. xxiii). There are different kinds of calls, just as there are different kinds of service. In the case of Thurgood Marshall, the story of his life is the story of his call; it seems almost seamless but it really wasn’t. Rather, it was hard and painful and demanding and exhausting and ugly and sometimes very lonely. At one point, Marshall explained it all: “The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.” In humor is truth and for Thurgood Marshall in truth is dignity and justice.

What is there left to say? Thurgood Marshall’s community at Saint Augustine’s in Washington, DC said this: “The Judge [was] a wise and godly man who knew his place and role in history and obeyed God’s call to follow justice wherever it led.” (AGCOW) And “The Judge” said this: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”

Amen

—Father Peter Kountz