Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 25, 1993 TAG: 9301250137
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Baltimore Sun and Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
EX-JUSTICE MARSHALL DIES AT 84
Thurgood Marshall, possibly the most influential black person of the 20th century and the first of his race to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, died Sunday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center near here. He was 84."He was a giant in the quest for human rights and equal opportunity in the whole history of our country," President Clinton said. "Every American should be grateful for the contributions he made as an advocate and as a justice of the United States Supreme Court."
Marshall was to have appeared at Clinton's inauguration ceremony Wednesday to swear in Al Gore as vice president but he was in the hospital. Justice Byron White took his place.
Marshall was characterized Sunday as a towering figure in the nation's history, not simply for his 24 years on the Supreme Court, but for the period before when he effected the legal strategies that helped make discrimination illegal.
"The question looms in my mind," said Parren Mitchell, a civil rights leader and former Maryland congressman, "where would we be as a race today if there had been no Thurgood Marshall?"
But Marshall's contributions transcended race, said A. Leon Higginbotham, chief judge emeritus of the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals. "For if he had not won the Brown case [Brown vs. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" school systems were unconstitutional], the door of equal opportunity would have been more tightly closed also to women, other minorities and the poor."
Lawrence Tribe, constitutional scholar and professor at Harvard Law School, called Marshall simply "the greatest lawyer in the 20th century."
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said, "For most of us who grew up under segregation, we have never known a day without Thurgood Marshall hovering over us to protect us."
Justice Clarence Thomas, who replaced Marshall on the bench in 1991, said: "He was a great lawyer, a great jurist and a great man, and the country is better for his having lived."
Two faculty members at the Washington and Lee University School of Law talked Sunday of their memories of Marshall from their days clerking for other justices.
Randall Bezanson, W&L's law dean, and Allan Ides, a teacher of constitutional law, said Marshall was particularly generous to the many young clerks who labored at the court over the years.
Marshall often dined with the clerks. "You could sit down and eat lunch with him whenever you wanted," and Marshall would regale the young legal scholars with stories of his struggles over Brown vs. Board of Education and other landmark cases, said Ides, who was White's clerk in 1980-81.
Whether writing for the court's majority or penning his "breathtaking" dissents, Marshall was "never bitter," said Bezanson, clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973.
Clerks often gathered in Marshall's chamber on Friday evenings to hear him talk about his life and the law. "He was a great storyteller, a wonderfully human man, and he loved his law clerks. They loved working for him," Bezanson said. Dozens of Marshall's former clerks held reunions with him every year or two.
Despite his failing health, which prompted his retirement in 1991, Marshall remained active in judicial matters until a few months ago.
Historian John Hope Franklin says that if "you study the history of Marshall's career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand when he speaks, he is not speaking just for black Americans but for Americans of all times."
Even before he was elevated to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall had become a household word for blacks. They called him "Mr. Civil Rights."
His most celebrated case was Brown vs. Board of Education, which resulted in a landmark 1954 ruling that put to rest forever the "separate but equal doctrine" and outlawed public school segregation.
In the quest for equal justice, Marshall had argued 32 cases on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People before the Supreme Court, prevailing in all but three cases. Among his successes were the striking down of the "white primary" of the Texas Democratic Party in 1944; segregated seating on interstate buses in 1946; racially restrictive real estate covenants in 1948; and separate state law schools for blacks in 1950.
Staff Writer Mary Bishop contributed to this story.