Thousands View Marshall’s Coffin in High Court Hall

WASHINGTON — Thousands of people visited Thurgood Marshall’s coffin as he lay in state Wednesday, with the line of mourners wrapping around the Supreme Court building where he won his greatest civil rights victory and later served as the first black justice on the high court.

Many people said they felt compelled to say goodby to a man they had never met.

“He was a man of courage, a man of dignity and a man of strength,” said Erold Jean Francois, an immigrant from Haiti who attends a Miami high school. “He did the best he could for this country . . . for blacks and whites.”

Marshall’s wife, Cecilia, and two sons, Thurgood Jr. and John William, led a procession into the court building on Capitol Hill.

“The battle done, the victory won . . . the songs of triumph have begun. Hallelujah,” the Rev. Kawsai Thornell, canon of the Washington Cathedral, said during a brief ceremony.

Marshall, who died Sunday at age 84, became only the second Supreme Court justice to be honored by having his coffin lie in state in the court building’s Great Hall. The other was Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1974.

His funeral will be today at Washington Cathedral; a private burial is planned for Friday at Arlington National Cemetery.

In 23 years as counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Marshall established himself as the nation’s greatest civil rights lawyer. He argued the Supreme Court cases that led to the landmark 1954 decision outlawing racial segregation in public education.

Marshall was appointed to the high court in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. He retired 18 months ago.

As Marshall’s pine coffin was carried across a sunlit marble plaza, current and retired justices, serving as honorary pallbearers, waited atop the imposing steps. They accompanied the coffin through the building’s main entrance, walking under the words carved into marble 58 years ago: “Equal Justice Under Law.”