Thurgood Marshall’s Sacred Foundation

Whenever I see Thurgood Marshall’s name show up on our calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, I can’t help but start humming, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.” This hymn, written by Lesbia Scott in 1929, lists the various saints of God, including queens and soldiers and doctors and martyrs, while making the case in every verse that each of us also has the potential of being included in their number one day because we love the Lord and make the choice to live our lives to God’s Glory. The hymn ends with the joyful assertion: “for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too!”

We celebrate Thurgood Marshall on our calendar of saints, because, despite the grand impact of the life he led and the history he made, he was a regular, everyday Christian just like you and me. Before he was the lawyer who successfully argued numerous civil rights cases, including Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in American public schools, before he was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, or the Solicitor General of the United States, or the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court, he was a faithful Episcopalian.

He was a Civil Rights hero, but he wasn’t a professional holy person, like a priest. He wasn’t a martyr, though I’m sure his life included many personal sacrifices. He was a Christian, living out his faith through the witness of his life and his work. Marshall broke barriers for people of color in the United States because he fundamentally believed in the message of Christ—that each and every one of us is created with equal worth by the God who loves us. And, as part of God’s beloved Creation, each of us deserves dignity as we undertake our education, our work, and our lives. 

Thurgood Marshall was the product of a lifelong belonging to the Episcopal Church, a childhood formed by countless Sunday school teachers, clergy, and other loving adults who sat in the pews alongside him on Sunday mornings, worshipping and learning and living out the Gospel truth as best they could in their lives as they supported him in dreaming of his own. As an adult, he was an active member of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Harlem, where he served on the vestry and as Senior Warden until his historic appointment to the Supreme Court took him to Washington, DC. He was elected as a deputy to the General Convention from the Diocese of New York in 1964. He surrounded himself with other holy people, working alongside another everyday saint we include on our calendar of observances, the Rev. Pauli Murray, the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest and a lawyer, who helped him craft many of the arguments he made in landmark civil rights cases. 

When my husband and I do the often hard, sometimes thankless, work of getting our family up and ready and out the door to mass on Sunday morning, the sort of Christian formation that Thurgood Marshall received as a lifelong Episcopalian is what makes it worth it. When my children ask why we go to church every Sunday or why the first thing we did when we moved across the country was attend all the local parishes to find our church home, this is what I tell them— it is all because I want  them to grow up surrounded by people who love God and love their neighbor, and who love and value them as precious children of God. The sacred foundation that shaped Thurgood Marshall into a person capable of being a Civil Rights hero is the sort of gift that I hope I am giving them—a childhood rooted in faith that will strengthen them for the rest of their lives, instill in them the values and character that will help them achieve whatever they desire, no matter how big or how humble their dreams might be. Whether it be as a teacher or a writer or a Supreme Court justice, growing up in Christian community is equipping them to be a saint, too.