Marshall Eulogized as ‘Rock of Justice’ : Tribute: In services at Washington National Cathedral, former law clerks and friends recalled the jurist as a visionary who never gave up hope.

With President Clinton and the nine current Supreme Court justices looking on, Thurgood Marshall was eulogized Thursday as “a rock of justice” whose fight for equal rights had changed the lives of millions.

“As a lawyer and judge, Thurgood Marshall left an indelible mark, not just on the law, but on his country,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who often disagreed with his more liberal colleague but nonetheless developed a close friendship with the legendary civil rights champion, said in services at the Washington National Cathedral.

Noting that the words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved into stone in the court’s facade, Rehnquist concluded, “Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than did Thurgood Marshall.”

Marshall died Sunday at age 84 of heart failure. During the nearly two-hour service Thursday, former law clerks and friends recalled Marshall as a visionary who never gave up hope and a realist who used humor to express his anger with the lack of progress on civil rights.

Vernon E. Jordan Jr., former National Urban League president, said Marshall “showed that the law could be an instrument of liberation” for black Americans, “rather than an instrument of oppression.”

Marshall, the counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund whose arguments in 1954 led to the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation, was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. The first black on the Supreme Court, he served for 24 years.

Several of his former law clerks served as pall bearers, and two of them delivered moving eulogies.

To his clerks, the justice was known as “T. M.” He referred to them as “knucklehead,” they said.

“I’m prouder of the title ‘knucklehead’ than any I’ve ever had,” said Ralph Winter, a distinguished judge on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Winter worked for Marshall soon after President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the federal bench in 1961.

“T. M. was larger than life,” said Karen Hastie Williams, his goddaughter and a former clerk. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Marshall traveled the country and fought in court for blacks who were seeking the right to vote, to enroll in state colleges or to buy homes in white neighborhoods. His clients were comforted just by the news that “the lawyer is coming,” she said.

Later, as a member of the Supreme Court, Marshall never abandoned his overriding interest in doing simple justice for common people. When the justices gathered behind closed doors to decide cases, she said, “he spoke from the heart for the humble people who could not be there to speak for themselves.”

“He has been to the mountaintop and now he has returned,” she said, “leaving us all for the better. For all, a rock of justice.”

Moments before the service began, President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and Vice President Al Gore and wife, Mary Elizabeth (Tipper), entered the cathedral, followed by Marshall’s widow, Cecilia, and his two sons, Thurgood Jr., a lawyer, and John William, a Virginia state trooper.

Thurgood Marshall Jr. has been a close aide to Gore and was recently named as a legislative director for the vice president.

On Wednesday, more than 18,000 persons lined up outside the Supreme Court and slowly filed up the steps and past his flag-draped coffin in the court’s Great Hall.

Marshall will be buried today at Arlington National Cemetery at a private service.