Last Wednesday, Thurgood Marshall lay in state in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the U.S. From 10 in the morning until 10 that night, a steady flow of people filed past his casket, which was draped with a flag and supported by the same bier on which Abraham Lincoln's coffin had rested. By evening, the number of mourners had reached nearly 20,000.
The Justice would have been surprised by the breadth and intensity of this outpouring of gratitude. A strong and consistent liberal, he was no sentimentalist. He possessed a rather dim view of human nature, a view...
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