WASHINGTON -- Thurgood Marshall was eulogized Thursday as a man who 'altered America irrevocably and forever' as a tireless civil rights lawyer and later as the nation's first black Supreme Court justice.
'Thurgood Marshall was an extraordinary man,' Chief Justice William Rehnquist said at Marshall's funeral service. 'Under his leadership the American constitutional landscape of equal protection under law was literally rewritten.'
More than 4,000 people, including President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore -- who read a passage from the Bible as part of the Episcopalian service -- packed the Washington National Cathedral for the nearly two-hour ceremony.
Others stood outside listening to the service on loudspeakers.
'It was Thurgood Marshall's mission to turn the laws against themselves. To cleanse our Constitution and our legal system of the filth of oppressive racism,' said civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, one of five speakers to remember the man whose accomplishments as a lawyer made him a legend even before his 24-year career on the high court.
Jordan, former head of the National Urban League and a key player in Clinton's transition team, called Marshall 'Mr. Civil Rights.
'You have altered America irrevocably and forever,' Jordan said, in a public goodbye to Marshall from one of the catherdral's massive stone pulpits.
Marshall, 84, died Sunday of heart failure, 18 months after retiring from the Supreme Court. He was to be buried Friday in a private ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
'T.M., as he was known popularly in chambers, was larger than life,' said Karen Hastie Williams, Marshall's goddaughter and one of some 85 of his former law clerks at the service.
She said Marshall 'changed the nature and focus of the debate' among Supreme Court justices, and called him 'conscience of the court.'
'He spoke from the heart for the humble people...who could not be there,' said Williams.
Williams described how, as a civil rights lawyer beginning in the 1930s, Marshall developed such a reputation that when he took a case in a given town, blacks would say simply: 'The lawyer is coming.'
'They didn't have to say his name,' said Williams. 'They all knew who he was.'
Marshall is perhaps best known for arguing the case for school desegregation before the high court that led to the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
Rehnquist discussed how Marshall, a legendary storyteller, kept other justices entertained with tales of his years of driving across the South as a crusading young civil rights lawyer, feats that Rehnquist said took 'physical courage' as well as legal expertise.
'Thurgood Marshall left an indelible mark not just upon the law but upon his country,' said Rehnquist.
'Inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words: 'Equal justice under law,'' said Rehnquist. 'Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall.'
Ralph Winter, a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who clerked for Marshall on the same court in the early 1960s, called the publicly brusque Marshall a 'warm, friendly, incredibly witty man' who sometimes hid it behind a 'long-running act as a curmudgeon.'
'The world saw yesterday what he meant to our people,' said Winter, who is white, referring to the nearly 19,000 who came by the Supreme Court for a public viewing of Marshall's flag-draped pine casket.
At the cathedral Thursday the American flag had been replaced by a simple white burial cloth with an embroidered yellow and red cross.
Winter and Williams discussed how Marshall referred to his various lawclerks as 'knucklehead.'
'I am prouder of the title 'knucklehead' than any I have ever held,' said Winter.
Former transportation secretary William Coleman compared Marshall to President Abraham Lincoln, but said in the area of race relations he 'achieved even more' than the man who ended slavery.
