Kamala Harris Picks Bible of Civil Rights Justice (and Saint) for VP Oath
Kamala Harris in 2019. Creative Commons photo by Gage Skidmore.
BERKELEY— When Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was sworn in on Jan. 20, she placed her hand on two Bibles — one that belonged to a family friend and one that belonged to a saint.
That second Bible was the personal property of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall, the first African-American on the court, died in 1993 at the age of 84.
“Thurgood Marshall, and the work that he did, is really one of the main reasons I wanted to be a lawyer,” Harris said in a video on Twitter last July on what would have been Marshall’s 112th birthday. “Thurgood was a fighter. He was a boxer in the courtroom.”
He is also an official saint of the Episcopal Church, given that honor in 2018. His feast day is May 17, the same day Marshall, then a civil rights attorney, won the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the doctrine of “separate, but equal.”
And while the use of his Bible was Harris’s personal tribute to Marshall, it is also a message to the country about the values the Biden-Harris administration hopes to reinforce.
“Remember, she is a child of the Civil Rights movement,” said James M. Douglas, a professor at The Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston, recalling the early Democratic debate when Harris confronted Biden about school busing to desegregate public schools— he was opposed to it in the 1970’s and she was affected by it as an elementary school student.
“So I think she is sending a signal that equality is especially important after what happened on Jan. 6 with the White supremacists,” Douglas continued, referring to the insurrectionists’ temporary takeover of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. “I think she is sending a signal that equality is going to be a centerpiece of this administration.”
When Marshall was sworn in as a justice in 1967, he asked Justice Hugo Black to administer the oath. Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s but renounced his membership after two years. At the ceremony, Black presented Marshall with a Bible. If this is the Bible Harris is using, its very presence is a repudiation of White supremacy and racism.
Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral, said when she thinks of the first Black woman vice president using Marshall’s Bible, “I can’t even explain to you the feeling that goes through me.”
Rev. Douglas, who is not related to James M. Douglas, said when Marshall was a lawyer in the 1950’s and 1960’s, racism and white supremacy were rampant. But Marshall’s 1967 appointment to the Supreme Court represented “our better angels.”
“And here we are with Kamala Harris at a time when White supremacy and racism reared their heads at the Capitol,” she continued. Perhaps the use of Marshall’s Bible “signals we are going to try to live in a nation where everybody is respected for the sacred creatures that they are, whose unalienable rights are equally protected.”
Though Marshall was a life-long member of the Episcopal Church, he kept his religious beliefs to himself. In 2006, the rector of his church wrote in support of his canonization, “The Spirit working through this man gave him an intuitive sense of justice in which he saw all of life as sacred and all persons equal before God.”
Professor Douglas of Houston was one of six Black Stanford law students invited to lunch with Marshall in 1970. They did not discuss religion, but Douglas feels it undergirded Marshall’s work.
“He said, ‘All of you are blessed by the mere fact that you are here at this law school, so we are going to talk about your responsibility to people who are not as blessed as you,’” Douglas said.
Marshall’s widow, Cecilia, told The Washington Post in 2006 that her husband “never thought of himself as a saint" and never saw a stained-glass window dedicated to him in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral.
"I used to kid my husband,” Cecilia Marshall said. “I said, ‘You better go and look at it; that's the closest you'll ever get to heaven.’"
Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.