It was the early 1960s and Thurgood Marshall was a brand-new member of the federal judiciary, with an interim appointment as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The judges were gathered for a group photograph, and the photographer’s 
 flash equipment blew a fuse in the courthouse at 40 Foley Square in New York, where the Second Circuit sits. Then Marshall arrived for the photo, and a secretary for one of the other judges mistook him for the electrician called to fix the blown fuse.

Marshall took no offense. Instead, when he returned to his chambers, he used the event to remark to his clerk on how certain of the trade unions were still not open to African Americans. “Boy, that woman must be crazy if she thinks I could become an electrician,” remarked one of the most successful lawyers of the 20 th century, the man who became the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Hundreds of lawyers and judges listened intently yesterday in the soaring marble lobby of that same federal courthouse yesterday as that anecdote was told by Marshall’s law clerk Ralph Winter, who now himself rides the Second United States Circuit. The occasion was a ceremony to mark the renaming of the federal courthouse after Thurgood Marshall. In the midst of a city that has gone through some tough times lately, and is still going through them, it was an extraordinarily uplifting event.

Marshall, who was already world-famous as the lawyer who had won the case of Brown v. Board of Education, was nominated to the Second Circuit by President Kennedy, and served from 1961 to 1965. For the first eight months, his nomination languished before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and, as an interim appointee, he was treated as a bit of visitor in a courthouse that already had a shortage of space. Marshall’s wife, Cecilia, recalled yesterday how her late husband and his staff used to carry — “maybe I should say shlep,” she said to laughter — their files from temporary office to temporary office. It is, she said, perhaps poetic justice that the court house is now renamed after Marshall.

Rep. Charles Rangel was an assistant United States attorney when Marshall was sitting as a judge at Foley Square. “All of us would sneak up just to see this great man,” Mr. Rangel said yesterday, recalling sitting in the back of courtrooms to watch Marshall on the bench. Mr. Rangel said as a federal prosecutor at the time, he had the notion that he had some kind of special relationship with the federal judges — until a case came up on appeal before Marshall and Mr. Rangel encountered a rigorous “interrogation as it related to the underdog defendant that I had convicted.”

One of moving things about yesterday’s ceremony was how steeped it was in patriotic American ritual. It began with the pledge of allegiance to “one nation, under God,” and proceeded through the Chorus of P.S. 123 in Brooklyn singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.…Glory, glory hallelujah!” No one looked uncomfortable, not even such stalwarts of the separation of church and state as Senator Schumer or Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who were in attendance.

The arc of Marshall’s life is one of the great success stories of the last century. Rejected for admission to the University of Maryland’s law school because of his race, Marshall went on as a lawyer to take 32 cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, and win 29 of them. All New Yorkers, of all races, can be proud to have a courthouse named after him. The plaque unveiled with all the fanfare yesterday will hang in the lobby of the courthouse designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1936. It says: “This building is dedicated to an American hero, the honorable Thurgood Marshall.”