All Saints Parish in Brookline (1773 Beacon Street), will offer Choral Evensong on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 5:00 pm, for the feast of Thurgood Marshall. The All Saints Choir will perform the music of Nathan Carter, Stephan Griffin, Orlando Gibbons, and Richard Pantcheff. The Rev. Michael Thompson, Esq. will be the preacher.
Thurgood Marshall was a distinguished American jurist and the first African American to become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Although he was pushed toward other professions, Marshall was determined to be an attorney. He was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School due to its segregationist admissions policy. He enrolled and graduated magna cum laude from the Law School of Howard University in Washington.
As a child, Marshall attended St. Katherine’s Church, one of Baltimore’s historic African American parishes. While living in New York, he was the senior warden of St. Phillip’s Church in Harlem and served as a deputy to General Convention in 1964. During his years in Washington, Marshall and his family were members of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, where he was affectionately known as “the Judge.” He is remembered as “a wise and godly man who knew his place and role in history and obeyed God’s call to follow justice wherever it led.” Thurgood Marshall died on January 24, 1993.
Evensong, a form of prayer that churches and cathedrals have used largely unchanged since 1549, combines the ancient monastic offices of Vespers and Compline into a single service for use at the end of the day.
The text of the service is drawn almost entirely from the Bible. Its primary purpose is to proclaim the wonderful works of God in history and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Its secondary purpose is to evoke from the worshiper a response of praise, penitence, and prayer.