Thurgood Marshall was a lawyer of heroic imagination, who led the team that brought school desegregation to the Supreme Court, winning an end to separate but equal. In 1967, he became the country’s first black Supreme Court justice.

But five years before that, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1962, he made his way to St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Harlem, where he was a vestryman, and bowed his head to receive the St. Philip’s Rector’s Award from the Rev. Dr. M. Moran Weston.

To outsiders perhaps, it was a minor accolade for Mr. Marshall, then a federal appeals court judge. It went unmentioned in Justice Marshall’s lengthy Times obituary. But the quiet humility he displays here in a photograph (never published until now) reveals just how much his faith, and church, provided him with spiritual strength.

Our article the next day only hinted at that. We ran a photograph of the judge behind the pulpit and wrote that he had urged his neighbors to “make Harlem the kind of place that people will want to come to.” We went on to quote him telling them: “We can complain, we should complain, and we shall continue to complain. But we must feel the responsibility first ourselves.”

It was a strong message. By a strong man. Showing the judge in eyes-closed, pious prayer probably didn’t fit with the coverage. Now, though, the photograph conjures up another message, delivered by President Obama last year after the church shootings in Charleston, S.C., when he described the deeper meaning of the black church in American life. Over centuries, black churches have been “our beating heart,” he said. “The place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.”