DATE: Sunday, July 27, 1997                 TAG: 9707260001

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   77 lines

THE DEATH OF HAROLD MARSH ``HE WAS JUST THE NICEST MAN - AND SOMEBODY MURDERED HIM

Tragedy struck last week in Virginia's capital. As happens all too often here, it was delivered by a bullet.

The news arrived at our house the way most news does these days, via a telephone attached to the ear of my 16-year-old.

``It's Mr. Marsh,'' she said, with the astonishment of one not versed in the cruel ways of fate. ``Someone shot him. . . . I can't believe he's dead.''

In more lofty circles, Harold M. Marsh was known as the younger brother of state Sen. Henry L. Marsh and the current managing partner of a law firm that, a few decades back, helped dismantle segregation laws of the state and nation.

But for the combined track team at the Thomas Jefferson/Governor's School in Richmond's west end, he was better known as ``Team Father.'' He was the man who traveled to every meet, at home or away, even though his own children had moved on to Harvard and the University of Virginia; the man who handed out sandwiches and chips to weary runners; the man who dispensed smiles and words of encouragement to kids such as my daughter.

``He was Mr. T.J.,'' said Jim Holdren, the school's longtime track coach and a close personal friend of Marsh's. ``I can't imagine a bigger loss to the school.''

Across Richmond, in the wake of Marsh's shooting Wednesday while stopped in a car at a busy intersection, there were similar outpourings of grief and dismay.

``Everybody loves Harold Marsh,'' said state Sen. Benjamin Lambert, a fellow student at the old Maggie Walker High School in the 1950s. Lambert chuckled at the memory of Marsh's correctly working a physics problem that filled a blackboard, and marveled at the combination of high intellect and humble bearing.

No task, from sweeping floors to feeding the homeless, was beneath him, recalled fellow members of the Hood Temple A.M.E. Zion Church.

My own memory of Marsh is of a quiet, smiling presence on the occasions when I visited the offices of Hill, Tucker & Marsh to interview his brother or Oliver Hill. Now in his '90s and the dean of Virginia's civil rights lawyers, Hill was a lead attorney in one of the cases that eventually became Brown vs. Board of Education.

The law firm he helped form in the heart of Richmond's Jackson Ward district was arguably the most prominent local law firm in the South when it came to charting and pursuing legal strategies for dismantling segregation.

At a minimum, it offered competition for that honor to the firm of Julius Chambers in Charlotte, N.C.

Both Hill and Henry Marsh brought politics into the mix, Hill as the first African-American member of the Richmond City Council, post-Reconstruction, and Marsh as the city's first black mayor from 1977 to 1982.

In recent years, associates say, it was Harold Marsh who held day-to-day business together at the office, allowing others the luxury of more public pursuits.

Marsh, who also served as a substitute judge, was stopped at a traffic light at one of south Richmond's busiest intersections when four or five shots were fired from a Cadillac that had pulled up beside him. He was pronounced dead at the Medical College of Virginia less than an hour later.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was no indication of whether it was random or premeditated. Those who knew Marsh could supply no motivation for the tragedy, beyond possible ire at some judicial decision.

``I'd put my life on it that Harold Marsh was not involved in anything shaky,'' said Lambert. ``He had never been anything controversial, never made any controversial stateThat sentiment was shared by a throng of runners who gathered the night after Marsh's death for what was to have been a kickoff for a new season, not a wake.

There are those who prod society forward by court cases and the passage of laws. And there are those who do it through a largeness of spirit. It would be hard to say which is more valuable.

Others in Marsh's firm have collected certificates and plaques from many of the loftiest legal and human rights organizations in this country. Harold Marsh's achievements are less likely to be recounted on a wall.

But in the end, I doubt if there is any more meaningful accolade than this from the lips of a teen-ager:

``He was so sweet,'' my daughter recalled. ``He was just the nicest man.'' MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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