Justice Ginsburg buried at Arlington in private ceremony
29 September 2020, 21:24
Ms Ginsburg was laid to rest beside her husband and near some of her former colleagues on the court.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been buried in a private ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
Ms Ginsburg was laid to rest beside her husband and near some of her former colleagues on the court.
Washington last week honoured the 87-year-old, who died on September 18, with two days where the public could view her casket at the top of the Supreme Court’s steps and pay their respects.
On Friday, the women’s rights trailblazer and second woman to join the high court lay in state at the US Capitol, the first woman to do so.
Arlington, just over the Potomac River from Washington, is best known as the resting place of approximately 400,000 service members, veterans and family members.
But Ms Ginsburg is the 14th justice to be buried at the cemetery.
Ms Ginsburg’s husband Martin Ginsburg was buried at the cemetery in 2010 following his death from cancer.
He had served in the Army as an artillery school instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma when the couple were newlyweds.
The couple was married for 56 years and had two children. The justice had kept the framed, folded flag from her husband’s casket in her office at the court.
While the cemetery is known for its rows of white headstones, the section where the Ginsburgs are buried, called Section 5, is an older section of the cemetery where markers chosen by families are allowed, and their headstone is black, with a Star of David at the top.
The gravesite is just below the final resting place of former President John F Kennedy. The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument are in the distance. Nine other justices are buried in that section, including three that Ms Ginsburg served with.
Other justices buried at the cemetery include President William Howard Taft, who served as chief justice after he was president, and Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights champion who argued the landmark Brown v Board of Education school desegregation case and became the court’s first black justice when he joined the bench in 1967.
Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision establishing a woman’s right to an abortion, is buried next to Mr Marshall in Section 5.
The last justice to be buried at the cemetery was retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who died in 2019 at the age of 99.
