Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

“You weren’t driving this car, were you?” one cop asked Looby.

  “I’m not answering your question,” Looby replied.

  The cop then looked to Marshall, who said, “I’m not answering your question, either.”

  Confused about what to do next, the police argued over who had been driving the car when it was stopped. “That’s the one! The tall yaller nigger!” one of them insisted with certainty, and the officers approached Marshall, who was asked to show his license.

  The cop took one look. “Get out,” he said. “Put your hands up.”

  Marshall was dumbfounded. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Drunken driving,” the officer responded.

  “Drunken driving? You know I’m not intoxicated,” Marshall said. “I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four hours!”

  “Get in the car,” one of them said.

  With guns drawn and flashlights glaring, four men hustled Marshall into the backseat of a nonofficial sedan.

  “Keep driving,” they shouted back to Looby and Weaver as they placed Marshall under arrest. With Marshall wedged into the backseat, the car sped away, back toward Columbia. As they picked up speed, the four law enforcement agents were quiet and all business. They drove into the darkness. Walter White had warned Marshall, as had Looby and Weaver, about these Tennessee men and their “Master Race preachments.” Marshall knew that the Ku Klux Klan in Columbia was deeply entrenched in the local police; he knew its members served as sheriffs and magistrates. He had read the NAACP reports. This wasn’t the Klan of “cowardly hood,” rather, it “wears cap and visor, and shining badge. . . . It is the LAW. It arrests its stunned victims, unlisted.”

  Marshall had no idea where they were going. For years his dark humor had horrified young lawyers and assistants when he would go into great detail about what Southern police or the Klan did with uppity Negroes in the woods. Now Marshall was the uppity Negro, alone, and he wasn’t in a joking mood. Looking out the window of the sedan, he could see the cedar trees as the headlights flashed across them. It was under a cedar tree just down the road that hundreds of townspeople had gathered around young Cordie Cheek in his last living moments. They had watched and cheered as officials pulled down Cordie’s pants and castrated him before forcing him up a stepladder and hanging him. Pistols were passed around the crowd; they were fired until all the bullets were gone.

  The car began to slow. The lawmen were quietly mumbling and pointing; then the driver turned left down a dirt road, toward “the famous Duck River.” Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads. He knew that the bodies of blacks—the victims of lynchings and random murders—had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.

  The sedan was lumbering forward, bouncing down the dirt road, when Marshall caught his first glimpse of the men waiting down by the river. The headlights illuminated their stern faces. The car slowed, then stopped. Suddenly headlights appeared behind them. Had word spread about the lynching of the NAACP lawyer? Glimpsing the glare of the lights behind them, one of the policemen in Marshall’s car stormed out of the sedan to confront the driver of the second car. Marshall craned his neck to see; he recognized the limp.

  It was Looby!

  Instead of driving to Nashville as the police had ordered, Looby had spun a U-turn and followed the police sedan. As soon as it turned left off the main road, he knew Marshall was in trouble. He’d been teaching at Fisk University, just down the block from where the Maury County officials “arrested” Cordie Cheek, threw him into a sedan, and drove him to these same woods along Duck River. Well, they’ll have to kill me, too, Looby thought. He wasn’t going to leave Marshall to the devices of murderous law enforcement officers.

  Once again the policemen ordered Looby to leave the scene. Waiting to be arrested, or worse, the slight, gimpy lawyer stood his ground; he refused to budge. He’d had these same police and town officials on the witness stand, and he’d wanted to question each one of them about the lynching of Cordie Cheek so that he could rightfully raise the issue of self-defense during the trial, but the judge had refused to allow it. Now Looby spoke his mind: he wasn’t leaving without Marshall, he said. Livid, the deputies and police conferred to the side. Whatever the plan had been, there were now too many witnesses, and there was sure to be another riot if things got out of hand with the lawyers. The police returned to the car and made a loop back up to the main road, with Marshall’s eyes lingering on the lynch party waiting by the river, while Looby, the man Marshall called a Rock of Gibraltar, followed close behind with Weaver and Raymond. This time the police drove Marshall back to the courthouse in Columbia, where he was pointed toward a magistrate’s office.

  “You go over there,” one of the policemen said. “We’ll be over.”

  “No, you won’t. I’m going with you,” Marshall replied, reminding the police that they had placed him under arrest. “You’re not going to shoot me in the back while I’m ‘escaping.’ Let’s make this legal.”

  “Smart-ass nigger,” one said, and they shuffled Marshall up to the second floor of the courthouse, with Weaver trailing behind to serve as Marshall’s lawyer. Once there, they met Magistrate Jim “Buck” Pogue, a small, bald man not more than five feet tall.

  “What’s up?” Pogue asked police.

  “We got this nigger for drunken driving,” one officer told him.

  Weaver was fuming. He accused the officers of being “frame-up artists” and demanded that Pogue examine Marshall.

  Pogue looked Marshall up and down. “He doesn’t look drunk to me,” he observed.

  “I’m not drunk,” Marshall exclaimed.

  “Boy, you want to take my test?” Pogue asked.

  Marshall paused and looked quizzically at the magistrate. “Well, what’s your test?”

  “I’m a teetotaler,” Pogue said. “I’ve never had a drink in my life. I can smell liquor a mile off. You want to take a chance?”

  Marshall stepped forward. “Sure,” he said, and leaning his tall, lanky frame down to Pogue till his mouth was just an inch from the magistrate’s nostrils, Marshall blew so hard he “almost rocked this man.”

  Pogue took a deep whiff and exploded at the police. “Hell, this man hasn’t had a drink. What are you talking about?”

  The arresting officers quickly filed out of the office.

  “What else is there?” Marshall asked.

  Pogue told him that there was nothing else and stated that those officers had come to the wrong man if they wanted to frame Marshall. He said he was the one magistrate in Columbia who had refused to sign warrants for the arrests of Negroes during the February trouble, and then he extended his hand to Marshall, saying, “You’re free to go.”

  Marshall quickly left the courthouse for the second time that day. He noticed again that the streets were deserted. This time, however, he understood why. “Everybody,” Marshall realized, “was down at Duck River waiting for the party.”

  He and Weaver hurried over to the Bottom, where Looby and Raymond were waiting at Sol Blair’s barbershop. They made sure Marshall was okay, but they also suspected Marshall wasn’t out of danger just yet. The officers, they figured, had probably been hoping to bring Marshall before Magistrate C. Hayes Denton, who surely would have locked Marshall up for the night. Then, in “the pattern of all recent Maury County lynchings,” it would only have been a matter of storming the jail with some rope and finishing the job.

  Looby thought it likely the officers might not yet be ready to give up on their party. He came up with a plan of his own. “Well, Thurgood,” he said, “we’ll put you in another car.”

  They decided to send a decoy driver out with Looby’s car, which would head toward Nashville, while Marshall and Looby in a different car sneaked out of town on back roads. Sure enough, Marshall watched members of the mob turn the corner and follow
Looby’s car; then he and Looby drove off in another direction. He would later learn that Looby’s car was indeed pulled over, and when the pursuers discovered that Marshall wasn’t in it, “they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.”

  In another car, Maurice Weaver made it back to Nashville that evening along with Harry Raymond, who immediately began typing his story for the Daily Worker. “I am certain . . . a lynching was planned,” he wrote. “Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.”

  Walter White was convinced that had Looby obeyed police orders and continued driving to Nashville on that November night in 1946, Marshall “would never have been seen again.”

  Safely back in Nashville and his heart still pounding, Marshall made a late-night phone call to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to tell him what had happened.

  “Drunken driving?” Clark asked.

  “Yes.”

  Clark paused. He had come to know Marshall well since being appointed attorney general in 1945 by President Truman, and he had just one question for the man who would one day replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court.

  “Well,” Clark asked, “were you drunk?”

  “No,” Marshall asserted, “but exactly five minutes after I hang up this phone I’m going to be drunk!”

  CHAPTER 2: SUGAR HILL

  NAACP attorney Franklin Williams and blinded World War II veteran Isaac Woodard went on a nationwide speaking tour to raise money and awareness of the brutality Woodard suffered at the hands of law enforcement agents in the South. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Franklin Williams Papers)

  NIGGER BOY, WHAT are you doing here?”

  Marshall had been standing under the sweltering sun on the far end of the platform. He had stomach pangs from hunger and he tried to make himself look small, but the white man had come straight toward him, eyes cold and firm, the gun on his hip in plain sight.

  “Waiting for the train,” Marshall told him.

  The man eyed him up and down, suspicious of the suit.

  “There’s only one more train comes through here,” the man told him, “and that’s the four o’clock—you’d better be on it because the sun is never going down on a live nigger in this town.”

  His appetite gone, Marshall’s eyes followed the man as he turned away. “So I wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket . . . and caught the next train out of there,” the lawyer recalled.

  One trip bled into another, and he never felt safe until he was riding the rails north again: sitting with a glass of bourbon in his hand, waiting for the porter to bring him a good cut of meat. Outside the parlor car window, the whitewashed shacks eventually gave way to factories and highways and row houses with white marble steps . . . until he finally stepped off the train in the entirely different world of New York. Pennsylvania Station, with its colossal pink granite columns and glass and steel train sheds, was one of the largest public spaces in the world, its grandeur awing the millions of travelers and commuters who daily passed through it. “One entered the city like a god,” architectural historian Vincent Scully noted. Yet the anonymity of strolling across the breathtaking ten-story vaulted concourse like any other man wearing a fedora and hauling his briefcase and luggage suited Marshall just fine. Standing out in a crowd on a train platform was something Marshall was happy to leave behind him in the South.

  From Penn Station, Marshall hailed a DeSoto Sky View taxi and headed up the west side of Manhattan to his Harlem apartment. Though the Great Depression had put an end to the Harlem Renaissance, the concentration of blacks in the fifty-by-eight-block area created a dazzling energy and culture that continued to thrive in Harlem in the postwar 1940s; it was still “the Negro capital of America.” Uniformed black soldiers on leave from World War II swarmed the uptown streets, flocking to popular clubs like the Savoy Ballroom at night and bars like the Brown Bomber during the day. Past the Victoria and Apollo theaters on 125th Street, Marshall crossed over tracks laid on cobblestone, where trolley cars encouraged commuters to “Ride the Surface Way.”

  Thurgood and his wife, Buster, in their twenties, childless, and already married for seven years, had come to New York in the fall of 1936. Like so many blacks who had migrated from the South, the young couple had come to Harlem, but not to escape Jim Crow. Thurgood had been offered a job with the NAACP, where he’d share a Manhattan office with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston. The money wasn’t good. Houston himself was living at the YMCA in Harlem, and he pulled in nearly twice Thurgood’s two-hundred-dollar salary each month. The Marshalls had packed their bags in Baltimore and headed north to stay with Thurgood’s aunt Medi and uncle Boots (Denmedia and Clarence Dodson) on Lenox Avenue—in the heart of Harlem in the waning moments of the Renaissance. It was the place to be.

  FATS WALLER PARKED on a piano bench for the night in a Harlem flat, fedora perched on his head and a flask within easy reach. He popped and rolled his eyes and wiggled his brows between verses as the dancers—maids, elevator operators, and other working-class blacks who lived uptown—brushed against him, fighting for space to unwind. Men were patted down on entry, but Fats had to remind some of them to behave, mid-song, until the words were said so often they crept into his lyrics: “Put that gun away!” Lights dimmed with colored bulbs hung over the dance floor, a space cleared of furniture except for a table and chairs to accommodate a five-hour poker game. Bourbon and gin flowed. The floors shook, and from the kitchen the sweet smell of yardbirds (chicken) and grits wafted in the air. All night long piercing laughter and shouts rose above Fats’s voice until the lights continued to dim and he was singing and playing swing and stride piano in darkness.

  A lively young couple, Thurgood and Buster reveled in the Harlem nightlife. They had looked for a place of their own but quickly realized they were going to have to compromise. With a total population more than double what it is today, the buildings and tenements uptown were overflowing with “roomers”: residents who rented sleeping space in apartments where living and dining rooms were converted into bedrooms at night. To help pay the rent, many tenants held rent parties; they would simply throw up a sign with the date and their address, and for a dollar or so guests could gain entry.

  We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan

  Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!

  The tradition of the rent party, which thrived during the Harlem Renaissance, continued into the forties out of economic necessity. Because famous clubs like Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club did not allow black customers, and Small’s Paradise, though not segregated, had high door fees that ensured mostly upscale white audiences, much of the great live music at the time was not accessible to blacks. This spurred musicians like Waller and Louis Armstrong to play at rent parties—not just for the extra cash but also for the joy of performing at lively parties with enthusiastic black crowds.

  After a few weeks with Marshall’s relatives, the young couple found a place of their own on 149th Street. It was small and cramped, but they weren’t sharing it with people twice their age, and with Charlie Houston holed up at the YMCA, neither Buster nor Thurgood was complaining, even though money would be tighter. To make ends meet, Buster realized she’d have to contribute. Light-skinned, with wavy hair and soft brown eyes, she’d been a student at the University of Pennsylvania when she met Thurgood at a restaurant in Washington. Marshall claimed it was love at first sight, but eighteen-year-old Vivian Burey disagreed, claiming that the Lincoln University student and self-avowed ladies’ man “was so busy arguing and debating with everybody at the table that [he] didn’t even give me a second glance.” The daughter of a Philadelphia caterer, Vivian had an ample chest that had earned her the nickname Buster in her teen years—a nickname that she maintained throughout her life. She had pluck and a radiant smile, and her intelligence and outgoing personality helped her to acclimate to New York as easily as her husband did.

  Soon after they arrived in
New York, Buster became involved with the Harlem cooperative grocery markets that had been sprouting up after the Great Depression to develop black economic power. Her work with the co-op helped lower the couple’s food bills each week and added a few extra dollars to their cash flow. Despite the excitement and prestige that Marshall’s work for the NAACP added to both his and Buster’s lives, financially they remained strapped. Still, the young couple had to laugh as they looked forward to better days and a bright future together. In the midst of helping Charles Houston prepare briefs for the NAACP’s first test case on educational segregation before the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood and Buster found themselves delivering groceries around Harlem and Washington Heights for extra cash.

  Soon Houston was lessening his workload in New York and preparing to return to Washington. Marshall was proving himself more than competent and hardworking, and Houston had no qualms about handing more responsibilities to his protégé. With Houston set to leave in July 1938, Marshall was about to be handed control of the NAACP’s legal office. He’d receive a $200 raise, so he’d now be earning $2,600 per year. “How much is that a week?” a frugal Buster wanted to know.

  In the days before Houston departed, he and Marshall went for a walk outside the office. The two could not have been more different. Houston was serious and tightly wound, whereas Marshall was folksy, familiar, and always laughing. But they shared a commitment to hard work and thorough preparation, and Houston wanted Marshall to know that he’d continue to counsel and support his former student. Houston warned Thurgood about the difficulties of working under Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP. White wasn’t a lawyer, but he liked to think he was at times, and he didn’t shy away from voicing opinions on legal strategies. White also had an ego, and Houston wanted Marshall to know that it would probably take some time before he’d see a reasonable salary that was worthy of the work he’d be doing. “You know how much money you’re making,” Houston said. Marshall just nodded.