by Gilbert King
“And you can imagine how much money I make. And I still say you have more goddamn fun than I do.”
With that, Marshall let out one of his hearty, high-pitched laughs. “Ain’t no question about that!” he said.
Not long after Marshall’s promotion, Buster realized that the tiny flat on 149th Street wasn’t going to do for the couple anymore—not with her husband’s newfound social status. She began asking around, talking to some of the other NAACP wives, and before long she had her sights set high on the bluff.
ON THE WAY home from Penn Station after another grueling trip south, Marshall sat in the DeSoto, eyeing the wide sidewalks in front of the Super Food Markets and Harlem tenements with “To Be Demolished” signs posted by the New York City Housing Authority, as the taxi approached Sugar Hill. In this renowned neighborhood of Harlem, Marshall lived alongside the successful artists, intellectual elites, and wealthy blacks who, pursuing their dream of the “Sweet Life,” had gravitated there during the Renaissance. If Harlem was the black capital of America, Sugar Hill was its cultural soul. It contained “perhaps the most modern and beautiful residential areas for Negroes in black America,” and it was home to musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne, the writer Ralph Ellison, and actor Paul Robeson. At the heart of Sugar Hill was 409 Edgecombe Avenue, a thirteen-story neo-Georgian building on Coogan’s Bluff that towered over the town houses and tenements of Harlem. The poet Langston Hughes spoke of “two Harlems,” and he clearly had 409 Edgecombe in mind when he wrote of those who “live on that attractive rise of bluff . . . where the plumbing really works and the ceilings are high and airy.” Its residents included Aaron Douglas, the Kansas-born, Parisian-trained artist who became known as the “father of black American art”; W. E. B. DuBois, author and civil rights activist; and Walter White, Marshall’s boss. A 1947 issue of Ebony magazine commented that the building attracted so many black elites “that legend, only slightly exaggerated, says bombing 409 would wipe out Negro leadership for the next 20 years.”
One resident at 409 had leadership skills that were disputed by no one, though she was not whom DuBois had in mind when he wrote of the exceptional “talented tenth” who would save the Negro race. Madame Stephanie St. Clair, known to most as “Queenie,” was purported to be the Numbers Queen of Harlem and, at one point, the richest black woman in America. In New York by way of Martinique, Madame St. Clair—abrasive, unsmiling, and tough as nails—had managed to withstand the violent efforts of Dutch Schultz and any other mobsters who’d tried to horn in on her gambling operations and territory.
The building had its share of society parties hosted by Gladys and Walter White—their thirteenth-floor apartment was called “the White House of Harlem”—and at times it fostered a fraternity atmosphere. The Baltimore couple fitted right in. At one of White’s parties, Marshall couldn’t stop laughing as he watched his new friend, world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, chase the actress Tallulah Bankhead as she ran screaming down the hallways of 409 with the fighter in close pursuit. For the most part, however, and in stark contrast to the life he lived away from home, Thurgood Marshall’s life at 409 was a quiet one.
On weekends, the young Marshalls attended upscale Harlem supper clubs like Happy Rhone’s Paradise on 143rd Street and Lenox, the “NAACP’s unofficial after-hours headquarters,” where the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement during World War II held court with black intellectuals, literati, and entertainers. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and the 1941 winner of the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s prestigious award “for the highest achievement of an American Negro,” was another of Marshall’s “sassiety” Harlem neighbors who moved in the same circle at the time. Thurgood also socialized with a friend from his college days at Lincoln University, Langston Hughes, who had come to New York years before and was one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Like many intellectuals and activists who joined the NAACP’s fight for equal rights, both Wright and Hughes were drawn to communism, and for decades Marshall had to navigate the complex relationship between communist supporters in the Civil Rights Congress—a communist front organization dedicated to civil liberties—and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which, Marshall knew, could destroy the NAACP with just a few well-timed words during the Red Scare.
The Marshalls eventually settled on a modest one-bedroom flat on the ninth floor at 409 Edgecombe, where they mostly socialized on weekends with a couple they knew from their college days—eating and drinking together late into the night, and playing card games. (They called their little group “the Pokenos,” after the card game Po-Ke-No.) With Thurgood traveling so frequently and often being gone for long stretches, Buster kept herself busy with social affairs and Urban League activities in Harlem. In many ways they were living a dream life—a young, attractive, educated couple with a desirable place to call home in the greatest city on earth. In private, however, the Marshalls were struggling with disappointments. Buster had miscarried again. Married for more than a decade, she’d been unable to carry a baby to term, and sadness was turning to frustration and grief.
“Buster had a weak uterus,” said Marshall’s secretary, Alice Stovall, adding that Buster had become pregnant “quite a few times because she said she knew how much Thurgood wanted children.” Everyone around them had children, it seemed, and Buster’s sense of self-worth had become wedded to her fertility problems and the notion that she was disappointing her husband. She was unable to shake the sadness that enveloped her.
Thurgood compartmentalized the pain and occupied himself increasingly with work and travel. On the rare mornings when he was in New York, he’d ride the elevator down to the white-tiled lobby, where Nathan the doorman would hold open the tall glass doors as Marshall stepped onto Edgecombe Avenue. High on Coogan’s Bluff, Marshall could look out over the Harlem River to Yankee Stadium on his way to work. More impressive, though, was the view of the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants baseball team played their home games. The stadium hosted the first game of the 1946 Negro World Series, in which the Kansas City Monarchs beat the Newark Eagles, 2–1. They did so without their former star, Jackie Robinson, who had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers before the season and was lighting up the International League with the Montreal Royals in preparation for his 1947 debut, when he would break baseball’s color line by becoming the first black to play in America’s major leagues. In that 1947 season, when Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey wanted a black lawyer to help put Robinson’s financial affairs in order, he sent the rookie to Thurgood Marshall.
Before heading downtown to the NAACP offices, Marshall would stride past Colonial Park and down Seventh Avenue to the Hotel Theresa at 125th Street, the “social capital of Negro America.” On June 19, 1946, nearly a quarter million people turned out for a parade there on 125th Street to wish Joe Louis luck in his rematch that evening with Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium. Louis was greeted all along 125th Street with music, floats, honking horns, and large signs that read, “Good Luck, Joe.” Before the fight, Louis famously said of the lighter Conn, “He can run, but he can’t hide,” and in the eighth round, before the first television audience to witness a world heavyweight championship, Louis finally found Conn, landing a vicious right-uppercut, left-hook combination that sent the Pittsburgh fighter onto his back for the ten count.
Ebony magazine kept an office at the Hotel Theresa, Walter White did his WLIB radio show there, and just across the street from the hotel, the black newspapers the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had offices. Marshall often met with reporters or addressed women’s groups at the hotel. In Theresa’s coffee shop he sometimes sat with Joe Louis, ate mushroom omelets, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bumpy Johnson, the notorious bookmaker for Madame St. Clair. But it was Marshall who commanded the attention of the staff. A waitress there remembered that “they treated him like a movie star.” She recalled, “He was so handsome in those days.” The waitress recalled, too, how Ju
lia Scott, the manager of the coffee shop, used to wait on Marshall “because she was afraid we’d spill coffee on him or cause some embarrassing accident because we were so nervous in his presence. ‘You girls stop staring at Mr. Marshall,’ she’d say when he came in.”
Despite the difficulties at home, Marshall was riding high in 1946. In May the thirty-seven-year-old attorney became the thirty-first Spingarn medalist, joining the likes of Wright, Robeson, DuBois, author and activist James Weldon Johnson, and the American contralto Marian Anderson as recipients of the esteemed award. Next to Wright, Marshall was the youngest person to receive the Spingarn Medal, conferred in recognition of his “distinguished service as a lawyer before the Supreme Court of the United States . . . particularly in the Texas Primary Case which conceivably may have more far reaching influence than any other act in the ending of disenfranchisement based upon race or color in the country.” In this 1944 case, Smith v. Allwright, involving an all-white primary, the U.S. Supreme Court justices voted 8–1 in Marshall’s favor, ruling that blacks “cannot be legally barred from voting in the Texas Democratic primaries.” One Spingarn Medal Award Committee member noted that Marshall’s work in the case “brought about the most beneficial results for the Negro since Emancipation.” Marshall was also cited for his attack on the Jim Crow travel system and unequal educational opportunities as well as for his battle to win for blacks “basic human rights and justice in the courts.”
In May 1946 Walter White wrote a note to Marshall, informing him that because the company making the Spingarn Medal would be unable to create a new die in time for the June ceremony in Cincinnati, the NAACP would instead be presenting him with a replica gold-plated medal. “Lest you think we are trying to pull a fast one on you,” White went on to explain, the company would be casting a solid gold medal that Marshall would receive “as soon as it is delivered.” Marshall returned the note after writing a two-word response: “Oh yeah.”
THURGOOD MARSHALL SMOKED three packs of cigarettes a day.
By mid-June of 1946, however, Marshall’s body was failing him. He was drinking steadily and not getting much sleep, and his constant travel to Columbia, Tennessee, where temperatures soared over a hundred degrees, had left him exhausted, with no time for exercise—not that he’d ever shown any interest in exercise. Nor did his preferred diet of fried food and red meat do him any favors. He was laughing less, talking in muted tones, and to friends and associates, he was not himself. Sensing something might be amiss with his health, Marshall arranged NAACP staff participation in the Blue Cross Hospitalization Plan, which, he said, at “very reasonable rates” would relieve employees of “that mental worry of wondering where the money is coming from to meet the bills.”
Two weeks later, more than seven hundred delegates joined thousands of members in Cincinnati for the NAACP’s thirty-seventh annual conference, at which, on the closing night, Marshall would receive the Spingarn Medal. Onstage, Marshall was seated beside Joe Louis and Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the famous Tuskegee airman. Next to Louis, Marshall looked gaunt and run-down in his dark pinstripe suit and spectator shoes: a stark contrast to the smiling, muscular fighter. Still, Marshall managed to rise to the occasion. Standing before his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, he made it clear that the medal was “an award coming to one person in recognition of the work of a large group of lawyers who have always worked together in a spirit of wholehearted co-operation and without any hope of reward other than that of seeing a job done.” After his acceptance speech Marshall introduced the lawyers he’d been working with on the Columbia case, Z. Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver, as well as Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, whose broken radio had started the riots back in February. The case had exhausted Marshall, and listening to Mrs. Stephenson onstage as she told her story reminded him of the oppressive heat and stress he had been enduring. Indeed, he’d just come from Columbia, where he’d been “carrying around a fever ranging from 103 to 104 degrees” over the last week, and the fever had not abated in Cincinnati. It was so bad, Marshall said, that he “was only able to be out of bed two or three hours a day.”
After the convention, when Marshall returned to New York, he could not get out of bed at all. Seeing his condition as critical and even “grave,” Walter White was worried. He wanted to avoid sending Marshall to Harlem Hospital—a place, he noted, that had earned such a reputation for the “callous and inadequate treatment” of black patients that it inspired a folk saying: “When any member of your family goes to Harlem Hospital, telephone the undertaker.” White thus reached out to some of his society friends and associates in an attempt to have Marshall admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital. It was not to be. Citing red tape, overcrowded conditions, and the inability to “build a room” for Marshall on such short notice as the excuses offered by the hospital, White concluded that Marshall, in his hour of need, was not admitted because of his race.
So it was that Marshall found himself in Ward 2D at Harlem Hospital, where the doctors could not figure out the cause of his illness. They first suspected a tumor, or “cancer of the lung,” and White, alarmed at the critical nature of Marshall’s prognosis, notified the NAACP’s board of directors that the lawyer’s condition was “due solely to the fact that he has worked himself almost to death without any thought of self.”
Marshall had hoped to keep the news of his admission to Harlem Hospital quiet, but it wasn’t possible, especially when the hallways began to buzz over the large plant and cards that Marshall had received from Eleanor Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was First Lady, she had been drawn to the cause of racial justice, and as a board member and activist for the NAACP, she had lobbied her husband on many race-related issues from civil rights to the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his part, was less than enthralled with his wife’s alliance with the NAACP, and the White House attempted to maintain a distance between the president and Eleanor’s activism on behalf of blacks. Marshall himself had felt the president’s chill when Attorney General Francis Biddle phoned FDR to discuss the NAACP’s involvement in a race case in Virginia. At Biddle’s instruction, Marshall picked up an extension phone to listen in, only to hear FDR exclaim, “I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor’s niggers. Call me one more time and you are fired.” Marshall later recalled, “The President only said ‘nigger’ once, but once was enough for me.”
Eleanor Roosevelt nonetheless continued her work with the NAACP during and after the FDR administration. Appalled by the riots in Columbia, Tennessee, she worked closely with Marshall to get a reluctant Justice Department involved. A plant and cards simply betokened her esteem and admiration for a man at the front lines in the country’s civil rights battle. Roosevelt, however, wasn’t the only one who had learned that Marshall had checked into Harlem Hospital. Marshall’s wife, Buster, was at home in Sugar Hill one day in July when a Railway Express man showed up at the apartment on Edgecombe Avenue with a package from the men Marshall was defending in the Tennessee riot case. “You know,” the deliveryman told Buster, “I’m from Tennessee, and from the smell I know what’s in here, and I would sure like to have some of it.” Inside the box was a “twenty-pound, country-cured ham” and a letter that read, “Dear lawyer . . . The wives all wanted to send you flowers, but we knew what you’d rather have.”
The doctors at Harlem Hospital continued to run tests. Marshall, still unable to get out of bed, did not show any improvement. It had been determined that Marshall did not have a tumor, and eventually the doctors settled on a diagnosis of a mysterious, pneumonia-like virus—“Virus X,” as Marshall called it. The diagnosis afforded the thirty-eight-year-old little comfort. Just a few years before, Fats Waller, whose exaggerated facial expressions and mannerisms Marshall often affected while telling a story, had died of pneumonia on a train down south shortly before his own fortieth birthday. The doctors ordered that Marshall be confined to bed for six weeks without visitors, and if he then showed any improvement, he would be allowed to r
eturn to work, but “not more than three hours a day every other day.” After a month Marshall slowly began to regain some of his strength. He was no longer running a high fever, but his doctors refused to allow him to return to work. White visited him in mid-July and noted that Marshall was “far from out of the woods yet.” White also noticed that Marshall’s spirits nonetheless seemed to be rising, as he’d asked White to deliver a message to the NAACP staff: “Give them the bad news that I’ll live,” Marshall said.
By early August, Marshall’s doctor, Louis T. Wright, the first black surgeon at Harlem Hospital and himself a Spingarn medalist in 1940, had “ordered” Marshall to leave the country; Wright felt that the lawyer would benefit from an extended leave, preferably in a tropical climate, where he could relax and recover. From NAACP donors, White secured five hundred dollars for Marshall’s medical bills, and sent Thurgood and Buster to stay with William H. Hastie, another fellow Spingarn medalist and one of Marshall’s former professors at Howard University Law School. Hastie had just been appointed the first black governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands by President Truman.
Marshall rested for a week in the Virgin Islands. For no longer than that could he resist working on the proposed budget for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Against doctor’s orders, he was also on the phone each night with Looby so that they could discuss legal strategies and the day’s proceedings in the Columbia Race Riot case. He reported to White, however, that he was “taking it more than easy” and the only exercise he was getting was from losing money at poker, which “is no effort for me.”
By mid-August Marshall had nearly recovered. Taking advantage of the excellent climate, he and Buster visited Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. “I will have a difficult job to persuade Buster to leave,” Marshall wrote to White. “I am not too anxious to leave myself, but I understand that my welcome is about worn out, so I better leave before being run out.” He told White not to pay attention to the “deliberate falsehoods” that Hastie had been spreading about Marshall’s “descent upon the Virgins,” despite the fact that White thought it would take a “month of steady explanation” to answer Hastie’s accusations.