Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Thorney Marshall was described by his superior officers as a “cheerful, manly, neat soldier” for most of the assignment, but he began to suffer repeated illnesses, such as diarrhea.13 Most of those illnesses seemed standard at Fort Brown, but then he got a puzzling ailment that army doctors called “Chronic Hepatitis.”14

  Thorney was discharged on November 30, 1874, for medical problems that had caused him to become “morose, untidy and careless, manifesting fears and melancholy,” according to Capt. H. C. Corbin, head of the 24th Cavalry.15 After his discharge he rode a train back to Baltimore wrapped in blankets. When he arrived, his eyes inflamed and half of his face paralyzed, he had to be carried to the home of a friend with whom he had waited tables at the Barnum Hotel. A year later, the twenty-five-year-old was still ailing, and doctors operated, placing a drainage tube into his right lung to relieve what they diagnosed as emphysema.

  After leaving the hospital, Thorney slowly recuperated; he eventually married his neighbor Annie Robinson in 1879. He went back to work as a waiter at the Barnum Hotel while Annie began having children, seven in all. Their first son, William Canfield Marshall, was the future father of Thurgood Marshall.

  Despite his marriage and new family, Thorney’s long illness had damaged his spirit. There were bouts of drinking, and some remembered him as a loud, difficult, and bitter man. He was by all accounts a “tough customer.”

  Nevertheless, Thorney used his army disability payments and wages from his job to open a small grocery store on the bottom floor of his house, just a few blocks away from Isaiah Williams’s house; it is likely that the two men knew each other. In addition, the Marshalls and Williamses were part of a tight-knit West Baltimore community with a strong focus on family and neighbors. It was in this community that Willie Marshall met his future wife, a brown-skinned, teenage girl with long, straight, jet black hair.

  Norma Williams was destined to be a teacher. Her mother had taught at one of Baltimore’s private academies for black students in the early 1870s. Mary had stopped teaching only when she began raising a family. But her oldest daughter, Avonia, also went into teaching, using her father’s political connections to get one of the first jobs for black teachers in the black public schools. Both mother and older sister spent long hours nurturing young Norma’s ambition. Most of all they impressed on her the need to do well in school. Avonia, who was twelve years older, was a powerful role model for Norma. She was a living example of a young black woman making good money and being given respect because of her job.

  While she admired her older sister’s academic excellence, the man Norma fell in love with was a wild boy who had dropped out after elementary school. When he did go to school, Willie was a troublemaker, quick to mouth off to teachers and principals. One day teachers complained to his father that Willie was acting up. The next day Thorney appeared in Willie’s classroom and, in front of the whole class, pulled off his leather belt and began beating his son. The humiliation was too much. Willie Marshall never went back to school.

  Willie did know how to read and write, however. He also worked as an errand boy, and when his father opened the family-run grocery, Willie began working at the store full-time. By 1904 the blue-eyed, light-skinned Willie had saved up enough money to move out of the family home to 1410 Ward Street and begin working at the city’s big railroad station as a porter.

  Somewhere in his comings and goings from the family store, his work at the railroad, and his wanderings around West Baltimore, Willie met Norma Williams. She was four years younger and still living with her mother and siblings on West Biddle Street. Norma had graduated from the Colored High School in 1904 and immediately gone on to teachers college at Coppin State in Baltimore. But before the nineteen-year-old could graduate, she became pregnant. Norma’s father had died, and the family sacrificed to pay her tuition. She had been expected to finish school and begin earning income from her teaching job for the family.

  But with Norma pregnant the plans had to change. Her mother insisted to Willie that Norma finish school no matter what. Willie agreed to pay the bills, and he supported the idea that Norma should be a college graduate. The couple got married on April 17, 1905,16 and Norma Marshall graduated from teachers college a few weeks later. The couple’s first child, William Aubrey, was born September 15, 1905.17 While Willie continued to work as a porter, Norma stayed home with the baby.

  Three years later, on July 2, 1908, a second child, Thurgood, was born. The family had moved from an apartment at 1127 Argyle Avenue, where Aubrey was born, into a larger apartment in the same neighborhood, 543 McMechen Street, where Thurgood was delivered.

  On his birth certificate the boy’s name was listed as Thoroughgood, Willie’s younger brother’s name. The older Thoroughgood had traveled the world as a seaman out of Baltimore’s ports since he was nineteen, and Willie envied his brother’s life. The brother’s name was also a variation on their father’s name, Thorney Good, which family lore claimed had come from prominent white slaveholders in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginia. On the large Virginia plantations where young Thorney Marshall lived as a slave, census records show that there were white families named Thorogood, Thoroughgood, and Thorowgood.

  The infant “Thoroughgood” was born into a town going through a wave of racially divisive politics. In 1899 the Democrats had gained political control of Baltimore with the slogan “This Is a White Man’s City.”18 But such rhetoric was simply the local reflection of a national movement toward rigid segregation. In 1896 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, enabling a pattern of “separate but equal” to become the law of the land. Jim Crow, already a fact of life for much of the country, was now legal precedent. In the early 1900s life in the city’s stores and workplaces became more racially divided. But even in the face of increased segregation and racism, Baltimore’s black community remained surprisingly well organized and was able to put up resistance.

  Unlike in much of the South, blacks in the city had a long tradition of owning their own businesses and holding skilled jobs. The society of free black people gave Baltimore’s black community reason to expect that they could respond to threats against their rights and defy the segregationist politics of the Democratic Party. In addition, the Republican Party in Maryland gave blacks a political home—a prominent organization in which they could be allied with powerful white politicians. Black activists teamed with Republicans to block enactment of laws to segregate black travelers on trains in the city during the early 1900s.

  But by 1908, when Thoroughgood was born, the Maryland legislature had passed laws requiring “white” and “colored” toilets on ships and trains. Baltimore’s black community fought back, with a boycott of the rails and steamship companies, but they had little success. Even in defeat Baltimore’s black community won a measure of respect, however, when the big ship lines took out advertisements to apologize to black patrons and explain that they were simply obeying Maryland’s new law.19

  The passage of laws compelling racial segregation created a climate of violence throughout the nation, particularly in the South. White fears of black political power led to efforts to intimidate blacks, and the year Thoroughgood was born, eighty-nine blacks were lynched nationally.20 Lynchings in the South, race riots in Springfield, Illinois (the home of Abraham Lincoln), and the general increase in segregation laws across the nation prompted several prominent social reformers to start a movement to stop the abuse of blacks. Members of the Brotherhood of Liberty, a group of Baltimore activists for black rights, joined over a thousand people in New York on May 30, 1909, for a meeting of social reformers from around the nation. A year later the group took the name the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).21 While its headquarters were in New York, the second oldest branch of the NAACP opened in 1912 in Baltimore.22

  Meanwhile, Willie continued to work as a sleeping-car porter while his wife took care of their two sons. They did their best to insulate th
e boys from the harsh hand of Jim Crow by keeping them in Old West Baltimore, among family and friends. For all the political and racial storms raging at the start of the century, Marshall’s large, extended family managed to give him a childhood full of warmth and loving comfort. The cocoon surrounding the Marshall boys gave them only passing glimpses of the Jim Crow segregation that chilled black life in most of America. But the boys were about to see more.

  CHAPTER 3

  Educating Thurgood

  THOROUGHGOOD TOOK HIS FIRST STEPS out of the cocoon when he was two. In 1910 Willie and Norma Marshall moved to Harlem at the invitation of Norma’s older sister Denmedia. Her name was born out of Isaiah Williams’s imagination: He christened her Denmedia Marketa in honor of the street corner market he opened on Denmead Street. Aunt Medi, as the boys called her, lured her younger sister’s family to New York by telling Willie Marshall that he could get steady work with her husband, Clarence Dodson, on the New York Central while she helped Norma care for the boys.

  When Norma and Willie said yes to the invitation, they became part of a wave of black families heading to New York at the turn of the century. The 1900 census indicated that Harlem was quickly becoming a center for the black population of Manhattan. By 1910 Harlem was a mecca for southern blacks eager to escape Jim Crow.

  The sudden influx of blacks transformed Harlem. It was becoming world renowned for its electrifying mix of people, politics, and culture. By the time Thoroughgood arrived, black writers, religious leaders, and intellectuals were making Harlem the place for debate about the future of the race. And its many gambling joints, bars, and after-hours clubs drew both blacks and high-society whites. Harlem’s streets became a magnet for black entertainers—from ragtime musicians to vaudeville actors and classically trained singers.

  Norma Marshall and Aunt Medi, who was eight years older than Norma, took the boys for walks in a city both bigger and busier than Baltimore. There was nothing in Old West Baltimore, not even Pennsylvania Avenue, that was as crowded, noisy, and vibrant as the streets around the Dodsons’ apartment on Lenox Avenue. In Baltimore the immigrants were mostly whites from Europe. New York had black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, as well as the surge of black migrants from all parts of the Deep South. And, unlike Baltimore, Harlem had a crowded feeling to it; whereas Baltimore had row houses and alleys, Harlem had apartment buildings reaching several stories high, many divided into single rooms, all packed full of people.

  While it was not the South, there was racial strife in Harlem. Some landlords, to attract white tenants, posted signs that read: “This Part of 135th Street Guaranteed Against Negro Invasion.”1 The open display of white racism in the North was a bitter lesson for many blacks who had come in the hope of escaping bigotry. The tense relationship between the races in Harlem set the stage for the emergence of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, which soon became a rage in New York.

  Willie Marshall and Clarence Dodson both worked as waiters on the New York Central, leaving their wives and the boys on their own several days every week. While the men were away Norma and Medi kept the boys under their skirts. Thoroughgood and Aubrey were not exposed to the jive or politics of Harlem’s street life. Among the family’s friends, Thoroughgood was known as a dainty, timid child called Goody. Aunt Medi felt that he was “nothing but a cry-baby.” When he seemed to show some strength of character a few months later, she attributed it to some of the neighborhood boys, who had “slapped his head.”2

  Norma doted on her boys, dressing them like little princes, in blue Buster Brown suits with pretty white blouses. One of the family’s friends later said of Thurgood, “He was too good-looking—he should have been a girl.”3 While Aubrey managed to keep his clothes clean, Goody usually came back dirty, once carrying a smelly, gray cat.

  “Get that cat out of here,” his mother screamed. But little Goody pleaded until his mother gave in and got a saucer of milk. That led to him regularly caring for the cat as well as a white rat and a dog. After that he did not limit his houseguests to animals. He brought Harlem’s kids as well as strangers over to the house to eat and sleep. His mother later recalled, “Our home got to be known as the ‘Friendly Inn.’ ”4

  Although they liked New York, Norma and Willie had to return to Baltimore when Norma’s mother broke her leg in 1914.5 Thoroughgood, now six, was about to start first grade. By this time he had tired of being teased about his dainty nickname. And he was fed up with having to spell out his complicated given name. In a strike of determined independence, he began telling everyone to call him Thurgood. And he got his mother to change the name on his birth certificate.6 “It was too damn long, so I cut it,” he explained. “I didn’t have nobody’s permission, I did it.”

  On January 10, 1915, just as Thurgood was starting school, Thorney Marshall died at age sixty-six of heart failure.7 Thorney’s death marked the end of an era for the family. His powerful personality and larger-than-life stories about everything from slavery to the Buffalo Soldiers had cast a strong shadow over his son and grandsons.

  The Marshall family was changing, and so was Baltimore City. Racial hostility had become more common in the five years the family had been away. The Baltimore Afro-American, the activist black paper that sold throughout the state, wrote an emotionally pained editorial complaining that no one could remember a time when tensions between the races were so troubled. The city’s black political leaders reacted to the hostile climate by becoming more politically organized and stirring people to join the Baltimore branch of the new NAACP.8

  The key political issue in the city was the divide between the all-white segregationists in the Democratic Party and the Republicans over the movement of wealthy blacks into white neighborhoods. The Democrats cloaked their efforts to segregate blacks with claims that they were trying to contain tuberculosis and typhoid. In fact these diseases were raging through the impoverished black sections of Old West Baltimore, not far from the Marshall family. City officials described one street, Biddle Alley, as “the Lung Block” after doctors said every house on that street held someone with TB.9

  When George F. McMechen, a black lawyer, moved to a white part of McCullough Street in 1910, the city council’s Democrats banned blacks from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. To make it look more balanced, the Democrats offered a provision also to keep whites from moving into mostly black areas of the city.10 “It is becoming more and more disturbing to permit … unrestricted invasions by Negroes into white-occupied streets,” the Democrats wrote in city council records.11

  Baltimore’s black community was politically strong enough to respond to the Democrats. Harry Cummings, the first black Baltimore city council member, was able to attract wide attention for a speech in which he called the new segregation laws pure racism. He expressed black Baltimore’s desire for integration with whites by saying all they wanted was “an opportunity to secure better homes, live under better conditions, be better citizens.”

  Cummings’s passionate speech did not persuade the Democratic majority of the council. The law went into effect, the first time anyone in America had tried to compel residential segregation. A few weeks later, however, it was declared unconstitutional by the Baltimore Supreme Bench.

  Even with Baltimore’s racial problems boiling around them, Thurgood’s family found a safe place to set up house when they returned from New York. They moved in with Norma’s brother Fearless Mentor Williams at 1632 Division Street. The Williamses’ house, not far from Pennsylvania Avenue, was on one of the better streets in Old West Baltimore. Families on Division Street were among black Baltimoreans with steady work or their own businesses. It was a middle-class street, and they lived next to a white, Jewish family.

  The Old West Baltimore neighborhood had Russian, German, and Italian immigrants, although it was overwhelmingly black. The store owners on Pennsylvania Avenue, however, were nearly all Jewish. And in several of the stores blacks were not allowed to try on clothes; some stor
es would not even let blacks walk in the door unless their skin was so light they could pass for white. The segregated life in many stores on Pennsylvania Avenue had prompted increasing grumbling among Baltimore’s black community by the time young Thurgood and his family returned.

  While Thurgood’s family was living with Uncle Fearless, his life was centered in the warmth of his grandmother’s house. Thurgood’s mother had to spend time with Grandma Mary as she recuperated from her broken leg, and Mary lovingly took her grandson into her kitchen to feed him and teach him to cook. As part of the protective blanket she wrapped around little Thurgood, Grandma Mary also gave him practical advice about his chances as a young black man in turn-of-the-century America. “Your mother and father want you to be a dentist or a doctor, something like that,” she told him. “And I hope you make it. But just in case you don’t, I’m going to teach you how to cook. And you know why? You’ve never seen an unemployed black cook.”

  While his grandmother and mother provided the strong female presence in his life, the leading male figure was Thurgood’s Uncle Fearless. Fearless got his name when his father, the imaginative Isaiah Williams, decided that the infant stared at him just after birth and was “a fearless little fellow.” Although Thurgood’s dad was often gone working on the railroad for several days at a time, Uncle “Fee” was there every afternoon and night to play and talk about school, the family, and the neighborhood with Thurgood and Aubrey.