Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Marshall and Houston did not know what to do. If they abandoned their arguments, they had no defense for Ades. But if they went into court the next day and contended that racism was at the root of the case, the judge was going to put them in jail. Word of their dilemma spread through Baltimore.

  “The judge was about to put me in jail, and this client of mine, John Murphy [of the Afro newspaper], came by,” Marshall remembered. “Here, I’ve got something for you to go to court,” Murphy told him. A curious Marshall opened the envelope and found inside five $1,000 bills. His eyes wide with astonishment, he turned to Murphy, who told him, “That’s for your bail.”

  Luckily for Marshall and Houston, Judge Coleman decided to recuse himself from the case, and another judge took his place. The case ended with Ades being given a reprimand, but he was allowed to continue practicing law. Marshall and Houston had won an important case. In local legal circles Marshall’s reputation now stood large. He was seen as a good attorney and also the black lawyer who made integrationist history by defending a white lawyer.

  Now that he was a courthouse regular, Marshall tried his best to become an insider among the white legal fraternity. He brought a personal yet respectful manner to the legal bar and its white judges. Despite the segregated nature of legal proceedings, he learned to work within the ropes of legal segregation. He only demanded fair treatment.

  To bolster his case for racial equality, Marshall took to heart Houston’s advice to be twice as good as white lawyers. His briefs were carefully written, and his arguments were well reasoned. “I never filed a paper in any court with an erasure on it. If I changed a word, it had to be typed all over,” he said.10 Marshall’s diligence regularly won judges to his side. Once, when an opposing white lawyer asked a white judge for time to check on the legal citations in Marshall’s brief, the judge said it was not necessary. Even though the judge had a reputation for giving black lawyers a rough time, he told the white attorney: “You don’t have to worry about that—if Mr. Marshall puts his signature on it, you don’t have to check.”

  Marshall’s good relationship with white judges, including the bigots, led them to call on him in cases where they wanted a solid black lawyer in the courtroom to protect themselves against charges of racial bias. One night Marshall got a call from the local judge in nearby Frederick, Maryland, alerting him that a lynching was about to happen. Marshall hopped in his rickety, used 1929 Ford, nicknamed Betsy, that he had bought with Uncle Fee’s help. When he got to Frederick, Marshall saw a scary, chaotic scene. The police were racing around, some grabbing black men and leading them to the jails. Marshall became worried for his own safety. Working up his courage, he drove his car next to a state trooper and asked for an escort to the judge’s house. “You want some protection?” the policeman asked him. Marshall, who by then had sweated through his shirt with worry, replied: “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  When a relieved Marshall arrived at the judge’s house, he told him that Geraldine Kreh, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a local bank president, had been beaten up during an attempted rape by a black man. Marshall was called to make sure that all the rules were followed in identifying and charging a suspect.

  That night William Carter, a black workman, was identified by Kreh as her assailant. He was charged with assault with intent to rape, a crime punishable by death. The Afro-American, the activist Baltimore paper, and the Baltimore NAACP hired Marshall to “observe” the trial and note any evidence of racial bias. With Marshall in the courtroom as a spokesman for the NAACP, the man was convicted but given a life sentence. Marshall later wrote to Charlie Houston, “He is guilty as the devil.”11 Marshall’s reputation had now extended outside the halls of Baltimore courts. He had become known to judges around the state as the eyes and ears of Maryland’s NAACP.

  Marshall’s growing profile led local labor leaders to ask him for help in organizing black workers. The young lawyer began to see a role for himself beyond the confines of the court. As Charles Houston had long preached to him, Marshall was using his legal training to become a social activist.

  One of the city’s biggest employers was Bethlehem Steel. A third of the labor force at its Sparrow’s Point plant was black, but they did not trust the all-white leadership of the labor unions. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, had come to Baltimore in the early 1930s to give speeches urging black workers to join white workers in unions. In many companies black workers were not even allowed to unionize. And when the companies allowed blacks to join unions, the unions often forced them into segregated units. But high unemployment during the Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal spurred a new wave of labor organizing in the city.12

  However, the antiunion tenor among Baltimore’s white establishment continued to prevail. Eugene O’Dunne, a leading judge in city courts, derided the strikes as evidence of labor radicalism. “A man has a right to work for whom he will and what he will,” O’Dunne said during one union-busting trial. He charged that labor groups had no right to set working conditions.13 Marshall was one of a few activists who challenged this policy.

  As a member of the union’s organizing committee, Marshall began secret meetings with black workers at Bethlehem Steel. Despite their anxiety about white union leaders, Marshall persuaded the black workers that the best way to protect their rights was to create an integrated union. To reassure black workers of fair treatment, he proposed that they run a candidate for a leadership post in the union. Marshall led a successful campaign to elect a black union treasurer.

  Bethlehem Steel was not pleased; they saw a cohesive, racially integrated union as a major threat to their control over workers. The company hired goons, armed with nightsticks, to break up several union meetings where Marshall was advancing the idea of black and white worker cooperation.

  One night, Marshall had to run from the company thugs. “It was raining and we started running and two of us saw a church. It had a big hedge around it so we got down in the hedge and these guys were coming by shouting: ‘Black son of a bitch’ and knocking heads. We lay down in the mud. At first, that mud was cold, but it got real warm. We stayed there until they left, after midnight.”

  Despite challenging Baltimore’s power structure, Marshall was careful to keep good relationships in the city’s establishment legal circles. He remained the warm, wisecracking black lawyer with whom white judges felt comfortable dealing. Marshall wanted acceptance from the city’s white lawyers; the only sign of defiance came when they would not let him or any other black lawyer in the Baltimore City Bar Association. Marshall became a leader in the Monumental City Bar Association, the black lawyers’ alternative bar. Marshall and six other black lawyers incorporated it in April of 1935. That year thirty-two black lawyers were working in the city, an all-time high.14 The same year Marshall became treasurer of the National Bar Association. Marshall joked that the group had so little money, he could “carry the treasury around in my mouth.”

  For all his activism Marshall’s law practice was still struggling. His biggest client was the Druid Hill Laundry until John H. Murphy, Jr., treasurer of the Afro-American Co., the country’s largest black newspaper chain, walked into his office.

  John Murphy had had a spat with his longtime lawyer, Warner McGuinn. Marshall had been college roommates with John’s nephew, James, who had referred John Murphy to the young lawyer. McGuinn did not object to giving Marshall a little business to keep him afloat. In fact, McGuinn was confident that his disgruntled client would soon return. As Marshall remembered their conversation, McGuinn told him: “Go ahead. You’ll fuck it up, and it’ll come back to me anyhow.”

  Marshall’s work with John Murphy paid off in more than cash. It brought him closer to the president of the Afro-American Co., John’s brother, Carl Murphy. Mister Carl, as he was called in Old West Baltimore, was a tough-minded bantam rooster of a man. He was fluent in German, with a master’s degree in the language from Harvard. He came to the paper in 1917 and
when his father died five years later took control of the Afro at the age of thirty-three.

  Mister Carl was an activist editor. He saw no distinction between running the Afro and being a key player in the NAACP. A lifelong integrationist, he had been on the board of directors for the national NAACP since 1931, and in 1935 he led the coalition that restarted the Baltimore branch. “I can’t remember anytime when I asked Carl for money for legal cases that I didn’t get it,” Marshall said. “That was when it wasn’t so fashionable but Carl always believed.”

  In 1931 the Baltimore NAACP had only five active members, but the five included Murphy and another dynamic personality, Lillie May Jackson. A driven woman who at a young age had suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of her face, Jackson had a shrill voice and no capacity for embarrassment. She regularly harangued city officials, the police, the Sun, and the Afro about racial discrimination in Baltimore. For years her leading crusade was against the bigoted treatment given black customers in the stores on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Pennsylvania Avenue was the gathering place for Baltimore’s black population. Church ladies and teachers as well as gamblers, prostitutes, and bootleggers all watched one another parade along the avenue. The Royal Theater, built in 1921, was a palace of black entertainment. With New York’s Apollo and Washington’s Howard theaters, the Royal made up the famous black entertainment “Chitlin’ Circuit,” with regular performances during the 1930s by world-known entertainers such as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and the Baltimore native Billie Holiday.

  Pennsylvania Avenue, however, also reflected the racial problems of the city. Walter Carr, then a youngster who was a neighbor of the Marshalls in Old West Baltimore, remembered the indignity he felt while on Pennsylvania Avenue: “You were supposed to walk out in the gutter when you saw white folks walking down the street,” he said. “My grandmother knocked me in the gutter half a dozen times.”15 The harsh emotional impact of Jim Crow segregation on Pennsylvania Avenue upset Marshall, too: “The only thing different between the South and Baltimore was trolley cars.” Many stores on Pennsylvania did not let dark-skinned blacks come in the door; others would sell to blacks but refused to let them try on clothes. Marshall’s mother and other blacks had their credit accounts taken away at one point when store owners suddenly insisted that blacks pay up front.

  In response to the daily racist practices on Pennsylvania Avenue, Lillie May Jackson, with her daughters, Juanita and Virginia, started a forum to discuss racial and job issues affecting young blacks in Baltimore. It was called the City-Wide Young People’s Forum.

  One of the biggest complaints at Jackson’s forums was that many white store owners in Old West Baltimore refused to hire black workers, but it was not until a religious mystic, Prophet Kiowah Costonie, appeared in Baltimore in June of 1933, that public sentiment was widely stirred to get jobs for black workers in stores patronized by black shoppers.

  Costonie was one of many faith healers operating among blacks in big eastern cities during the early thirties. Black people were ripe for any savior. Unemployment and frustration with ongoing oppression in the South resulted in northern neighborhoods crowded with poorly educated blacks. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore all had black cultists promising a better day to people who would attend their meetings.

  In Old West Baltimore, Costonie held revivals at which he laid his hands on the sick; newspapers said he supposedly made the deaf hear, the blind see, and cripples walk again. However, Costonie was more than a good tent show revivalist. He began attending the Young People’s Forum. With Costonie, often dressed in a turban, drawing the crowds and Lillie Jackson stirring public anger, they began a “Buy Where You Can Work Campaign.”16

  Costonie and Jackson led dozens of people in picketing the stores and had immediate success. Black customers boycotted the stores as Murphy’s Afro carried headlines that championed the cause. Some white store owners started to lose money and offered to negotiate a settlement.

  “The first Saturday that we put the campaign on, we cut their sales off so bad that one store sent a man down from New York to find out what happened,” Marshall said later. The NAACP sent Jackson and a young activist named Clarence Mitchell to meet with the man. Marshall went along as the NAACP’s lawyer and successfully negotiated a deal in which A & P began training black clerks and store managers.

  Not all the stores complied so easily; some owners hired black thugs to beat up the picketers. When Marshall found out that one of the store owners was Jewish, he went to see the man’s rabbi. The rabbi promised to speak to the man, but when Marshall returned, the rabbi told him there was nothing he could do. “I’m sorry, I can’t do anything. I’m embarrassed. I’ve never had one of my people in my synagogue talk to me like he did. He told me to go to hell.”

  The hired toughs attacked some black picketers, including Marshall’s wife. He came home one evening to find Buster bruised and crying. She was hurt but announced that she was going to be on the picket line the next day. Marshall sought out one of his clients, Scrappy Brown, and asked him to serve as a bodyguard for Buster and himself. “Scrappy was one of them nice, peaceful guys,” Marshall said, laughing. “He carried an ax up the back of his coat.”

  The campaign ended with mixed results. Some store owners got court injunctions banning picketing in front of the stores. Nevertheless, many businesses on Pennsylvania Avenue began to hire black workers. Murphy, whose Afro carried front-page stories about the blacks who were hired, urged Jackson to continue her campaign. He offered financial support and publicity if she could employ her success to revive the city’s flagging NAACP branch. With the Afro as her booster, Jackson began using the Pennsylvania Avenue boycotts, as well as stories about lynchings on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to build membership for the local NAACP. In less than a year she enrolled 2,000 members.

  Jackson also used Marshall as the local branch’s lawyer. She did not pay him but took care to remind Marshall that Mr. Carl might give him more of the Afro’s legal work—and fees—if he helped the NAACP. She would call the young lawyer and tell him what she expected and when. At times, Marshall remembered, he would lay the phone down on his desk, continue his other work, and every few minutes shout into the phone: “Yes, Mrs. Jackson. Yes, Mrs. Jackson,” as she continued to talk.

  But there were times when Jackson and Marshall came close to falling out. “Mrs. Lillie would actually call me up and say, ‘I heard a horrible story about my lawyer,’ ” an exasperated Marshall recalled. “She said that I was drunk at such and such a club.… I said, ‘I was and I got up there two nights and I got drunk both nights.’ She said, ‘You’re not ashamed of it?’ I said, ‘Proud of it.’ ”

  Mrs. Jackson also cracked down on Roy Wilkins, Walter White’s young assistant from the national office. When Wilkins visited Baltimore he spent time with Marshall drinking at jazz clubs. Jackson complained to Carl Murphy, who sent a letter to New York chastising Wilkins for damaging the organization’s image.

  Finally Marshall told her his drinking and chain-smoking were none of her business. “Well, look, start paying me some salary and I will think about listening to you. But you don’t pay me a goddamn nickel, then you want to run my life. You can’t do ’em both.”

  Despite his bluster Marshall was happiest doing Mrs. Jackson’s civil rights work. He was now looking for that one breakthrough case that would make him a leading lawyer. It was coming fast.

  CHAPTER 7

  Getting Started

  THURGOOD MARSHALL DECIDED IT WAS TIME to take action. He read the Afro’s regular stories about the University of Maryland’s continuing refusal to take black students with growing disgust. As early as January 1933, the paper reported that blacks were trying to break the Jim Crow admissions policy but had been turned away by white law school officials who declared they were preserving the color line in law school education.

  Marshall began to discuss with Charles Houston how to attack
the university’s ban. At Howard, Marshall had done research for one of his professors, William Hastie, who had tried to get a black student, Thomas Hocutt, admitted into the school of pharmacy at the University of North Carolina. That case failed on a technicality when the black president of North Carolina College, a historically black school, refused to release Hocutt’s transcript. The college president said he did not want to integrate the state’s university system. Marshall later said Hastie and Houston’s theory in the Hocutt case was sound; the only reason they lost was because of the school president. “He was a first-class Uncle Tom,” Marshall said. Even in defeat Hastie, Houston, and their star pupil were confident that a legal attack against segregation in the graduate schools was the best way to break apart racially separate schools around the country.

  In the early 1930s the NAACP had hired Nathan Margold of Harvard, one of Houston’s friends, to come up with a legal approach to stop school segregation. Margold wrote that the NAACP should not challenge racial segregation directly but insist that states provide truly equal schools for blacks. His theory was that southern states could not afford to build equal facilities and ultimately would have to admit blacks and whites to the same schools. “I must have read the report at about the time of the Hocutt case,” Marshall recalled. “It stayed with me.… The South would go broke paying for truly equal, dual systems.”

  With the Margold report in the back of his mind, Marshall now saw his chance to take revenge for the hurt he felt when he discovered his home state law school was closed to him. He had held the anger for years, later saying that the first thing he wanted to do after he got out of Howard was “get even with Maryland for not letting me go to its law school.”1