Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  “I mean he was a blunderbuss,” Marshall said, describing George Vaughn, the NAACP lawyer who handled the St. Louis restrictive covenant case. “And we’d all worried about this guy. So we tried to tell him what to argue and he would not listen. He wanted to argue the Thirteenth Amendment [which freed the slaves].”

  “Vaughn didn’t get a question from any of the justices,” Marshall said. “And at the end of his argument he stood up in that damned courtroom, filled to the gills with people, and he said in a loud booming voice that you could hear out in the streets: ‘And Moses looked across the River Jordan and looked across the Mississippi River and said, let my people G-o-o-o-o-o-o.’ And we were all sitting like this,” Marshall said, his eyes wide and mouth hanging open.

  “Then he got through and sat down, right in the front row, and promptly went to sleep. The guard got up and walked over toward him. I got up and said to him, ‘Are you goddamned dead?’ ”

  When Marshall was sure that Vaughn was still breathing, he began his argument. But the justices interrupted him almost immediately. They were loaded with questions that they had been unable to ask Vaughn. “I got a thousand questions all the justices were scared to ask him.”

  Marshall’s approach—to say the covenants violated the right to equal protection under the law—found surprising support from Attorney General Tom Clark and Solicitor General Philip Perlman. Perlman, a Jewish lawyer from Baltimore, gave a powerful hour-long presentation. He told the justices that white Americans were “under a heavy debt to colored Americans. We brought them here as slaves,” Perlman said. “Yet after three-quarters of a century, attempts are made by such devices as restrictive covenants to hold them in bondage, to segregate them, to hem them in so that they cannot escape from the evil conditions under which so many of them are compelled to live.”16

  Philip Elman, an assistant solicitor general who was working behind the scenes on Perlman’s brief, later said Perlman’s “Fourth of July speech” to the Supreme Court was a politically calculated presentation, aimed at helping President Truman’s sagging popularity with white liberals.17

  On Monday May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court announced a 6-0 vote to end the use of restrictive covenants. Marshall was elated.18 This victory got the nation’s attention because it reached into every city and every neighborhood. Marshall’s name appeared in the headlines of white as well as black newspapers. Black America, which sat by radios to hear every move of Joe Louis’s championship fights, now began hailing Marshall as the Joe Louis of the courtroom. And when he gave speeches around the country, NAACP leaflets heralded him as the “Jim Crow Buster.” Marshall was making his distinctive mark on American law, literally changing where and how the races interacted. But his success was also stirring segregationist passions. Old Jim Crow was not ready to throw in the towel.19

  CHAPTER 15

  Groveland

  THE FOUR BLACK MEN could not run faster. They kept their legs churning through the cypress, moss, and mud of the steamy groves and swamps as the sounds of the lynch mob and their hunting dogs grew closer. The black men used the velvety dark of night in rural central Florida to hide where possible. But the angry flares of the mob’s torches cast long shadows. And when they ran from their hiding places, the tree roots tripped them up. In the distance they could hear the cries from Groveland, where four hundred black people’s homes were set afire and white-hooded night riders terrorized their neighborhoods. It would be many hours before the state militia moved in to protect the blacks in what remained of Groveland.1

  Hyperventilating with fear and fatigue and imagining their own deaths by lynching, the men began to fall behind. The frenzied mob grabbed and beat each one, sending sickening shrieks into the air. They killed the first one they caught and beat the three others long after they had lost consciousness.

  The three men were dragged into jail, strung up from iron pipes in the boiler room, and given more bloody beatings. As they faded in and out of consciousness, the men could hear their jailers demanding that they confess to raping a lovely, wild-eyed seventeen-year-old white housewife. They wanted them to admit they had been on the highway where the blonde said her clothes were ripped by black men who had kidnapped and violated her.

  The men didn’t know enough to answer. One of them was so severely beaten that his testicles remained swollen for days. Another was injured so badly that his pants were still caked with dry blood days later when NAACP lawyers came to question him.2

  In his New York offices Thurgood Marshall got barely coherent phone calls from NAACP officials in Florida. They told about the black neighborhood being burned and about the men being beaten. Marshall heard that the mob violence had spilled over from that ghastly night. The next day the families of the young men had been threatened, then forced to go into hiding for fear that they would be lynched.

  Although police claimed the three survivors had confessed, NAACP officials told Marshall none had signed any written confession. Marshall decided to send Franklin Williams, one of his deputies, to Groveland to figure out what was going on and mount a legal defense. Williams called back within hours of arriving to tell Marshall that what had happened made no sense and that the black community was so dazed with fright they had barely managed to hold a public funeral for the suspect who had been killed by the mob.

  On Marshall’s orders Williams stayed and defended the three men. The trial began with temperatures reaching 105 degrees. And Williams faced a hostile white jury. But he thought he had a strong case. Despite the beatings, there were no confessions from these men. He also argued that the state had not even presented evidence that the woman had been raped. But the jury still convicted the three. Samuel Shepherd and Walter Lee Irvin were sentenced to death in the electric chair; Charles Greenlee, sixteen, was given life because of his age. The NAACP lawyer was chased by a jeering group of white toughs as he left town. He had to speed down the highway to get away, all the time recalling what had happened to Marshall in Columbia, Tennessee.

  The NAACP appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the Shepherd and Irvin convictions. Greenlee, fearing he might get a death sentence if there was a new trial, chose not to appeal. Justice Robert Jackson said the convictions did not “meet any civilized conception of due process of law.” The high court ordered a new trial. But just when the case seemed back on track, it took another bizarre turn.

  While Shepherd and Irvin were being transferred to another jail, Sheriff Willis B. McCall shot both men. The two were handcuffed together, but McCall claimed they were trying to escape. Shepherd was killed, but Irvin, who was shot three times—in the shoulder, chest, and neck—survived by lying facedown in the mud and playing dead.3

  Sheriff McCall’s brutal actions caused an uproar. Newspapers from around the world sent reporters to cover the incident and the upcoming new trial. The expanded attention to the case caused trouble among Marshall’s legal team in New York. Franklin Williams wanted to continue as lead counsel. But with the Supreme Court having ordered a new trial and press all over the story, Marshall decided to take charge. “He thought he was great, and I did too, [but] I didn’t think he was as great as he thought he was,” Marshall later said about Williams.

  The angry Williams told Marshall it was unfair for him to take over the now prominent case. Williams went to Walter White to complain, and finally White promised him that he “didn’t have to worry about Thurgood Marshall.” White told Williams that he would have a job “as long as he was secretary.” When Marshall heard about White’s promised protection for Williams, he fired him.4

  “[Franklin Williams] had a big fight with Thurgood, around the time I was [first] there [at the NAACP],” Jack Greenberg, a young staff lawyer, later said. “There was a lot of yelling and screaming and carrying on, that sort of thing.… He and Thurgood clashed constantly.”5 In the battle of egos Marshall had defeated Williams. No doubt he was a more experienced lawyer, but Marshall was also drawn to the spotlight now focused on Grove
land, and he was not going to play second fiddle to his junior. Marshall’s actions damaged his relationship with White, who was forced to send Williams to California as the staff director for the NAACP’s West Coast office.

  With Williams gone, Marshall personally led the NAACP legal team to defend the accused Irvin at the second trial, which was moved to nearby Marion County. And right from the start, they faced troubles. In the December 1951 proceedings, Judge Truman Futch ruled that Marshall and Jack Greenberg were not allowed to represent their clients because the NAACP, according to the judge, was a group of agitators who had “stirred up trouble in the community.”6

  But Marshall would not back down. A few days later, speaking before an electrified Mount Zion Baptist Church in Miami, he stood to full height and defied the white powers of Florida to stop him from defending his client: “They can keep me from the courts of Florida but there is no man alive or to be born who can prevent me from arguing the Groveland Case before the U.S. Supreme Court.”7 Armed men were positioned around the building where he spoke as bomb threats were promised against Marshall’s life. Guards were even posted around the pulpit as Marshall addressed the biracial crowd. A few days later, on Christmas night, the home of the NAACP’s state coordinator, Harry T. Moore, was bombed, killing Moore. It was the first murder of an NAACP official.8

  Under threat of further appeals, Marshall finally forced Judge Futch to allow him back into the case. When he walked into the small southern courtroom with its whirring overhead fans and segregated seating, Marshall became the first black lawyer to argue a case in Marion County, Florida. During the trial Judge Futch showed his disdain for Marshall and the defense by taking out a knife and whittling whenever they stood to speak.

  “When I went down for the Irvin trial,” Marshall recalled in a quiet, conspiratorial voice, “a white man met me in the hallway, and it was real tense. And he showed me his credentials from the governor’s staff. He said, ‘They’re trying to get you.’ And I said, ‘Who, Sheriff Willis McCall?’ And he said, ‘No, the deputy is going to get you.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you, I appreciate that.’ ” The threats caused Marshall to walk everywhere, even to the toilet, with two bodyguards. He began shifting houses from night to night and even eating at different homes so no one could predict his movements.

  In addition to physical threats Marshall had to cope with a good-old-boy justice system. The governor had phoned the judge, who agreed to give Irvin a life sentence if Irvin pleaded guilty. The judge sent word to Marshall to have his client accept the deal immediately or go to trial and take his chances with the death penalty.

  In his client’s jail cell Marshall described the judge’s offer. Irvin asked what he would have to do to accept the plea bargain. “Just stand up there and when they say are you guilty or not guilty, you say: I’m guilty,” Marshall explained. Irvin, a dark-skinned man with a long face and sad eyes, looked dead into Marshall’s eyes. He asked if admitting guilt meant he had raped the woman. Yes, replied Marshall. Irvin spat on the floor in disgust. “That I raped that whore? I didn’t and I’m not going to say so.” Marshall said in that moment he became convinced that while Irvin may have had sex with the woman, he had not raped her. “I knew damn well that man was innocent.”

  But persuading an all-white, male jury that Irvin was innocent of raping a young white woman was a mountain of a challenge. Marshall began by eliciting testimony from a white soldier who found the girl wandering on a highway the morning after the crime. The soldier testified that the woman never told him she had been raped, only that she had been kidnapped. He added that she said she could not identify the men who grabbed her because it was too dark. Marshall also got sheriff’s deputies to concede that they had no medical evidence the woman had been raped.

  He next tried to undermine the sheriff’s effort to put Irvin at the scene. The sheriff claimed prints in the mud matched Irvin’s shoes. However, under questioning from Marshall, a criminologist testified that while the shoe prints matched Irvin’s, the prints had been made when the shoes were empty.

  Marshall began his closing argument by reminding the jury that there was no evidence any rape had occurred. He closed with a patriotic appeal. “There’s nobody who believes in the democratic principles of government more than my people,” he said. “Cases like this are cases that try men’s souls.”9

  As he was talking to the jurors, Marshall noticed that every one of the men had on a Shriner’s pin. After the jury went out, Marshall went to Judge Futch’s chamber and asked if he had seen the state’s attorney motion to the jury, three times, using a secret Masonic distress signal. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, it was four,” Futch told Marshall with a laugh. Marshall said, “I’m going to make an objection.” Futch told him he would be overruled. “There’s nothing racial about that,” Judge Futch told Marshall. “He does it all the time, whether you’re white, black, or green. He gives the distress signal all the time.”

  The jury came back within ninety minutes. One court observer later told Marshall they only took that long because the men wanted to smoke their cigars.

  The verdict was guilty. Irvin was sentenced to death in the electric chair. For the first time in his legal career, Marshall had to fight back tears. He immediately rushed over to Irvin’s mother to reassure her that the NAACP would appeal again. “Irvin’s mother had me awake all night, every night,” Marshall said. “She had the most impressive face I’ve ever seen on a woman, real high cheekbones and a whole lot of red in that black, a lot of Indian. And she just had these piercing eyes, and she told me not once but four times, ‘Don’t you let my son die.’ I’m going to be stuck with that for life.”

  The emotions in the Irvin case resonated with Marshall’s still unsettled emotions about the “Black Dillingers” case in Prince Georges County, Maryland. He had lost that client to a death sentence by hanging, and that time he’d blamed his inexperience. Now a more experienced Marshall decided he would do anything to stop Irvin from being executed.

  Marshall appealed the case at every level until the Supreme Court refused to review it. But the lengthy appeals delayed the execution and gave Marshall time to work on other options to keep Irvin alive. Using political and NAACP contacts, he put public pressure on the governor and generated loud headlines, week after week, about various details in the case. The black press as well as international newspapers made the Florida case almost a running feature. The state legislature, the U.S. Congress, and the Justice Department were all well aware of the negative fallout from the Irvin case. With the pressure building from all sides, Gov. LeRoy Collins, three years after Irvin had been assigned to death row, changed the sentence to life in prison. Several years later, Irvin was finally released.10

  The governor’s decision was pure politics. And it was a win for Marshall, who had been able to apply just the right political pressure to get the governor to act. The Irvin case had shown Marshall to be a wily political player, both inside the NAACP and even in an unsympathetic southern state. But Marshall’s political skills were about to face an even tougher test, on the national stage, from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

  CHAPTER 16

  Lessons in Politics

  J. EDGAR HOOVER TOOK A STRONG, IMMEDIATE DISLIKE to Thurgood Marshall. Hoover’s boss, Attorney General Tom Clark, kept getting complaints from the NAACP lawyer about the behavior of Hoover’s FBI agents in the South. Marshall regularly charged that the FBI was not investigating hate crimes committed by white racists—even lynch mobs—against black people. Marshall said Hoover’s agents were spending their time covering up for their friends in southern sheriffs’ departments, who were often sympathetic to the mobs.

  The NAACP lawyer was particularly incensed over the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the notorious 1946 beating of Isaac Woodard. The day of his discharge from the army, after fifteen months of jungle fighting in the Philippines, Woodard was on his way to visit his mother. At one stop he delayed the bus driver while using the bathroom. At
the next stop, in Aiken, South Carolina, the driver asked him to step off the bus for a moment. Two policemen were there to greet him. The driver shouted that Woodard was drunk and creating “a disturbance” on the bus.

  When Woodard protested that he had done nothing wrong, the policemen clubbed him and put him in their car. Once they got Woodard to the jail, they beat him with a blackjack and nightstick. At one point, as Woodard was on the ground and helpless, the policeman purposely shoved the end of his nightstick at both of Woodard’s eyes, completely blinding him.

  News of the attack rang like an alarm through much of the nation. The horrific beating drew attention from people who had previously ignored claims that southern police regularly beat blacks for no reason. When the prosecutors failed to convict the policemen who beat Woodard, explaining that the FBI’s investigation of the incident had turned up little evidence, Marshall became angry and sent another fiery letter to Attorney General Clark. In the December 1946 letter Marshall charged that the bureau was suspiciously incompetent when it came to protecting the rights of black people: “[The FBI’s] great record extends from the prosecution of vicious spies and saboteurs … to nondescript hoodlums who steal cheap automobiles.… On the other hand, the FBI has been unable to identify or bring to trial persons charged with violations of federal statutes where Negroes are the victims.”1

  Despite the sharp twang of his Texas accent, Clark was well known for liberal tendencies on civil rights. He sent a copy of Marshall’s stinging letter to Hoover and demanded a response. Hoover wrote a four-page retort that dripped with deep, personal anger at the NAACP attorney. He said he did not think Marshall would accept a “factual explanation” of the bureau’s investigations: “I have found from previous dealings with [Marshall] that he is most careless as to the truth and facts in the charges which he makes against the FBI.” The FBI chief argued that the bureau’s problem with race crimes was that civil rights laws required a high level of evidence, and it was difficult to find evidence or witnesses willing to talk about these crimes. “I believe that Mr. Marshall’s obvious hostility to the Bureau dominates the thinking of his associates in the legal operation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” he concluded in his January 1947 response.2