“I am reminded,” Davis concluded, “of Aesop’s fable of the dog and the meat: The dog, with a fine piece of meat in his mouth, crossed a bridge and saw the shadow in the stream and plunged for it and lost both substance and shadow. Here is equal education, not promised, not prophesied, but present. Shall it be thrown away on some fancied question of racial prestige? … I entreat [my opponent] to remember the age-old motto that the best is often the enemy of the good.”
For all his years of admiration for Davis, Marshall was not impressed with his opponent’s argument. He felt Davis had not capitalized on the weakness in the NAACP’s position. In Marshall’s opinion Davis had looked like a struggling old man. “Well, he was down, he was over the hill,” said Marshall. “He was old. And he cried. Real tears, while he was arguing. He was telling the story about the dog with the bone in his mouth. When he told that story he had tears in his eyes. He sure did.”
In his rebuttal the next day, Marshall showed no signs of the fumbling that had bedeviled him the first day. He began with a razor-sharp swipe by reminding the justices that Davis had said blacks were seeking “racial prestige” and social status by going to schools with whites. “Exactly correct,” said Marshall. “Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation, the Negro has been trying to get … the same status as anybody else regardless of race.” In an impassioned conclusion, Marshall told the Court that the only justification for continued school segregation was the desire to keep “the people who were formerly in slavery … as near that stage as is possible.”
His second-day argument drew a strong, positive response. “This time he took a different, more effective approach—he came on like a locomotive,” Paul Wilson, the lawyer for Kansas, later wrote. Bill Coleman, the young Harvard Law graduate who had been a clerk to Justice Frankfurter, sent Marshall a letter two days later that read: “I must say that your rebuttal was the most appropriate and the most forceful argument I have ever heard in any appellate court.… While you were making it I could not help but watch the smile of understanding on Mr. Justice Frankfurter’s face.”26
With the final arguments done, Marshall was left in limbo. The Court’s ruling was not due until the spring. Marshall’s legal team, however, had run up huge bills. So despite the upcoming holidays, he went on the road to give speeches at NAACP fund-raisers. One of the biggest was in New York just before Christmas. Calvert Whiskey sponsored a $15,000 testimonial at the Hotel Astor that attracted more than a thousand people. At the dinner Marshall thanked the corporation as well as the Masons, who contributed $24,000 a year to the NAACP’s legal fund, and the local branches. In January, Marshall went to a national meeting of black publishers, who had raised almost $18,000 with special ads calling for contributions to the NAACP. The special counsel, speaking to the publishers in Tuskegee, predicted that the Supreme Court would end school segregation. He said he expected full integration to take place in four to five years, with the worst trouble in “some sections of the black belt, some of them right here in Alabama, where the Supreme Court decision … would have no effect for 30 years.”27
Marshall was on the road again in March 1954, when he told an audience in Charlottesville, Virginia, that “come Hell or high water, we are going to be free by ‘63.” Asking them to remember the promise of the emancipation of the slaves by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, Marshall made a prediction. “On freedom’s 100th anniversary we will be free as we should have been in 1863.… The soul of the white man is in the hands of the Negro, because we are the only ones who—with blood, sweat and tears—got the money to go to court to get the rights others enjoy as a matter of course.”28
By early May the Supreme Court still had not ruled, and Marshall was beginning to wonder if the ruling might be delayed until the next term. He was in Mobile, Alabama, where he had spoken on Sunday, May 16. He was scheduled to speak in Los Angeles the next day when he received a phone call—he never said from whom—telling him that he might want to be at the Supreme Court instead. Marshall caught the next flight to Washington.
At 12:52 P.M. Chief Justice Warren, with all the associate justices in attendance, started reading the Court’s decision in the schools cases. As Warren began to read, Marshall was not certain which way he was going. Warren said: “In approaching this problem we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the [Fourteenth] Amendment was adopted or even to 1895 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its [current role] in American life.”
Marshall, seated in the lawyers’ section, focused a glare at Justice Stanley Reed. Marshall thought Reed, a Kentucky native, was the most likely leader of a bloc of votes to keep school segregation in place. Marshall heard that Reed had prepared a dissent, with the help of a privately hired law clerk. He wanted to watch Reed’s face as a clue to what was going to happen. Reed only stared back at him, wide-eyed.
While Marshall and Reed were staring each other down, Warren continued: “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education … a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.… To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community.”
Then in dramatic style Warren made a historic pronouncement: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Marshall later recalled that when he heard those words, “I was so happy I was numb.”29
“When Warren read the opinion,” Marshall recalled, “Reed looked me right straight in the face the whole time because he wanted to see what happened when I realized that he didn’t write that dissent and I was looking right straight at him. I’m sure Reed laughed at that.”
In fact, one of Reed’s clerks, John Fassett, had done research on arguments to support a possible dissent. Reed, however, decided to vote with the majority. The ruling was unanimous. “Earl Warren,” said E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., a clerk to Justice Jackson, another possible dissenter, “worked very hard, to his credit, to convince people and particularly the last one or two holdouts that it would not be in the interest of the court or the country to have divergent views on this vital subject.”30
After the justices stood and filed out, Marshall was quickly surrounded by reporters. But first he turned to James Nabrit II and George Hayes, the two lawyers who had argued the Washington, D.C., case, and said, “We hit the jackpot.”31 Marshall was filled with brash confidence and told the press that he did not think southern states would “buck the Supreme Court.”
The Afro’s next edition read: SEGREGATION ILLEGAL NOW. The story quoted Marshall as saying: “It is the greatest victory we ever had … the thing that is gratifying to me is that it was unanimous and on our side.”32
One of the few children in the courtroom that day was the son of Joe Greenhill. An assistant attorney general in Texas, Greenhill had argued against Marshall in the Sweatt case. He was on vacation and just happened to be visiting the Court that day with his family. After talking with reporters, Marshall, bursting with happiness, picked up Greenhill’s kid. The large brown man began running through the grand marble halls with the small white child. “He picked up our son Bill and put him on his shoulders and ran down the corridor of the Supreme Court,” said Greenhill. “He was having a good time, we were having a good time, and to hell with dignity. He just won a biggie.”33
CHAPTER 22
No Radical
SHOUTING INTO A PAY PHONE in a hallway at the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall announced the big victory to NAACP officials in New York. He had grabbed the golden ring, the prize that had been sought so long by Nathan Margold, by Charles Houston, by the people contributing their coins in the branches all over the country, and here it was—the end of school segregation. Elated by the unanimous ruling, he stopped only to allow reporters
to snap pictures of him on the steps of the Court before hopping on the next flight to New York, racing the news that was spreading around the country like electricity. “We were ecstatic,” remembered Bob Carter. “It was a very heady day.”
At the NAACP’s office Marshall walked into a crowded press conference being held by Walter White. The NAACP executive secretary, prancing like a rooster, told the reporters that his next plan was to attack segregation in housing and transportation. Marshall shifted from elation to anger as he watched White taking all the credit for the Supreme Court’s ruling. He was literally being pushed to the rear as White stood up front to make pronouncements about the NAACP’s great victory over segregation. Toward the end of the press conference, in an uncharacteristic outburst, Marshall shouted, “What law school did you graduate from, Mr. White?” Despite the tension, everyone laughed it off as a joke.
“Walter was carrying on as if this was his achievement, this was his victory, as if he prepared the case, got the plaintiffs, wrote the briefs, even went to court,” recalled Herbert Hill. “I watched Thurgood, and I said to myself, ‘How much longer is Thurgood going to take this stuff?’ I knew he was going to start to blow up.”1
Despite that ego battle, the sounds of popping champagne corks and loud laughter filled the rooms. Roy Wilkins, Marshall, and the entire staff, from the receptionists to the board members, were celebrating the decision with reporters and friends.
“We’d always had parties, drunken parties, after winning, but that was the best,” Marshall said later, a smile on his face. “Yeah, I thought I was going to win but not unanimously.” John W Davis was the first to get through on the telephone. He congratulated Marshall on the victory but threw in a word of caution: “I hope you realize that the only way you can win a case is somebody has to lose.” When Marshall got off the phone, several people pulled into a circle around him to find out what Davis had said.
As was typical, Marshall was empathetic with Davis. Sounding almost apologetic about Davis’s defeat, Marshall shook his head, a look of condolence washing over him, and said, “I did, I beat him, but you can’t name many people who did.”
As the party spun into the night, Marshall and several of the NAACP staff went to his favorite restaurant, the Blue Ribbon, for food and drinks. Ken Clark was in the group, and Marshall stopped the festivities at one point, less to honor Clark than to tease Clark’s critics. “Thurgood was his usual ebullient self,” Clark recalled. After toasting the psychologist’s work on the case, Marshall looked across the table at some of the lawyers who had fought his use of the social science data. “Now, apologize,” he told them,2 as the table broke into laughter.
People at the party began saying the NAACP’s work was done and it was just a matter of time before all the nation’s schools were integrated. Marshall, who shifted into a more pensive mood as the clock passed midnight, made a prophetic remark: “I don’t want any of you to fool yourselves, it’s just begun, the fight has just begun.”3
The party continued until after 1:00A.M. Buster was not in the group; she had been ill for months now, sometimes bedridden. She had visited doctors and been diagnosed with colds, flu, and even pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lungs. In her absence Marshall had begun to hang around with one of the NAACP’s secretaries, Cecelia [Cissy] Suyat, born in Hawaii of Filipino parents. It was at this dinner at the Blue Ribbon that many of his colleagues first noticed what appeared to be a special relationship between the pair.
“Thurgood was very discreet about his affairs,” said John A. Davis, a Lincoln professor who had advised the NAACP on the school segregation suit. “There was never an example of it except at the victory celebration. He was leaving with Cissy.… That was the first time I’d ever seen any indication that she wasn’t just another worker there.”4
The next morning’s newspapers were filled with stories on the Supreme Court’s ruling. Marshall was on the front page of The New York Times, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, shaking hands with his fellow lawyers George Hayes and James Nabrit. The Times noted that the decision amounted to a death knell for separate but equal. But the court had delayed until the next term arguments on how to begin integrating the schools. In a second article on the front page, the Times wrote that southern leaders were incensed by the ruling, and their outrage was “tempered” only by the Court’s decision not to set forth “the time and terms for ending segregation in the schools.”5
Southern politicians uniformly blasted the Court’s decision. “The South will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court,” said Sen. James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi. Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia said the ruling “strikes down the rights of the states, as guaranteed by the constitution, to direct their most vital local affairs.” Georgia’s governor, Herman Talmadge, said, “There will never be mixed schools while I am governor.” He said if school integration became a reality, it would be “a step toward national suicide.”6
The backlash from the South intrigued Marshall. He did not think the southern politicians could stop school integration, but he was surprised by the psychological distress being expressed by some whites over the notion of racial equality.
He came into the office one day and told NAACP staffers that he had heard a revealing story: Three southern white guys got together, Marshall said, and began discussing the Brown decision. Two of them were upset over the call for school integration. But the third man said he didn’t agree. In a booming, theatrical voice, Marshall mimicked the shock of the two segregationists: “You mean you are for integration?” The lone dissenter shook his head and said no. “I’m not for integration—I’m for slavery.” Marshall looked around the room, an intense expression on his face, and said the story was a warning about what was to come. “There’s a whole lot to that story,” Marshall said. “A whole lot.”
But in black America there was little of Marshall’s foreboding of a coming backlash. Harlem’s Amsterdam News wrote, “The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” The ruling was far bigger than a decision about schools, the paper wrote, it was the end of all segregation. The day after the Supreme Court ruled, the Chicago Defender wrote that “neither the atomic bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy.”7
President Eisenhower, meanwhile, had little to say publicly about the ruling other than he expected all states to comply. Privately, however, he was fuming. “I personally think that the decision was wrong,” Eisenhower told a staffer a few weeks later.8
The president also told Herbert Brownell, his attorney general, that he strongly disagreed with the decision. At one point a temperamental Eisenhower told Brownell that since Chief Justice Warren and the Supreme Court had made the ruling, “let them enforce it.” Brownell sympathized with his president’s position. Eisenhower was caught between a decision he had not made and a public uproar that created political problems nationwide. “Any president would have the same reaction when they had a hot potato handed them by the judiciary,” Brownell later said. Nonetheless he pointedly told Eisenhower that it was his duty to uphold the decisions of the Supreme Court.9
Marshall, however, had no idea about the president’s private expressions. And despite angry statements from southern politicians who pledged to resist integration, he pressed ahead. By the Saturday following the Court’s Monday decision, he was meeting with his team of lawyers in Atlanta. At the end of the two-day conference, they issued instructions for black parents to petition local school boards for integration “without delay.” Marshall pledged the national NAACP’s help to battle recalcitrant school boards. “We know there has to be a reasonable time to adjust and the question is the definition of what constitutes reasonable time,” Marshall said to reporters. “Our people are ready to take part in conferences, but we are determined to attain this goal without compromise of principles.”10
Marshall continued celebrating
the decision in speeches and appearances around the country. In one of the many laudatory profiles of Marshall after the May 17 ruling, the Pittsburgh Courier portrayed him as a man flying high above any complaints or criticism: “I’m in a hurry,” Marshall told the Courier. “I want to put myself out of business. I want to get things to a point where there won’t be an NAACP—just a National Association for the Advancement of People.”11
Marshall also began to talk openly about his willingness to sacrifice the jobs black teachers had in segregated schools as well as the future of historically black colleges for his integrationist ideal. “What’s going to happen to the ‘Negro College’?” he asked in one of his many speeches around this time. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s going to cheerfully drop the word ‘Negro.’ ” But Marshall cautioned that if these schools did not quickly measure up to the white schools, they could die off. The impact of the Brown ruling, he told audiences, would be to force black people to compete with white schools and white students. “And you are going to have to measure up.” Black colleges and the United Negro College Fund, which raised money in the name of helping black students, “will have to find another sales talk.”12
Marshall’s unyielding integrationist worldview had few critics in the NAACP or the black press. At this point there were no Carter Wesleys or Marjorie McKenzies launching attacks at him for sacrificing black institutions for the promise of integration. He was universally celebrated by black Americans. At Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, the school’s president, called him the “greatest constitutional lawyer in history” and gave him an honorary degree. At the NAACP’s forty-fifth annual convention in June, he was honored before a jubilant crowd of 700. As he entered to speak, the Afro-American reported, “to add dignity to the occasion, the little people abandoned their comfortable shirt sleeves and … put on their coats” on a heavily humid Texas summer day.
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