Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Lou Nichols wrote in a memo that Marshall wanted information he could use to disparage Communist sympathizers during his keynote speech to the NAACP’s 1956 convention. This was the same convention at which Marshall had aimed barbs at Martin Luther King after he claimed nonviolent protests and boycotts could have desegregated schools. “He stated that no one would know where he got the information and he wondered if I could be of any help to him,” Nichols wrote after his conversation with Marshall. “I think that it might be to our advantage to give him a little guidance if we can on the basis of public source and well-documented material.”9

  Marshall recalled the meeting vividly years later: “I remember one time I had a conversation with Lou Nichols about something very important,” he said, still refusing to divulge exactly what they talked about. “In the FBI office, in some of these secure offices, I met him,” Marshall said. “I sat down. He tossed a yellow pad over to me. I said, ‘You must be kidding. I know you guys don’t allow copying.’ He said, ‘These are instructions from the boss. Make your copies and use ’em.’ And I did. But I still ain’t gonna tell ya what it was. We were helping each other. It was something he wanted and there was something I wanted.”

  Marshall’s notes on the FBI’s yellow pad apparently focused on new tactics being used by Communists to infiltrate the NAACP. Those tactics included creating fronts—labor organizations that then approached the NAACP and its branches for help with fighting discrimination. On the basis of the notes he took at FBI headquarters, Marshall sounded the alarm at the 1956 convention:

  “[Communists] are all sweetness and light these days, trying to persuade us to join their front organizations, the names of which are constantly changing,” he told the crowd at San Francisco. “For example, the National Negro Labor Council, which we exposed and condemned last year, has been disbanded and now they are working up other organizations such as the National Association of Trade Unionists. Whatever the name, whatever the avowed purpose, we know them for what they are. We know their master plan for Negroes is ‘self-determination,’ which simply means that all Negroes are to be set aside in a separate 49th state.… At this convention we must continue to keep our membership abreast of new tactics of infiltration. We must continue to make it clear that there is no place in this organization for communists or those who follow the communist line.”

  It was a deeply ironic speech for the middle-aged Marshall. As a young lawyer he had worked with left-wing labor groups. Socialists had even asked him to run for Congress. But now Marshall was aggressively separating himself from any radicals and militants.

  In fact, Marshall lumped the segregationists with the Communists as having similarly negative impacts on black people. In several speeches he said oppression by racists on the right was pushing black Americans into the Communist camp because they pretended to be defenders of black people. In one speech he specifically condemned Georgia’s Attorney General, Eugene Cook, for playing into the hands of Communists by failing to protect the rights of blacks. “The wave of anti-Negro terror in the Deep South [has] given new weapons to the communists for their propaganda,” Marshall said.10

  In an interview later Marshall showed no regret for his willingness to go after Communists and get them out of the NAACP: “I did more than anybody else did and if you don’t believe me ask.… I didn’t like ’em and I didn’t like what they were doing.”

  Similarly, Marshall had no regrets about working with the FBI: “I let Hoover know that I wanted the communists out. He didn’t help us.” Marshall did not consider Hoover’s decision to let him see FBI files as an effort to make him a tool of the FBI. He viewed Hoover’s decision as an act of generosity, the sharing of information between like minds. He felt he had manipulated Hoover—Hoover had not manipulated him.

  * * *

  “We did it on our own,” Marshall insisted. “We got rid of them [Communists]. They’d either go against religion or something like that and that’s how you could tell they were communists.”

  After his Hoover-aided attack during the June 1956 convention, Marshall found himself caught up in another controversy. Many NAACP convention delegates felt he needed to be as aggressive, even militant in his tone and action with white segregationists as he was fighting Communists.

  Since the Brown decision there had been growing demands from NAACP branch leaders for Marshall to file more lawsuits, specifically against housing discrimination. Marshall had ignored the pressure. He did not want to detract from his ongoing work to integrate schools. But the dispute boiled over at the convention. Under pressure from delegates, Roy Wilkins had become more insistent with his friend that the rank-and-file NAACP members wanted to see a more activist legal department. It prompted an argument in which the lawyer angrily told Wilkins that the convention delegates were not going to set the agenda for his department.

  That led to speculation that Marshall might leave the NAACP for a high-paying job in Hawaii. Even before the convention there had been news reports that Marshall “has reached the point where he is ready to stay in one spot—he’s tired of hopping around the country and will [leave the NAACP to] accept the first federal judgeship that comes his way.”11

  The disagreement at the convention took on an especially sharp edge because of ongoing concern over the battle to open NAACP membership lists. As Marshall had been working on the bus boycott, the state of Alabama tried to outlaw the NAACP. Southern states like Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas joined the effort. They charged that the organization was violating its status as a nonprofit group by engaging in political activities, including promoting lawsuits and creating public protests. Alabama’s attorney general, John Patterson, joined the attack, claiming that the NAACP was behind King’s “illegal” boycott.

  In June 1956, Patterson won a lower court ruling banning NAACP activities in the state on the grounds that the organization had engaged in a conspiracy to promote the bus boycott. The judge demanded that the membership list for Alabama be released. When the NAACP refused, they were fined $100,000 and held in contempt of court. Their only choice was to appeal and close down their operations in the state.

  Alabama’s growing success in fighting the NAACP put Marshall in a bind. He was loyal to the NAACP, but having had so much success in the courts, he was now incapable of ignoring a judge’s order. Marshall made it clear to NAACP officials that he would ultimately have to honor demands for membership lists if appeals to the Supreme Court were unsuccessful.

  In Marshall’s mind the NAACP’s concern with racial equality was one part of a larger effort to promote individual rights under the Constitution: “The core of his concern was not the Negro but the individual human being,” a magazine reporter wrote after interviewing Marshall. “Other people were engaged in efforts to improve the … status of Negroes as a race,” the article said. But Marshall’s cause was to make a reality of individual rights for all.12

  But NAACP officials, including some members of the legal staff, wanted no part of Marshall’s high-minded, philosophical approach if it meant turning over the names of their rank-and-file members. Inside his office Marshall was being isolated as an accommodationist whose affection for the courts, no matter how biased and crooked, was allowing the civil rights organization to be crippled. One of the leading challengers to Marshall’s decision to abide by a possible Supreme Court order to release membership rolls was Bob Carter, his second in command.

  Roy Wilkins polled the NAACP’s national board and found that most supported Carter’s view. “We cannot in good conscience risk exposing our loyal members to economic pressure, personal threats, and acts of violence for no cause other than their membership in the NAACP,” Wilkins told reporters. The only common ground between Marshall and other NAACP leaders was that no final decision had to be made on releasing the lists until the Supreme Court ruled.13

  There was even more to the story of the split between Marshall and NAACP leaders than was publicly known. In the months before the convention Mar
shall had been engaged in a high-stakes game of office politics. He was trying to pull the legal office away from the NAACP and make himself free from all meddling by Wilkins, Carter, the NAACP board, and the rank and file.

  Marshall’s strategy centered on the tax-exempt status of the Legal Defense Fund. Technically, the legal department of the NAACP had been separate as far back as 1940. The groups were made into distinct entities to allow tax-exempt contributions to flow into the LDF. The NAACP, which was openly political and lobbied Congress, was not tax exempt. Despite those separate roles the NAACP and the LDF continued to share staff members, board members, and finances, and to work as one. As part of the backlash against the Brown decision, southern senators had petitioned the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether the LDF should lose its tax-exempt status for working too closely with the NAACP.

  With Wilkins and the association trying to exert control over the legal department, Marshall began to use the technical separation of the LDF and NAACP to his advantage. He insisted that he alone had day-to-day authority to decide what the LDF would do. And Marshall conveniently started to repeat the southern senators’ complaints about the close relationship between the LDF and the NAACP.

  Citing tax reasons, Marshall persuaded Wilkins to have Bob Carter assigned to the NAACP as its in-house lawyer. That meant Carter had to give up his post as Marshall’s assistant and the number two lawyer at the LDF. Marshall then resigned his job as special counsel to the NAACP. He had staged a one-man coup.

  “[Bob Carter’s new job] leaked out to the press and elsewhere as this big promotion. ‘He’s now the lawyer of the NAACP’ and so forth,” said Jack Greenberg. “But he had no budget and no staff and he didn’t even have a law library. He was allowed to stay on our premises and use our facilities as a courtesy.”14

  “The LDF breakup didn’t have a damn thing to do with taxes,” recalled Ed Dudley, a lawyer on Marshall’s staff. “The reason was that Thurgood was getting too big. Thurgood had gotten to the point where he wanted to make his own decisions.”15

  To many people who were watching this drama, the NAACP-LDF split had really been an ego battle between Marshall and Carter. Marshall saw Carter as a first-rate legal mind who handled the office’s affairs expertly. But Marshall also saw that Carter had come to resent him. Carter complained to board members that Marshall often behaved like a prima donna. He wanted all the public attention, he made all the speeches, and he got all the credit, while day-to-day issues and concerns fell on Carter’s desk.

  “In the period of about 1956, my relationship with Marshall deteriorated …,” Carter remembered in an interview decades later. “As time went on, I began to gain my confidence. Marshall had given me my head and I was sort of point guard in the office … I began to give him ideas that I was some kind of threat … at that point Buster died. And she, I think, recognized that I had a value to Thurgood because my willingness … to do the research and the necessary work to keep the office running. And when she died, a bad relationship developed between us.”

  Although Carter saw Marshall as the Machiavellian hand who pushed him out of the Legal Defense Fund, others in the office saw Carter as a man who had also played office politics and come up short against Marshall. “[Thurgood] claimed … that Carter was traveling around the country to NAACP branches and others saying that ‘Marshall isn’t doing his job’ … and Marshall was drinking a lot and so forth, and essentially Carter was trying to undermine his position,” said Jack Greenberg.16

  Similarly, Gloria Branker, a secretary at the LDF, recalled that Carter was going “behind Thurgood’s back” to tell NAACP board members about his boss’s personal and professional problems. The stories reached Bill Hastie, and Hastie called Marshall.17 “[Thurgood] was distrustful of Bob,” said Henry Lee Moon, the NAACP’s director of public relations. “Roy mentioned this many times to me.” Moon added that “Roy did not come to [Carter’s] rescue” when Marshall forced Carter to resign from the LDF.18

  By May 1957, Marshall had solidified his control of the LDF with a two-step maneuver that put the board of directors firmly in his hands. First, he got them to agree that no one should serve on both the LDF and NAACP boards. Then he asked for the resignations of LDF board members who were not in his pocket, such as former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and former New York governor Herbert Lehman.

  The new board became Marshall’s board. There was no longer any question who was in charge and no possibility of pressure from the NAACP’s staff or its members. Decades later Marshall’s perspective on the board he created was simple and to the point: “My board backed me up. I had fights [with Wilkins, the previous board, and Bob Carter], but I won ’em. If I didn’t win, I’d quit. Course I would, I’d quit and go someplace else. It ain’t worth talking about the fights, I don’t think. Dirty linen should be kept in the closet. Well, that’s what I’d consider it, dirty linen.” While he had no interest in talking about it, Marshall had proved to be a skilled political manipulator in his battles with Hoover, Communists, and inside the NAACP.

  But Marshall still felt under assault from some NAACP members, who were beginning to question the value of the celebrated Brown decision. After the initial rush there was an obvious decline in efforts to integrate schools. Marshall’s critics charged that the legal struggle to desegregate the schools had changed little or nothing. Marshall took the criticism as a personal rebuke, and by the summer of 1957 Marshall felt the need to answer it. At the NAACP’s forty-eighth annual convention, in Detroit, he charged that the failure to integrate schools and neighborhoods was the result of the “inaction” of black people. “The responsibility … rests on the shoulders of Negroes who for one reason or another are unwilling to make an effort,” to buy homes in white areas or to enroll their children in white schools, Marshall told the audience.19

  Despite his increasing fights with black critics, including his longtime support base inside the NAACP, Marshall kept up an optimistic pose. In a long interview with Newsweek, he said the NAACP and the LDF were happily working together and in full agreement on negotiating with white school boards to slowly integrate schools. But wasn’t it true, the reporter asked, that going slowly about school integration was “gradualism,” and that word had a “nasty” connotation for many black activists?

  “I’m the original gradualist,” Marshall shot back. “But let’s make sure what we’re talking about. If by gradualism you mean a policy of doing nothing, letting things drift and hoping for the best, I’m dead set against it.… Say we take a case into court. It may take two or three years before we get a final decision. Isn’t that gradualism? We intend to work this out in an orderly fashion.… We are making progress.… In general we are completely optimistic.”20

  But to vindicate that optimism, Marshall would have to put himself on the line against white mobs whipped into a racial frenzy as they fought the desegregation of schools. Thurgood Marshall had cunningly played off diverse factions, ranging from J. Edgar Hoover through the NAACP’s Bob Carter to the Communists. Now he would face a nasty street fight, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Second Civil War

  BY THE TIME MARSHALL ARRIVED in Little Rock, the violence had already started. Daisy Bates awoke to find a cross flaming in front of her house even before schools opened in the fall of 1957. Mrs. Bates, a tall, attractive woman with curly hair, was the NAACP chapter president and with her husband published the Arkansas State Press, the state’s major black paper. Daisy Bates had been threatened before, but as the opening day for school approached, the segregationists became more violent. First, the cross was burned. Then a rock shattered her front window, showering her with sharp-edged glass. Bates picked up the heavy rock and found a note attached: “Stone this time. Dynamite next.”

  It had been over a month since Bates had arranged for nine black students to integrate Central High School. Now every night Bates was awakened by honking horns and bright lights as people screamed, “Da
isy, Daisy, did you hear the news? The coons won’t be going to Central.” Arkansas governor Orval Faubus went on television to announce that he was putting the state’s National Guard around the school to keep out the black students. If any attempt at school integration succeeded, he warned, “blood will run in the streets.”

  When Central High opened on September 4, 250 armed National Guardsmen surrounded the school. Fearful black parents sent their children to Bates’s house so they could travel to school together and with adult protection. But one child, Elizabeth Eckford, took the bus to school by herself and was surrounded by the mob. When the sixteen-year-old tried to get into the building, the soldiers lowered their bayonets at her and ordered her away. As she walked back to the bus stop, a mob gathered and began to shout, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Grace Lorch, a white woman, finally stepped in and shielded her until she could flee. The other children, who were driven by Bates to Central High, were also turned away.1

  The crisis in Little Rock became national news. Governor Faubus sent a telegram to President Eisenhower warning him that despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision and subsequent court orders “it is impossible to integrate some of our schools at this time without violence.”2 Faubus asked Eisenhower not to intervene even though the court’s order was being defied. Marshall got a call from Wiley Branton, the NAACP’s attorney in Little Rock, saying that the school board, under pressure from the governor, was trying to get the court to delay the integration of Central. Marshall took the next flight to Little Rock, where armed men escorted him to the Bateses’.

  The atmosphere was tense; guards in front of the Bates home stared at every passing car to see if anyone was about to throw a rock or a bomb. Somehow Marshall—with his confident manner and comic storytelling—reassured the city’s black leaders that everything was going to be all right. Branton escorted him into the guest room, where they would be staying. Branton had his suitcase on the bed farthest from the window—and a safe distance from any rock that marauding segregationists might heave. Marshall joked with the nervous people in the house that he planned to sneak back when Branton was not paying attention and move his roommate’s gear to the bed near the window.