Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Three years after the Brown decision, the intensity of the violence and anger that confronted school integration in Little Rock caught the nation and Marshall by surprise. Events in Little Rock put the slow progress of school desegregation squarely in front of the president, the courts, the press, and the American people.

  “I had thought, we’d all thought, that once we got the Brown case, the thing was going to be over,” Marshall said later, looking back on the events leading up to Little Rock with regret over his failure to anticipate what was coming.

  “You see, we were always looking for that one case to end all of it.… Well [Brown] did not [solve all our problems], because we all shouted and sat down.… We should have sat down and planned.… The other side did,” Marshall said. “The other side planned all the delaying tactics they could think of.”3

  After the Supreme Court’s 1955 ruling that school boards around the nation could act in “all deliberate speed” to integrate, most school districts did drag their feet, with bogus claims that their elaborate integration plans needed more review. Little Rock, however, had been one of the cities most open to beginning integration.

  In the summer of 1954, the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, had drafted a plan. He wanted to start integration with two new high schools, then come down to the junior highs before integrating the elementary schools. The black community in Little Rock wanted speedier action but was willing to live with the superintendent’s plan. Unexpectedly, however, the school board rejected Blossom’s approach. Instead they approved a slower, smaller effort to integrate one school, Central High, in the fall of 1957.

  Even after he had forced acceptance of the slower plan, Gov. Faubus saw the chance to score political points. A combative little man with a strong desire to be liked, Faubus saw himself becoming a hero throughout the South, the champion of frustrated segregationists. He claimed to reporters that he had received confidential reports indicating mobs of segregationists from all over the South were converging on Little Rock. He predicted violence and a “blood bath” if he did not halt school integration.4

  Branton, a light-skinned country lawyer with a broad, handsome face, lived just outside Little Rock in Pine Bluff. Marshall liked Branton but was worried that the whirlwind approaching the state might be too much for the friendly, mild-mannered fellow. “I just figured he was a normal, local lawyer,” Marshall said, looking back on Little Rock. “And I would say to my surprise he was one of the most competent guys I ever ran across. They had crosses burning on his lawn and everything. But he was a really tough guy. Any kind of jam you got in, you’d call Wiley.”

  On Saturday, September 7, 1957, the day after he arrived, Marshall was in federal district court with Branton. Under pressure from Faubus the school board had requested that Judge Ronald Davies halt the integration plan because of possible violence disrupting Central’s classes. “The threat of tension and the emotional agitation referred to in the petition [from the school board] has no bearing on this [effort to integrate the schools],” Branton told the judge. Judge Davies agreed. Later that day he ruled that the school integration plan was to go forward. With Marshall and Branton present, the judge told a courtroom packed with the governor’s political supporters: “It must never be forgotten that I have a constitutional duty and obligation from which I shall not shrink.”5

  But on Monday, September 9, the governor had the Arkansas National Guard back in place, blocking the black students from entering Central. Marshall, who had been focused on the courts, now realized that this was a political fight and President Eisenhower would have to get involved. Trying to use public opinion as leverage, Marshall had the NAACP issue a press release calling for the president to federalize the National Guard and take command away from Faubus.

  Eisenhower, however, was reluctant to take action. He did not want to be labeled as the president who used troops against American citizens. He felt there was no political capital to be gained on either side of the dispute. He had confided to his secretary that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown had created “the most important problem facing the government, domestically, today.”6 But Eisenhower’s only immediate action was to have the Justice Department go to court seeking an injunction to force Faubus to pull the National Guard away from the school.

  Faubus, meanwhile, was growing paranoid. He had already wired the president, expressing alarm that his phone lines were tapped and that he was about to be arrested by federal agents. Eisenhower had reassured the governor that there was no plan to arrest him, but Faubus was not convinced. He asked to meet with the president in person. On Saturday, September 14, Faubus traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, the president’s summer home, to have a private talk.

  Governor Faubus pleaded with Eisenhower to defy the Court and support his call for a one-year delay in the school board plan to integrate Central. The governor promised that with extra time he could calm the angry white community. Eisenhower said no. The Supreme Court’s ruling, he said flatly, had the force of law. Faubus nodded and seemed to understand. The meeting ended with handshakes and smiles. But Eisenhower, according to his secretary’s notes, was not pleased. “I got the impression,” she wrote, “that the meeting had not gone as well as had been hoped, that the Federal government would have to be as tough as possible in the situation.… The consensus is that it will backfire badly for the Governor. ”7

  Marshall watched Eisenhower’s polite exchange with Faubus with growing disgust. He could not believe that the president was allowing this Jim Crow politician, this yokel, to defy the federal courts. Marshall got even more angry when Faubus continued to keep the National Guard in front of Central. Marshall could not understand why the president let Faubus run over him. Then came news reports that Eisenhower was planning a meeting on the Arkansas crisis with black political leaders, such as New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell. No one representing the children or the NAACP was asked to attend, and Marshall was incensed.

  “As representative [of the] Negro pupils directly involved in litigation being discussed,” he said in a telegram to Eisenhower, “[I] would suggest you discuss matter with either parents or children involved or their lawyer before discussing matter with sundry people not directly connected with litigation involved.”8

  Eisenhower did not respond. Marshall felt personally slighted. “If President Eisenhower had used his good offices to say that this is the law and it should be obeyed, that would have accomplished much,” Marshall said years later. “We hoped for it. And we found out too late that indeed, President Eisenhower was opposed to it and was working against it.… I think [Little Rock was] a black mark on President Eisenhower, and there’s nothing in his record that would correct it, in my book.”9

  With Eisenhower ignoring him, Marshall went back to federal district court to ask that an injunction be issued to stop Faubus from interfering. A week later the judge directly ordered that the National Guard was not to be used to stop black children from going to Central High.

  Pressure was building on Faubus, and this time he obeyed the court order. But angry mobs of Faubus’s supporters, white segregationists, remained around the school. City police could not control the crowds. On September 23 the nine black students were rushed into the building by a police escort and attended school for half a day. While the students were inside, rioting broke out, and the mob grew to more than a thousand. They began screaming, “Oh, my God, they’re in the school.” The white mob started attacking reporters and black passersby. The police chief decided he could not control the situation and ordered the black students to be packed in cars and secretly driven away.10

  Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Mann, sent a telegram to the president explaining that Faubus was behind the violence: “The mob that gathered was no spontaneous assembly,” Mann said. “It was agitated, aroused, and assembled by a concerted plan of action.”11

  Daisy Bates, meanwhile, telephoned the NAACP’s national office to report that the teachers and white students
inside Central were “very nice” to the black students. But Bates was worried that the mob on the street was growing and becoming more violent. “They are imported from the rural areas—real rednecks, ” she said, announcing that she did not plan to take the children back to the school the next day. “I am afraid the children may be killed.… It is vicious down here. You just don’t know.”

  A day later Bates was back on the phone to New York after a group of segregationists, carrying dynamite, was stopped a block from her house. The mob at the school, she reported, continued to beat up anyone black they could get their hands on, and “if the mob can’t find a Negro to jump and beat up, they beat up all the New York reporters.” At night black neighborhoods in Little Rock went completely dark so as not to provide targets for drive-by shooters and arsonists.12

  With the situation growing more violent, Mayor Mann wired the president again. In this telegram he begged for federal troops to take control of the high school: “I am pleading to you … in the interest of humanity, law and order and … democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours.”13

  This time the president acted. He ordered the 101st Airborne from Fort Campbell in Kentucky to go to Little Rock. And he traveled from his summer home to the White House to give a nationally televised speech. “I could have spoken from Rhode Island,” Eisenhower began, “but I felt that in speaking from the House of Lincoln, of Jackson, and of Wilson, my words would more clearly convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled today to take and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course.”14

  Bates, Branton, and Marshall were elated. At the same time there was wide concern that sending armed federal troops into an American city might mark the beginning of a second Civil War. “In fact, I’ll confess to you,” Branton later said, “when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and I looked up and I saw the 101st Airborne and all those damn Army troops, … I said, ‘My God, what have I brought on?’ ”15

  Several prominent southern politicians attacked the president for using federal troops in the South. Sen. James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat, referred to Eisenhower’s action as an attempt “to destroy the social order of the South.” And Texas senator Lyndon Johnson said, “No troops from either side [should be] patrolling our school campuses.”16

  The next morning federal troops arrived at Daisy Bates’s house to drive the black children to school. The Airborne also circled the school and escorted the black children in the hallways. Integration had come to Central.

  In newspapers across the country, Thurgood Marshall was defiant. “Little Rock is not an occupied town,” he told the newsman Mike Wallace. “Troops are there for one purpose only—to see that those children are able to go to school. I hope it’s gotten over to the Southern people that if they allow their governors to defy the Federal Government this is inevitable.” When Wallace asked if he and the NAACP had started a second Civil War, Marshall replied: “If you mean by Civil War that there is continuing effort to emancipate Negroes, towards accomplishing what the Civil War was intended to accomplish—yes.”17

  Marshall’s triumph lasted only until the end of the school year. The following summer, after Central had graduated its first black student, the Little Rock school board went to court to ask that desegregation be stopped because of threats of more violence. Marshall, with Branton at his side again, argued that the court should not give in.

  Federal District Judge Harry Lemley did not agree. He stunned Marshall and Branton by accepting the school board’s plan to delay integration for another two years. Marshall was angry, but even in his anger he worried about the threatening atmosphere he was in, especially when he looked around the courtroom. Among the spectators, he later recalled, were “the most horrible looking women, with Confederate flags and all that—boy, they were tough looking.”18

  The extent of the power of white anger went beyond keeping children out of white schools for an additional two years. It damaged the self-image and confidence of black people in the state. Marshall saw this firsthand when he went drinking with Branton in a local pool hall.

  A young black man, smoking a cigarette and carrying a pool cue, walked over to Marshall and said, “Hey, lawyer—you know anything about this thing—where you come back after you die?” Marshall asked the pool player if he was talking about reincarnation. The guy nodded, and a laughing Marshall said he knew more about law than about spirituality. But the young man looked straight at him and said, “Well, if you find anybody that has anything to do with it, tell ’em when I come back I don’t care what it is, whether it’s a man or a woman, a horse, a cow, a dog, a cat, whatever it is, let it be white.”

  Though weary, Marshall found the Little Rock crisis spurring him to fight back. It triggered his old spirit of determination. To counter Lemley’s ruling Marshall immediately appealed to the federal circuit court and boldly told the Afro-American: “We are going to drop all other cases and the full legal staff will concentrate on the Little Rock case. The pupils will be back in school in September.”19

  Marshall’s appeal went to the Eighth Circuit Court in early August 1958. The appeals court called a special session in St. Louis, with all seven judges sitting. The courtroom was packed with more than 150 people, including many blacks who came up from Arkansas. Marshall said that Judge Lemley’s decision sent a message—“that if you merely dislike integration and speak against it, you won’t be successful, but if you throw rocks or commit acts of arson, bombing or other violence then you will be successful.”20

  Two weeks later the Eighth Circuit ordered that Central High was to continue desegregating that fall. But Marshall’s victory had little effect. The Little Rock School Board appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

  In an extraordinary summer session, all nine justices of the high court gathered in Washington to hear the case. Marshall argued that no society should sacrifice the rule of law to appease violent agitators. He demanded that the Court not “surrender to obstructionists and mob action.” He told the justices that when banks were robbed, “you don’t close the banks—you put the bank robbers in jail.”21

  Richard Butler, the attorney for the Little Rock School Board, responded that integration would “destroy the public school system of Little Rock” because of the threat of more violence. Butler’s view was shared by the state’s top politicians, including Sen. William Fulbright, who sent a supporting brief. Butler also told the Court that “the people of Arkansas had not accepted the court’s desegregation decision and … Gov. Faubus [has said] that the ruling is not the law of the land.”

  Chief Justice Warren was aghast: “I have never heard such an argument made in a court of justice before.… I never heard a lawyer say that the statement of a governor … should control the action of any court.”

  But Butler’s argument seemed to have support from Eisenhower. Just the day before the president had issued a statement that said he preferred a slow pace of integration. Marshall began to lose his usual cool. He was angry at being painted as a crazy radical for simply asking that the Supreme Court’s decision be enforced.

  “Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP, who had made the opening argument for the Little Rock Negro students, listened to Mr. Rankin [the solicitor general] with a hint of a scowl on his face, looking like Othello in a tan business suit,” The New York Times wrote.22

  It came as a surprise to Marshall, however, when Solicitor General Lee Rankin, in contradiction to Eisenhower, told the Court: “We are now at a crossroads—the people of this country are entitled to a definitive statement from the court as to whether force and violence will prevail.”

  Two weeks after the final argument, the Supreme Court issued a short, decisive ruling in Cooper v. Aaron: “Law and order are not here to be preserved by depriving Negro children of their Constitutional rights.… The enunciation by this court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land.” Marshall had won his nineteenth case bef
ore the Court. The Pittsburgh Courier reported in joyous tones that he had “pleaded his second straight 9–0 shutout” in the Supreme Court.23

  After the Supreme Court ruled in September 1958, Governor Faubus ordered a citywide referendum on whether to keep Little Rock’s public schools open. Shutting down the schools was the overwhelming choice [19,000 to 7,500], and the city immediately set up private, segregated schools. Marshall and Branton had to go back to the Supreme Court to win confirmation that closing the public schools was illegal. It was not until the fall of 1959 that Little Rock’s public schools were reopened and Central and other high schools allowed black students to study with white students.24

  * * *

  When Marshall returned to New York, he was greeted as a conquering general. He was on radio and TV, and reporters were literally lined up to interview him at the NAACP offices. But while he was celebrated as a civil rights hero in public, the story was different inside the office.

  While Marshall was preoccupied with Little Rock, he had turned down a request from the NAACP chapter in rural Dollarway, Arkansas, demanding that Marshall file a suit for immediate school integration there. Marshall had explained that he wanted to get control of the crisis in Little Rock before taking on another fight in Arkansas. But on his return to New York, he found that a suit had been filed in Dollarway against his orders. And an Arkansas judge had issued a terrible ruling, which allowed the local school board to slow its integration to a near stop and left little room for appeal. There were almost no school integration cases in the nation not being directed by the Legal Defense Fund. Marshall asked his staff if they knew about the case, Dove v. Parham.