The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  William McCray had started work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc, within months of Jake Zignelik starting there. It was in 1949 and from their office on West 40th Street the young attorneys could look out the window when they paused to think and seek inspiration from the awe-inspiring main branch of the New York Public Library and calm or solace from the greenery of Bryant Park. They and the handful of other assistant counsel were each on a salary of $3600 a year. There was a small room next to his office where two secretaries worked and on the other side was the office of Thurgood Marshall.

  In the very early days William McCray shared an office with Jake Zignelik, a respectful yet fiery, somewhat wiry Jewish kid who had to be taught that while his passion for the work would help get the job done, anger would only get in the way. Anger could sabotage the benefit of the passion. It could be the enemy of a good lawyer. Thurgood taught him that. It was funny that the lawyer to whom this needed to be explained most often was also, at least at that time, the only white one. It was expected that each of the young attorneys would either know the law or know how to find it out. But, additionally, Jake had to learn what it meant to be black in America in the middle of the twentieth century. He had to learn how to feel it or at least how those who were black felt it, and to get the job done anyway. Of course he could never know it entirely but there was always something each of the attorneys had to learn and, calm as he was, Thurgood didn’t shy away from reminding them of this. Each of them could always do a little better, know a little more.

  In addition to teaching the practice of law by example, Thurgood made sure all the attorneys, including William McCray, knew the debt civil rights lawyers owed to Charles Hamilton Houston. He was the grandfather of civil rights law. Graduating in the top five per cent of his class, he was the first black person elected to the Harvard Law Review. As Dean of Law at Howard University he had taught and moulded Thurgood and many other black lawyers and in 1935 he was appointed special counsel to the NAACP. It was Charles Hamilton Houston who devised the plan to advance the cause of civil rights through litigation. He was tough on his students, including Thurgood, who enjoyed telling William McCray and the others how tough ‘cement shoes’ Charlie Houston used to be on them. ‘No tea for the feeble, no crepe for the dead,’ William learned he’d said.

  William was also taught the backstory of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund or LDF; how it came to be what it was, how it got its revenue. Everyone had to be schooled in what came before them. Back in 1943, during the war, six years before William started at the LDF, there had been a race riot in Detroit. A spontaneous strike had arisen without union sanction when three black workers were upgraded at the Packard plant. Thirty-four people were killed, over 600 people were injured and property was destroyed. Harold Oram, the former University of Miami football star who had a history of supporting progressive causes, organised a committee to raise funds for what would become the NAACP–LDF. The first and urgent task was to raise funds for the more than 1200 victims of the Detroit riot. In his tireless collection of signatories he collected those of Adam Clayton Powell Jr, Mary McLeod Bethune, a leader of the National Organization of Negro Women, Henry Sloane Coffin, President of the Union Theological Seminary, Mrs Louis D. Brandeis, James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard, Albert Einstein, Archibald MacLeish, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Helen Keller, Reinhold Niebuhr and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. They were able to raise approximately $15,000 in 1943. This was a long time before major corporations understood the public relations benefit of contributing to progressive social causes.

  Then there were the people you were helping. It wasn’t enough to know the law. Thurgood wanted his attorneys to know as much as they could about the clients who needed them. His attorneys had to know the clients’ backstories as well. Young William McCray had it explained to him soon after he arrived that two years earlier, in 1947, there were thirty school buses for white children and none for black children in Clarendon County, South Carolina. He was told that when J. A. DeLaine, a black preacher and teacher at the school for over ten years, complained to the white chairman of the school board, the chairman took a break from the running of his sawmill to explain, ‘We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.’ When DeLaine wouldn’t let it rest at this, they fired him from his job at the school. Then they fired his wife, two of his sisters and a niece. Then they threatened him with assault. Then they found a spurious cause of action, sued him on it and left him with a judgement debt he was unable to pay and, as a consequence, an inability to obtain credit anywhere. Then they set his house on fire. When he called the fire department the white firefighters came just in time and watched as his house burned down. His church was stoned and shotguns were fired at him in the night. When he shot back, they charged him with felonious assault with a deadly weapon. This was about the time he fled the state. This was the beginning of one of the cases that became known collectively as Brown versus the Board of Education.

  William McCray remembered the nervous excitement of his first day on the job. There might well have been better-paid jobs for lawyers in New York City, even for Negro lawyers, as they were called, but surely for him, he reasoned, there was no better job anywhere in the world. He felt this keenly even on his first day when he couldn’t have imagined the momentous events in the nation’s history and in the stop-start history of Western Enlightenment in which he and his colleagues would play a part. And, at twenty-five, he had already helped win World War II.

  *

  ‘The German cleric,’ Professor Adam Zignelik continued his lecture, ‘was an active opponent of Nazism. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like Gandhi he believed that ethical behaviour required evil be confronted through action, not merely intellectually through writing, thinking and arguing. Having observed the flowering of African American culture in Harlem, felt the power of passionate black worship, and seen the conditions blacks were living in, he returned home. There, some years later, he saw what his country was doing to some of its own citizens, its Jews. While others joined in the persecution of German Jews or else looked away, he found that he couldn’t.

  ‘Gandhi, Harlem, Christ, Jews in Europe, a black man living over there on Broadway in the Union Theological Seminary in 1930: you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections. You never know where you’ll find them. Most people don’t know where to find them or even that there’s any point to finding them. Who even looks? Who’s got time to look? Whose job is it to look? Ours. Historians. It’s part of our job. The more you know, the more you read, the better will be your intuition. You can use your intuition as a first-order Geiger counter of likelihood, of probability, and also as a starting point for new lines of enquiry. But whatever you end up doing for a living, wherever you do it, you’ll need intuition and curiosity, as much of it as you can muster. Develop these as an athlete develops muscles and impulses. You’ll need them if for no other reason than to keep your mind going. Whatever happens on Wall Street, sooner or later you’re going to want your mind back for yourself.’

  *

  Prison had honed Lamont Williams’ intuition but his curiosity predated his time in prison. Now he wanted to survive his six-month probation period and become a full-time employee at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He hoped the people around him couldn’t see how hard he was trying.

  He was collecting trash on the ninth floor when he reached the room of a patient; an old man he had spoken to before. He had tried to look in on the man a couple of times since then but he had not yet managed to find the man alone. Once the patient seemed to have family visiting him and on two other occasions it was the man’s oncologist, a tall fearsome-looking young African American woman who was visiting him on her rounds.

  Lamont thought she would be pretty if she weren’t so officious-looking, like a stern no-nonsense schoolteacher, someone waiting to catch him doing the wrong thing. Anyway, if she had found Lamont in the pa
tient’s room when there had been no garbage there to collect and she had asked him what he was doing there, he wouldn’t have been able to say. He didn’t really know what he was doing there. He had read the name on the old man’s chart after they had spoken the first time and he’d remained curious about him. It was at the time Adam Zignelik was stumbling through his ‘What is history?’ lecture uptown that Lamont Williams looked in on the old man again. Alone and awake, the patient cocked one eye at him with what could be mistaken for an almost comical surreption. Not that the man had much cause to be amused. He was old and had cancer. Would he complain about being disturbed? Did anybody see him go in? Maybe someone he hadn’t seen had seen him. Perhaps he could lose his job for this. No. But why not? Who would stop it?

  ‘I’m sorry, sir … Mr … er … Mandel-brot, I didn’t mean to wake you. We … um … we talked before. You don’t … maybe you don’t remember. I was … I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘You’re not really a doctor, are you?’

  Lamont smiled. ‘No, sir, I’m in Building Services. Remember?’

  ‘The other one is, you know … the tall one.’

  ‘The other what?’

  ‘The other one – the one who frightens you, the girl. She’s a doctor. She’s my oncologist … one of them.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You mean Dr Washington?’

  ‘Yes, like the city … and the first president.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘No, I mean I seen her ‘round.’

  ‘Ever talked to her?’

  ‘Dr Washington?’

  ‘Yes. She talks.’

  ‘No, I never actually –’

  ‘She reads my chart too, like you. Why are you afraid of her?’

  Lamont smiled. ‘I ain’t … I’m not afraid of her. I … It’s just … we work … you know … in different departments.’

  ‘Different departments,’ Mr Mandelbrot repeated quietly.

  ‘I prob’ly … I should prob’ly go, Mr Mandelbrot.’

  ‘Ever been to Washington, Mister … ?’

  ‘Washington DC? No, I never been there. Listen, sir, I’m sorry if I disturbed you … I should prob’ly go.’

  ‘You should go. You’d like it but not in the summer ‘cause in the summer it’s too hot. Like here. But there’s no ocean there what there is here. What’s your name?’

  ‘My name? Williams, sir, Lamont … Lamont Williams.’

  ‘What is it? Laront?’

  ‘Lamont. I should prob’ly go.’

  ‘I’ve been to Washington, Mr Lamont.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I went there with my family once … in the summer … when it was too hot. I live now with my family, not in Washington, in Long Island. Sometimes it’s too hot there too but they have the air-conditioning. When I’m not here dying, I’m with them there living. What about you, Mr Lamont?’

  ‘I gotta be gettin’ back to work, Mr Mandelbrot.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened of that lady doctor. She won’t hurt you. She is too busy trying to kill me. What about you? You live with your family, Mr Lamont?’

  *

  When Michelle came home from work she got to washing vegetables in preparation for the dinner she was making for her family, her father-in-law William and an old family friend, Adam Zignelik. Her daughter was meant to be doing her homework but she was bored and came into the kitchen. Sonia turned the radio on. A spurt of music sprang out of it, loud, too loud for her mother. She had a book in her hand.

  ‘Can you turn it off, please?’

  Sonia rolled her eyes but did as she was asked.

  ‘Don’t tell me you can read with the music on that loud.’

  ‘Okay, I won’t tell you,’ Sonia said, reaching for a carrot.

  ‘Is that for school?’ Michelle asked, nodding in the direction of Sonia’s book but her daughter ignored the question, preferring to let her thoughts roam to dinner.

  ‘Who’s coming for dinner?’ she asked, crunching on the carrot.

  ‘Your grandpa and Adam.’

  ‘What about Diana?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she’s able to come.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is she sick?’

  ‘I don’t know. Adam left a message on your dad’s answering machine at work saying she wouldn’t be able to come tonight.’

  ‘Why?’ Sonia persisted.

  Michelle took in a breath and held it for a moment.

  ‘Sonia, is this a hormonal thing? I don’t know why she’s not coming. I’m not holding anything back. I guess Adam will tell us. I know you like her.’

  She tried to identify the book Sonia was holding but couldn’t see it well enough from where she stood at the sink. It hadn’t been an easy day. None of them were. Then suddenly, for no reason a third party might have been able to ascertain, she looked at Sonia again but as if through a different lens and she felt grateful that her daughter, though bored, was at home with her, eating carrots, wanting conversation with her mother despite pretending not to, enquiring about the wellbeing of a family friend and carrying a book. Her daughter was home with her, talking to her.

  *

  Somewhere else in the city a little light-skinned black girl aged between seven and nine was battling to stay upright on a crowded bus. She wore her hair in braids tied tight with ribbons. She grimaced involuntarily. Everyone was bigger than her. Squashed and gasping for fresh air, she wondered if she’d ever get a seat.

  *

  Pay attention to the small details. It is the mark of a professional. When Adam Zignelik said this to his students he was referring to the craft of a professional historian. More than fifty years earlier William McCray learned the same thing as it pertains to lawyers. He learned it from Thurgood Marshall not merely through it being said but also by simply watching him and the way he worked. Thurgood taught all the attorneys working under him what Charles Hamilton Houston had taught him; they were going to have to be twice as good as lawyers arguing against the extension of civil rights to non-whites. William noted the way Thurgood argued in court and the firm but unfailingly polite manner in which he addressed all judges, even those he knew were opposed to his most passionate beliefs. He noted the total absence of any crossing out in his boss’s written arguments as they appeared in court documents, in the briefs handed up. If Thurgood changed so much as one word the whole document would be retyped. It was a part of his punctiliousness that he passed on to William and the others. Later, William would pass this on to his son Charles, the historian.

  An astute observer at the US Supreme Court in Washington on 17 May 1954 might have suspected before the commencement of the actual proceedings that something was up. He would have noticed the enthusiasm of the recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren during the usually formal and staid preliminary admission ceremony welcoming the new members of the bar. And what was a frail-looking Justice Jackson doing sneaking into the building through a seldom-used side entrance so soon after suffering a severe heart attack, and why did he stop off to knowingly advise some of the other judges’ clerks without explanation, ‘I think you boys ought to be in the courtroom today’?

  Thurgood knew to be there that day. Two-thirds of the way through Chief Justice Warren’s reading out of the majority opinion it wasn’t yet clear which way the court was going to find. Thurgood fixed a stare on Justice Stanley Reed, a native of Kentucky, whom he thought the most likely to lead a push in favour of retaining segregation. He would have to appear before him again so he needed to be careful with the way he looked at him but he continued to look for what gamblers call a ‘tell’ in Justice Reed’s eyes. The Chief Justice continued reading aloud. He had been reciting the majority’s review of previously decided cases when Thurgood heard him read the sentence that suddenly showed the majority’s hand. Referring to black children, Chief Justice Warren said, ‘To separate them and others of similar age and qualificat
ions solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ Thurgood just had to keep still and keep breathing. When the Chief Justice reached the paragraph that began with ‘we conclude’, he added a word that was not found in the printed text. The word was ‘unanimously’. At around this time Justice Stanley Reed, a native of Kentucky, had tears in his eyes.

  Whatever was churning inside him, Thurgood Marshall, the gradualist, maintained his composure as he listened to the Supreme Court unanimously decide in Brown versus Board of Education that it was wrong and illegal to segregate school children on the basis of race. It was not only morally wrong, it was also unconstitutional.

  Thurgood was numb. He found the nearest payphone and called the LDF office in New York. Jake Zignelik took the call and William McCray stopped what he was doing after the third time he heard Jake say the only thing he had said after ‘hello’ up till then in the conversation: ‘Oh my God!’. Everyone in the office wanted to speak to Thurgood after he had spoken to William, who had grabbed the phone off Jake. Thurgood instructed them to phone Roy Wilkins and Walter White and Kenneth Clarke too. As soon as Thurgood’s call had finished the switchboard began to light up with calls from all over the country. Exactly the same thing was happening at the same time at the office of the NAACP.

  Thurgood took the first plane back to New York. The first call he took when he got back to the office was from John W. Davis, the 79-year-old one-time Democratic presidential candidate, counsel in the Brown case for the state of South Carolina, and, while only one of a large group of lawyers who had argued the case for retaining segregation, he was its unofficial leader. Davis had called to congratulate Thurgood. Work stopped for everyone. Champagne flowed freely in the LDF office. People were laughing, walking in and out of each other’s offices. No one could quite believe it. The drinks session grew more festive. From the board members to the receptionists, everyone was celebrating the decision. Reporters arrived and quickly joined the group. More than by alcohol, people were intoxicated and numbed by history so fresh its full effect could not even begin to be divined. Before long people adjourned to Thurgood’s favourite restaurant, the Blue Ribbon, where at some stage Thurgood interrupted the celebrations with a sober and prophetic reminder. ‘I don’t want any of you fooling yourselves; it’s just begun, the fight has just begun.’ While they knew he was right, Jake Zignelik and William McCray were part of a large group of revellers still celebrating at the Blue Ribbon after 1 am.