Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  The following summer Houston had another proposition for Marshall, who had just graduated as valedictorian from Howard University Law School. The NAACP was sending Houston on a fact-finding mission to study and document the inequalities in schools for both black and white children in the South, and Houston wanted his young protégé to accompany him. It was something Marshall had to talk over with Buster first. They’d been living together with Marshall’s parents in a small house on Druid Hill Avenue in Baltimore, patiently waiting for the day when Marshall would graduate from law school, hang a shingle, and start making a name for himself. Buster had meanwhile been selling bread in a Jewish bakery and women’s hats in a clothing store, among other jobs, to help make ends meet. Complicating the decision was a scholarship offer from Harvard Law School for Marshall to study for an advanced law degree. Marshall, however, could not resist the opportunity to travel with his mentor. He’d study for the Maryland bar exam when he returned.

  Having packed Houston’s six-cylinder Graham-Paige with their luggage and bags of fruit, the two men set off from Washington, D.C., on a journey that took them through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Traveling not as lawyers but as journalists and social scientists, they documented public facilities and schools for blacks in rural areas of the South that, to both men, seemed to have been lost in time. With a still camera as well as a rented, handheld silent movie camera they compiled a visual record of the poverty they encountered. An endless string of ramshackle schools on dusty roads, where children sat on floors of tiny classrooms with broken windows and potbellied stoves, demonstrated indisputably that the segregationist states were by no means meeting the “separate but equal” standard established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the nocuous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. “Motion pictures,” Houston wrote, “humanize and dramatize the discrimination which Negroes suffer much more effectively than any corresponding amount of speech could do. . . .”

  Riding alongside Houston in the car, Marshall smoked cigarettes and typed observations on a well-worn Remington portable that he balanced on his knees. “Conditions,” Marshall wrote, “were much worse than we heard they were”—conditions like streets with human waste running through poorly drained ditches, because there was no plumbing in the black parts of town. The trips—they made two of them—had a profound impact on Marshall. Not only had he now seen with his own eyes the “evil results of discrimination” that his mentor had tried to describe to him in classrooms, but the course of his life had been significantly altered. Houston’s incessant credo took hold of the impressionable young man: “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”

  Marshall went back to Maryland, where he passed the bar, then struggled to find paying clients at his own private practice during the Depression. Most blacks in Baltimore had little money, so Marshall mostly practiced poverty law for the lowest of fees. The more successful blacks were reluctant to hire black lawyers, as they thought their suits would be better represented by white lawyers who had relationships with opposing counsel and judges. So it didn’t matter how smart or how competent Marshall was. His race alone prohibited him access to the legal sphere where Baltimore’s higher socioeconomic class conducted business and forged relationships—a sphere that even the least competent of white lawyers could enjoy by virtue of their skin color.

  Charles Hamilton Houston had to ask only once for the young lawyer to join him in New York at the national headquarters of the NAACP.

  BY THE MID-1940S, the NAACP had become overwhelmed with casework. For years Thurgood Marshall and the association had been planning an all-out attack on segregation, one they hoped would reverse the separate-but-equal doctrine established by Plessy. To get there, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) had been filing numerous lawsuits around the country to combat inequalities in teachers’ pay, housing, transportation, the armed forces, and higher education. Despite the relocation of the NAACP to more spacious offices in the Willkie Memorial Building in midtown Manhattan, a rash of recent hirings had left Thurgood Marshall’s LDF short on space.

  Since his arrival at the NAACP in 1938, Marshall had been forced to share an office, first with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and later with various LDF counsel over the years. He was, Marshall wrote in a 1947 memo to Walter White, “the only executive who shared offices.” That was after he’d been shuttled into a small fourth-floor office in Freedom House with two young females, attorney Constance Baker and sociologist Annette Peyser—the three of them shared the single phone. Marshall told White conditions had become unbearable; it was impossible to concentrate with three people in the same office working on different types of cases, “answering the telephone and/or dictating.” Marshall was, he wrote, “at the end of my rope.”

  Though sympathetic, White was not especially disposed to accommodate the less than punctilious Marshall. He had already made it clear to Marshall that he did not appreciate some patterns of behavior in the LDF offices, most notably an “overfamiliarity and casualness” and the use of first names between executives and secretaries or stenographers during office hours that Marshall permitted. W. E. B. DuBois, who had left the organization in 1934, was nevertheless around the office enough to observe Marshall’s “unbuttoned office manners to be outlandishly bad.” It was a charge the lawyer could not deny. Victories were celebrated, often on Friday afternoons, when Marshall would pull a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer and proceed to hold court. Imitating judges, opposing counsel, or dim Uncle Tom witnesses, he’d punctuate his tales from the civil rights battlefront with one of his famous deadpan grins or bawdy punch lines. He relished racial humor, like the story about the slave who stole a turkey from his master, then ate the whole bird—and just as the master was about to deliver a whipping, the slave pleaded, “You shouldn’t beat me, massuh. You got less turkey, but you sure got more nigger.”

  “He could tell some pretty off-color jokes which would be, if they were told by someone else, embarrassing,” recalled Mildred Roxborough, who began a long career with the NAACP as a secretary in the early 1950s. “But you would find yourself responding to them because of the way in which he told them.”

  In an office where the work was hard, usually depressing, and often tragic, Marshall was inclined to using sophomoric or gallows humor to alleviate tension. One associate recalled an occasion when Marshall, in the course of doing research, came across a story in a nineteenth-century newspaper about a black man who’d been doing railroad construction in the Midwest and had fallen into a ditch. The absurdity of the headline gripped Marshall, who kept reading it aloud from his desk, over and over, as if it summed up the black man’s condition then, and now: “Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . .”

  The letters from the South that arrived at the NAACP offices often brought cries for help or pleas for justice, and Marshall commonly read them to his staff, even if the LDF could not offer help. A letter, at once touching and humorous, that he received in May 1949 from Charles Jones in Hog Wallow, Georgia, was typical:

  Mr. Turgood.

  I see by the Courer [Pittsburgh Courier] that you ar the No. 1 negro of all Time, so I take my pen in han as you must be the man I have been lookin for all these yers.

  You see Mr. Turgood I has great trouble an goin to church don’t seem to make it better. The Courer say you has scared the white folks down hear in the South and has them on the run. Well, maybe so but you has them runnin after me and I am ritin to try to get you to make them run in the other road away from me. They is shootin and beating and tarfeatherin all around here getten closer to me all the time just las week over in the next county and I hop you will come quick because these white folks down hear don’t ack like they heard of Supreme court or any court or anything. They is runnin wild and we shure could use the No. 1 negro of all time or somebody to stop them from mistreatin us.

  You all is in Harlem an if the goin get tough you can duck in the n
ext basement an nobody no wher you has gon, but down here aint no place to hide they just grabs you and yore number is up or down. Please Mr. Turgood if you are No 1 of all time you can do it you are the one we ben watin for since I was born please help these white folks is mighty mean and mighty close on my heels

  yours for a little while anyway

  Charles Jones X

  PS Mr Turgood I rite this for Charlie he cant read or rite but he got real good sense. His wife Essie Mae

  Gloria Samuels was Marshall’s secretary in 1949. She acknowledged the use of first names at work as Walter White had observed, as well as occasions of laughter, but the fourth floor was not typically so casual as the executive secretary seemed to believe. The workload was far too heavy to be abandoned in laughter, and productivity was no just cause for White’s worry.

  “Mr. Marshall was very dedicated and careful,” Samuels said. “He always wore a suit and tie every day, and he was surrounded by serious young lawyers doing important work. We worked late whenever we had to. Even Saturdays. That was part of the job.” Mildred Roxborough confirmed Samuels’s observations. “When he was working, you didn’t joke,” she said. “You didn’t waste time. You had an assignment he gave you and he expected it to be completed. It was inviolate that you did that work and you produced and you performed.”

  Constance Baker, a black woman who was in her last year at Columbia Law School when she was hired by Marshall as a law clerk in October 1945, thought Marshall was ahead of his time in his hiring practices. Baker, who married in 1946 and became Constance Baker Motley, remembered Marshall’s “total lack of formality” during her interview, in which he mostly told stories about women lawyers he had known and admired, especially black women who had mustered the courage to enter the white-male-dominated legal profession. That same year Marshall also hired a white woman, Marian Wynn Perry, as an associate counsel, no matter that in 1945, as Motley noted, “nobody was hiring women lawyers.” Marshall’s hiring practices were not a conscious attempt to achieve diversity on his staff: he just didn’t think about it, said Motley, noting that Marshall’s mother, Norma, who taught at a segregated elementary school in Baltimore, was one of the first black women to graduate from Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College. She pawned her engagement and wedding rings to help fund Thurgood’s law school education at Howard University (his brother Aubrey went to medical school). Marshall had nothing but respect for serious women who were committed to achievement. “His mother was a professional,” Motley said. “So the idea of a woman in a professional job, he didn’t see anything wrong. In fact, there were women in his class at law school. He didn’t think anything strange of a woman being a lawyer.”

  Evelyn Cunningham, who later became a noted Harlem columnist and feminist, referred to her friend Thurgood Marshall as one of the “first feminists.”

  BY THE LATE 1940s, Marshall was logging some fifty thousand miles each year as he swooped into cities and towns across the South, usually alone. The postwar years marked the beginning of a more violent era in the American South, and Marshall’s willingness to ride into a hornet’s nest of racial conflict in pursuit of his well-stated goal—to dismantle Jim Crow—only cemented his growing legacy as a crusader for justice. Marshall relished his role as Mr. Civil Rights—it suited his gregarious, larger-than-life personality—and he was acutely aware that when he stepped off the train, his only sword was “a piece of paper called ‘The Constitution.’ ” He had grown into a celebrity, and wherever he went he was treated like one. Men respected him and wanted to drink with him and listen to his stories; women simply fawned over him. More and more frequently, after conferences on the road, he did not return home to Harlem, and Buster. To avoid crisscrossing the country, Marshall found it reasonable not to detour back to Manhattan—“no sense in coming back to New York,” as he wrote in a letter—and his correspondence vaguely hinted at a need for privacy. On most of his business trips he stayed with friends or associates, but on one occasion he wrote to West Coast civil rights attorney Loren Miller, stating, “I do not want to burden you and Juanita again,” and asking for “a suggestion as to a good place near Los Angeles as to where one can go and rest and hide.”

  Daniel Ellis Byrd, the handsome and extroverted former member of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team who went on to become field secretary with the NAACP in Louisiana, worked on several desegregation suits with Marshall. The two were close friends and Byrd liked to tease Marshall about his predilection for the ladies. Byrd once wrote to inform Marshall that he had to rearrange the lawyer’s itinerary, since he had scheduled Marshall to give a speech on Mother’s Day in New Orleans. Byrd wrote, “It has been suggested, however, that since you are not an authority on making a Mother’s Day Address, that you would be much more successful, and the occasion would prove more pleasant for you, if you were permitted to ‘undress’ someone’s fine Mother, on Mother’s Day (smile).”

  In New Orleans, Marshall usually stayed at the home of A. P. Tureaud, a Creole attorney who had also studied law at Howard under Charles Hamilton Houston. At one time the only black attorney in Louisiana, Tureaud filed countless equal pay and desegregation lawsuits in parishes around the state on behalf of the NAACP, and he spent decades fighting nearly every one of them in court. Tureaud lived in the Seventh Ward, a largely Creole section of New Orleans, and around the corner from his home was one of Marshall’s favorite restaurants, Dooky Chase’s, where he and Tureaud often conducted business over gumbo and fried chicken in the upstairs meeting room. Otherwise they’d work, as they were doing one evening when, in Tureaud’s French Quarter office, Marshall decided he needed a break and headed for the bar downstairs to get a drink, although he knew the bar was closed to blacks. It was the kind of behavior that had earned Marshall one of his nicknames, “Nogood.” Tureaud and Byrd continued working and as the hours passed without Marshall reappearing, they began to worry. They worried even more when they could not find Marshall in the bar or anywhere else. Disheartened, they returned to the office, only to find Marshall sitting at the desk going over briefs. The next day on the stairway, Tureaud ran into the strapping white owner of the bar, and his heart jumped. “Say, where’s that big tall black fellow that came into my place last night?” Tureaud said that he didn’t know. “Well,” the owner said, laughing. “If you see him and he ain’t busy, ask him to stop by again tonight. He sure had some funny stories.”

  IN FEBRUARY 1949, with the volume of criminal cases coming through the NAACP threatening to paralyze the LDF, Marshall issued a memorandum that established three rules to be applied “to the types of criminal cases we accept . . . (1) That there is injustice because of race or color; (2) the man is innocent; (3) there is a possibility of establishing a precedent for the benefit of due process and equal protection in general and the protection of Negroes’ rights in particular.”

  The memo also addressed a “misunderstanding” that had arisen when one of his LDF attorneys, Marian Wynn Perry, argued against “limit[ing] ourselves on the second point” and Marshall had to remind her that the NAACP was not a legal aid society. Although he acknowledged that a defendant’s innocence was a matter of judgment, he also reasoned that “any experienced lawyer reading the record in a case can usually detect whether a man is obviously guilty or whether he is apparently innocent.” He further exhorted his staff to “put no more credence in a convicted defendant’s protestation of innocence than we do a confession of guilt. Neither is sufficient in itself for either point.” Perry ultimately agreed that she would “obey orders.”

  Marshall’s core strategy for the LDF in education, equal pay, or transportation cases hinged upon the careful selection of the plaintiffs, as the aim was to try their cases in favorable courts in order to establish precedents, usually through the appeals process. So it was absolutely imperative that the organization not be embarrassed by any defense they mounted. They could ill afford any mid-trial setbacks or surprises. While Marshall expected to lose crimi
nal cases before juries, he also expected the LDF’s cases to firmly establish grounds for appeals on record. The LDF would thus have strong equal protection cases that it could appeal to the higher courts. To Marshall, it was therefore essential that his lawyers strongly believe a potential client had been wrongly accused. On occasion, prisoners who’d escaped from chain gangs in the South would show up at the NAACP offices, and Marshall was adamant about turning them away, lest the organization be charged with “harboring an escaped felon.” Sometimes a lawyer would nonetheless listen to a convict’s horrific story and attempt to persuade the governor of the state from which the prisoner had fled “not to sign extradition papers.”