Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Uncle Fearless, who was about thirty-four when Thurgood and his family moved in, had a good job as personal attendant to the white president of the B & O Railroad. Fearless set up the president’s meetings and served his lunch. He wore a suit and bow tie to work every day. He was on a first-name basis with the city’s top white business and political leaders. Fearless was a “tall, broad-shouldered, wide smiling man.… A sort of major domo in the office of the president,” the B & O Railroad Magazine wrote about him years later.12 “Fearless was the most important black in the B & O Railroad,” remembered Douglas C. Turnbull, Jr., executive assistant to the president of the railroad for many years. “The president talked to Fearless several times a week.”13 Uncle Fee, who had no children of his own, delighted in being a powerful influence on the young boys.

  When six-year-old Thurgood began attending school, he went to Number 103 on Division Street, just three blocks from Uncle Fee’s house. The segregated 103 was the best colored elementary school in Baltimore. “Everybody in the community relied on public neighborhood schools but parents … were especially proud of school 103 on Division Street, a model elementary school,” a historian later wrote.14 The school was an old, redbrick, two-story building with twelve makeshift classrooms. The classes were separated by sliding doors, which, when opened, made two or three rooms into an auditorium.

  The academic year at the black schools was about a month shorter than it was for the city’s white children. Black children were expected to get jobs, and most did leave school every spring when the strawberry crop was ready to be picked.15

  Thurgood’s classmates remembered him as an energetic boy who had to sit in the first seat of the first row. Agnes Patterson, one of his classmates, explained that Thurgood had to sit up front because “he was always playing, and so they had to keep right on top of him.”16

  His class was called “The Sissy Class,” because it had few boys besides Thurgood and his best friend, Jimmy Carr, the son of a prominent black doctor. Thurgood and Jimmy took pleasure in teasing the many girls around them: “He used to drive me crazy,” recalled Julia Wood-house Harden.17

  Carrie Jackson, another classmate, portrayed the young Thurgood as annoying but never mean: “Thurgood didn’t get into fights.” Thurgood’s mother remembered her son the same way: “Thurgood wasn’t much of a street fighter—Aubrey was the tough one. He did all the fighting. Thurgood would always come home and tell me about what the boys did to him.”18

  Thurgood, a great storyteller even as a boy, told his mother and his friends about the people who lived in the alley streets and their roughneck children. Their scary world fascinated Thurgood, but while he might venture out for a peek, he was much more comfortable at home.

  After school Thurgood and his older brother went home to a house ruled by women: Norma Marshall and Aunt Flo (Fearless’s wife) oversaw family affairs, with frequent visits from Grandma Mary, now in her late sixties. Willie Marshall was at work much of the time. Even when he came home, Willie was a distant father figure, an intense, introverted man who liked to drink. Aubrey was not much of a presence either. A bright student and a snappy dresser, he socialized with an older crowd and was a regular on local baseball fields.

  “Aubrey was more outgoing,” said Ethel Williams, one of Thurgood’s classmates. She recalled that “Aubrey looked just like white, he was blond, the blondest black guy you’ve ever seen, with sharp features, too.” “You wouldn’t think that they were brothers, other than they were both fair,” said Pat Patterson, who knew both boys. “The interesting thing about the family is that when they were young, Aubrey was the fair-haired boy. They just felt he had a whole lot of promise,” said Elizabeth [Penny] Monteiro, who later married into the Marshall family.19

  Thurgood, meanwhile, could be regularly seen in the late afternoons playing and working at the grocery next door to Uncle Fee’s house—owned by Mr. Hale, a Jewish merchant. His job was to pick out items ordered by customers, then deliver them in his little red wagon. Thurgood started the job when he was seven, working for ten cents a day plus all he could eat. On his second day he made a neighborhood reputation for himself when he got “sick as a dog” eating pickles and candy. Mr. Hale had to take him home and later joked, “That’s why I let you do that—I knew you’d break yourself out of the habit.”

  Thurgood moved easily among the Jews in the neighborhood. He considered the rabbis the most learned men he knew. And his best friend after school was Mr. Hale’s son, Sammy, who also worked in the store. Sammy and his parents would join Uncle Fee and the Marshalls for dinner once in a while. It was rare for blacks and whites to have dinner together. Julia Woodhouse Harden said of that era: “We had no contact with anybody white.” Even so, the Marshall family did not hold negative stereotypes about whites or Jews. The only racist influence in his family, Marshall later recalled, was his mother, who he said was “a little anti-Semitic because of a couple of bad deals” with Jews.

  Thurgood and Sammy learned how to deal with race at the same time but out of different traditions. “We used to have fights, fusses, because he would let people call him a kike and wouldn’t fight back,” Marshall said later. “If anybody called me a ‘Nigger’ I fought ’em. He said he was always told by his father that fighting was not good.”

  Despite the racial tension in the city, Thurgood’s father had very good white friends, including a local policeman, Captain Cook, who occasionally came by to spend some time with Willie Marshall. According to Thurgood, his dad had no hostile feelings toward whites in Baltimore. When Captain Cook knocked at the door, Thurgood knew to go get his father because the policeman would never come in without Willie Marshall’s personal invitation. His father had set down a rule—if any policeman entered his house without permission, he would kill him. This rule, applying even to friends, reflected a widespread concern among black Baltimoreans about the power of the all-white police force. Willie’s hard-nosed stance came from an 1875 incident. Norma’s father had been the leader of a citywide protest against a policeman who shot and killed a black man after forcing his way into the man’s house.

  The incident began when police responded to a complaint early on the morning of Saturday, July 31, 1875. A neighbor contacted them about a loud party just blocks from Isaiah Williams’s house. Officer Patrick McDonald thought it was a “Cake Walk” party, at which couples held a dance competition for a prize cake. The neighborhood police charged blacks to hold such parties, issuing permits and taking a percentage of the fees.

  When Officer McDonald went to tell Brown to quiet down sometime around 2:00 A.M., events quickly turned violent. The redheaded policeman threatened to “snatch” the partygoers off to jail if they didn’t immediately halt the party. Daniel Brown, a thirty-seven-year-old mulatto, shouted at McDonald: “Snatch? No, you won’t.” With that the short, muscular policeman jumped at Brown, hitting him on the head with his nightstick.

  Brown’s wife jumped in to save her husband. But the policeman pushed the screaming woman away. As the injured man began to get up, the officer pulled out his revolver. Still struggling with the woman, he shouted, “Damn your husband,” then shot Brown in the head.

  The murder led Isaiah Williams and several other leading black Baltimoreans to investigate what had happened and hold a public rally against police brutality. Speaking before a crowded Douglass Institute, named for Frederick Douglass, Williams said the situation cast a revealing light on larger issues plaguing Baltimore’s black community: “There is little protection, if any, afforded us by the police in cases of assault where the offenders are white; second, there are frequent arrests made by officers … without warrant or authority by entering houses occupied by colored people.”

  There was no holding back the crowd’s emotion as Williams spoke. His remarks reached their crescendo when he said black Baltimoreans only wanted “simple justice … and the same protection in life, liberty and the pursuit of our happiness which white men enjoy as a right.” His speech was gre
eted with a loud and long outburst of applause. But he was criticized the next day in the Baltimore Sun, which said Williams was wrong to charge that black people were being abused by police: “We are not aware of any systematic oppression in this state or city of any class of citizens by another, nor do we believe that there is any disposition or intention on the part of the police … to oppress, injure or maltreat colored people.… There is no ground for any such assertion.”20

  Officer McDonald’s trial began on November 15, 1875, with the entire city fixed on what the newspapers called “The Cake Walk Homicide.” Every day drew a large crowd of blacks and whites to the courtroom. A dozen people testified in the opening round to the events that had led up to the shooting, and their testimony fit with Isaiah Williams’s earlier account.

  On November 22 closing arguments began. Isaiah Williams was at the front of a courtroom described by the Sun as “so crowded it was difficult for those concerned in the case to squeeze their persons through the compact mass.” The next morning, the day before Thanksgiving, the jury reached a verdict. The Sun said Officer McDonald stood straight as the jury foreman read out loud: “Not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter.” A reporter wrote the next day that McDonald was satisfied with the jury’s decision; he had “dreaded a verdict for a higher grade.”21

  The powerful role Isaiah Williams played in that celebrated case no doubt added to Marshall family folklore about abuses that stemmed from police entering private homes without permission. But Willie Marshall regularly spent hours with his white friend on the police force. Young Thurgood was often in the room with the two men, listening to their stories and debates over crimes, Baltimore politics, and race relations.

  One frequent topic of conversation between Captain Cook and Willie Marshall was the war in Europe. Thurgood was nine when the United States officially entered World War I, and several of his uncles fought in the war. However, when black soldiers returned home victorious in 1918 and 1919, they were greeted by a white backlash. Some whites were angry at the idea of saluting blacks wearing the U.S. uniform. There were race riots during the summer of 1919 in several cities as defiant blacks who had served in Europe clashed with segregationist whites. Later accounts referred to this as the “Red Summer,” because of the bloodshed and claims that Bolshevik propaganda had prompted blacks to defy the existing racial order. One of the bloodiest of these riots took place just forty miles south of Baltimore, in Washington, D.C. It made a deep impression on young Thurgood.

  In early July of 1919, the NAACP’s Washington branch sent letters to the editors of the city’s four major newspapers, accusing them of “sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines.” The leader in printing such stories was The Washington Post. On Saturday morning, July 19, the Post ran the headline NEGROES ATTACK GIRL … WHITE MEN VAINLY PURSUE. The wife of a navy man had her umbrella grabbed by two black men who made “insulting actions” toward the woman, according to the Post. That evening 200 of the husband’s fellow white sailors decided to lynch the two men. The white men roamed Southwest Washington, beating any Negroes they found walking the streets.

  Two nights of rioting ensued, with knots of black and white men doing battle throughout the city. By Tuesday night hard rain and 2,000 of President Wilson’s federal troops had halted the violence.22

  Word of the riots quickly spread to Baltimore, especially along the railroad with its black workers, including Willie Marshall. Eleven-year-old Thurgood heard dramatic accounts. He later said his light-skinned, blue-eyed father was caught between black and white rioters, fearful that he might be mistaken for the wrong race at the wrong time. “He had a hell of a time,” Marshall said. “The Negroes would run one place, the white folks were running the other. So he was running back and forth. Wherever he went, he was wrong.… I know that was a tough riot. Nobody will admit it, but the Negroes won that one. They just didn’t count the white bodies.”

  There were no riots in Baltimore, but the D.C. violence sparked Thurgood’s imagination and raised his racial consciousness. The idea that black military men would be attacked shocked him. From childhood he had been captivated by stories of his grandfathers’ exploits in the Union Navy and the Buffalo Soldiers. And he was thrilled to glimpse his uncles in uniform and hear that they were going to Europe to fight. However, the racist treatment given to returning black soldiers and the Washington riot began to shake Thurgood out of the integrated shelter of his middle-class neighborhood. He understood fully now that black people were treated badly in much of the nation, even if heroes of a victorious war effort.

  By 1920 Willie Marshall’s savings as a railroad waiter allowed the family to move out of Uncle Fee’s house. At first they went ten blocks away, to 2327 McCullough Street. Later they moved to 1838 Druid Hill Avenue, a three-story row house with five bedrooms and the classic white marble steps that could be seen throughout Baltimore. On Saturday mornings Norma and other women washed those marble steps by hand, a Baltimore tradition. The changes in address meant shifts in neighbors. On McCullough the family found themselves in a mostly white area filled with newcomers from Russia and Germany.23 Druid Hill was mostly black.

  As her boys grew, Norma Marshall decided to go back to school. In 1921 she started taking classes at nearby Morgan College.24 She hoped to get recertified and follow in the footsteps of her mother and sister by getting a full-time job as a kindergarten teacher. But teaching assignments were hard to come by. Black teachers were hired only for the few allblack elementary schools and a single black high school. These were patronage jobs, controlled by the city’s Democrats, the segregationists. Few black teachers were getting work. But a persistent Norma Marshall pushed for any substitute teaching assignment she could get for the next few years.

  Norma’s drive to get a college degree and a teaching job set a strong example for young Thurgood. Her ambition, both for herself and for her sons, put pressure on them to excel. And even though Willie had left school at an early age, he was powerfully intolerant of poor grades from Aubrey or Thurgood, to the point of threatening them if they brought home bad report cards. Willie felt his lack of schooling had prevented him from being more than a sleeping car porter and waiter. And his deep insecurities added to his conviction that the boys should have the very best education.

  His parents’ constant push for better grades led to a turnaround in Thurgood by seventh grade. He eased up on teasing and whispering to girls long enough to get such high grades that his teachers let him skip to the eighth grade before he had finished the seventh.

  * * *

  Thurgood stepped into a harsher world of segregation as he started high school. In 1921 he began ninth grade at the Colored High and Training School, a two-story, sixteen-room building. The rusted facility had housed Baltimore’s German-American Elementary School for several decades. It had become “Colored High” thirty-eight years before Thurgood entered its doors, opening as Baltimore’s first public high school for blacks. The school had no library, no cafeteria, and no gym when Thurgood arrived. “This school stands in urgent need of equipment.… It is lamentably short of anything like an adequate supply,” Principal J.H.N. Waring had written in an annual report to the superintendent of public instruction.25

  Thurgood was aware that white children had vacated the school; he knew whites had better schools with more books and newer facilities. Additionally, as the only high school for blacks, there was unbearable crowding. The school had almost doubled in size between 1920 and 1922. When Thurgood entered the building, there were bookcases crammed in the corridors. To accommodate all, the principal had to divide the student body and hold half-day sessions.26

  Thurgood’s classmate Essie Hughes recalled that the teachers also divided the students on the basis of test scores. On the first day of school, a large group of ninth graders were seated in several big rooms and tested. Thurgood scored high enough to be put in a class with the best students.27

  Even as he was doing well at the Colo
red High School, Thurgood was maintaining his reputation as a cutup and prankster. Charlotte Shervington, one of his classmates, remembered Thurgood acting up one day when the teacher left the classroom. “Thurgood was full of the devil. He threw a piece of chalk and hit me in the eye. He didn’t aim to hit me in the eye, he just threw the chalk. He was mischievous.”28

  There was some control on Thurgood’s teasing at the Colored High School because his uncle Cyrus Marshall, Willie’s younger brother, was a math teacher there. “Anytime that Thurgood would carry on in class, all you had to do was tell Cy Marshall—and Thurgood’s father would knock his head off,” said Julia Woodhouse Harden.

  Thurgood’s antics occasionally led to punishment. Once, the principal sent him to the basement with a copy of the U.S. Constitution and told him he had to memorize it before he could leave. “Before I left that school,” Marshall said later, “I knew the whole thing by heart.”29

  Thurgood’s study of the Constitution gave him an interesting perspective on the conflict between American ideals and the reality of how the law was twisted when it came to black people. Sitting in a second-floor classroom and next to the window, he had a bird’s-eye view of the Northwest Baltimore police station. He could see prisoners, mostly black, being brought in by the all-white police. Often he could even hear as black suspects were questioned about crimes and sometimes hit with a club or brass knuckles to loosen up a confession. Essie Hughes remembered Thurgood being so fascinated by the goings-on in the jailhouse that teachers sometimes had to tell him to pull down the window shades.

  “We could hear police in there beating the hell out of people, saying, ‘Black boy, why don’t you just shut your goddamned mouth, you’re going to talk yourself into the electric chair,’ ” Thurgood told friends.