Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Thurgood’s interest in the prisoners, lawyers, and policemen going in and out of the Northwest police station was heightened by stories he heard at home from his father. When Willie Marshall wasn’t working on the trains, he was a regular figure in the rear of courtrooms, a hat perched on his lap as he watched trials.30

  Willie’s fascination with the courts made a deep and lasting impression on his younger son. He would use lawyers’ tactics on both sons during arguments at the dinner table, demanding that they logically back up any claim they made, while discussing politics or even the weather. “Oh yes, we talked about the law,” Marshall later recalled of debating duels with his dad. “We fussed about it and argued and carried on.” And he credited his father with forcing him to sharpen his thinking and his arguments, and to be as crafty as a lawyer. “I got the idea of being a lawyer from arguing with my dad.… We’d argue about everything.” The one issue father and son did not argue about was racial segregation. “We saw eye-to-eye on that.”31

  Even though Thurgood loved to argue with his father, their conversations sometimes crossed the line from boisterousness to hostility, fueled by Willie’s drinking. Aubrey and Thurgood had different reactions to their father’s verbal bullying. Aubrey shrunk in and kept silent until the first opportunity to leave the house. Thurgood was electrified by his father’s bellicose manner and arguments. Consequently Thurgood never turned away from his father; he idolized him and treasured their good moments. He happily credited those shouting arguments as having prepared him to be a star on the Colored High’s celebrated debating team.

  From his first year of high school, Thurgood was “the main debater” on the team. “We would gather material, but Thurgood would specify certain key points that we would either elaborate on or look up more information on,” said his classmate Essie Hughes. The debating team’s coach, Gough McDaniels, a black history teacher, loved Thurgood’s argumentative style and worked closely with his star. McDaniels picked up where Willie Marshall had left off. He didn’t just argue with the loud, cocky boy but made Thurgood do in-depth research on topics for debate. Thurgood took to McDaniels, a college man—he had graduated from Cornell University—who impressed him with his stories about serving in World War I.

  In his freshman year Thurgood was elected captain of the varsity debating team. The winning team was so successful in Baltimore that it was invited to compete in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. But during his sophomore year Thurgood had to quit the team to concentrate on his schoolwork. He rejoined the team in his junior year and was immediately reelected captain.

  Thurgood’s interest in current events and debating did not detract from his interest in teasing girls and playing around with his best friend, Jimmy Carr. His favorite female target was his debate teammate Anita Short. He would pull her hair and call her “piano-legs” or “knock-knees.” But he would also eat lunch with her and walk home with her whenever he could.

  The girls at the Colored High were taken by Thurgood’s lanky walk, the way he swung his long arms and longer legs. In fact, his nickname was Legs. His wavy hair and light skin color added to his appeal in a city where dark skin was often considered lower-class. Thurgood was not much of an athlete. Nevertheless, his success on the debate team made him a well-known figure in school. He won election to the student council and to his class’s treasury committee.

  One of Thurgood’s more adventurous—if not outright crazy—high school friends was Cab Calloway, who later became a famous jazz singer, authoring songs such as “Minnie the Moocher,” with the famous refrain “Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho.” Calloway was one year behind Marshall at the Colored High School but knew Baltimore’s streets as a poor kid. Those streets were different from the ones known by middle-class Thurgood.

  By his own admission Calloway was “a hustler” during his high school days. A thin, light-skinned kid who looked not too different from Thurgood, Cab had little use for schoolwork. He preferred “waiting tables, shining shoes, hustling newspapers, walking hots [horses at Pimlico racetrack].”32 Cab would often skip school to do those jobs and keep money in his pocket. He would return to class with stories—some full of lies—about his exciting life on the streets.

  Although he was just a teenager, Cab knew local gamblers, musicians, club owners, and numbers runners because his older sister, Blanche, was a cabaret singer. One of his jobs was to hustle soldiers on leave to come into the nightclub where Blanche was singing.

  While Cab was making himself a character in the city’s nightlife and clubs, Thurgood was moving in another direction. At his mother’s insistence he joined her in becoming a member of St. Katherine’s Episcopal Church on Division Street, just a few blocks from Uncle Fearless’s house. At age fifteen he was confirmed at St. Katherine’s and served as an altar boy.33

  The next year, 1924, Thurgood had even less time to run around with guys like Cab Calloway because an illness left his father unable to work on the railroad. Aubrey had already left for college, Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, but with Willie’s illness the Marshalls fell behind on Aubrey’s tuition payments. To keep alive her dream of having Aubrey become a doctor, Norma took a job as a playground director while continuing to do substitute teaching.

  Jobless, sick, and lacking even a high school education, Willie Marshall was an unhappy man. His only marketable experience came from working in his father’s grocery store and his years as a waiter. By all accounts Willie was a complicated man. Fascinated with the law but lacking the education to be a lawyer, he was deeply frustrated, and his drinking problem worsened.

  “Yeah, he drank,” said Ethel Williams, one of Thurgood’s classmates. “He was an alcoholic … [but] we always respected him. We always liked him.” Another classmate recalled seeing Willie Marshall drunk and falling down on the streets of West Baltimore. Some neighbors remembered that when he was drunk Willie Marshall cursed and threatened people. “He put a lot of fear in you,” said Teddy Stewart, who worked with Willie Marshall and lived near him on Druid Hill Avenue. “He was one of the hardest men. He was a mean son of a bitch when he got drunk. But he could work drunk. It didn’t affect his work. If you worked around him, you knew he’d been drinking—he would get red.”34

  Willie Marshall’s growing drinking problem meant that his conversations with Thurgood increasingly traveled a thin line between shouting and fighting. Aubrey’s voice sometimes joined the roar when he came home, but Aubrey would still leave the table while Thurgood and his father continued to one-up each other. “The woman next door,” Thurgood said, “would know when we were all home. She’d tell her husband, ‘They’re all together again.’ She could hear it through the walls.”

  Going away to college brought out more of Aubrey’s personality. He had always been the more detached brother, never one for idle chatter or even listening to Thurgood’s fabulous stories, much less his arguments. Being a college man gave Aubrey a superior air when he tangled with his father and younger brother. And with the money from his job at school, he bought good clothes that gave him a preppy look. Some neighbors called him classy, others felt he was a snob. In any case, the elder son was living up to his mother’s expectations. He was doing well at Lincoln and on a straight path to achieve her dream.

  Thurgood, still at home, worked part-time at his father’s former job—as a porter on the B & O Railroad. And when Thurgood’s relationship with his father hit a bad patch, he turned to Uncle Fee, both for an easier personality and to get a look at the wider world of Baltimore politics and the powerful, white-run corporations that controlled the city.

  Fearless Williams treated Thurgood like the son he never had; he would give him a play-by-play on the power games among the corporate bosses as well as gossip about their personal secrets—from booze to gambling. And Uncle Fee would take Thurgood for Sunday car rides to the Eastern Shore. Those trips offered a different kind of education. Uncle Fearless made certain to have extra gasoline in the trunk so the family would never get stuck in som
e small town with whites who didn’t like blacks. Several lynchings had occurred on the Eastern Shore, and Uncle Fee wanted to be cautious. He also carried extra food because there were no restaurants for blacks outside Baltimore.35

  With Thurgood’s mother a well-known face in the city’s few black schools, Thurgood was expected to be a top student. She had prodded and coached Aubrey to top grades and then into pre-medical school studies in college. Now she had plans for Thurgood. Norma didn’t think he was as hardworking as Aubrey. He wasn’t an A student. But she told relatives she wanted her second son to be a dentist or maybe a lawyer.

  Thurgood did have a B average. But with his mother’s high expectations and his brother’s success, he found it hard to think of himself as a good student. Ultimately, he graduated in the top third of his class. Thurgood’s high school transcript shows that he never failed a course, took Latin, history, trigonometry, and physics, as well as machine work and wood trimming. More impressive, in contrast to his pal Cab Calloway and all his talk about being a wild man and a bad student, Thurgood was never late to school and absent just one day.36

  During their senior year Thurgood’s classmate Essie Hughes noticed that he showed signs “of adolescent blossoming as far as girls are concerned.… He was muscle-bound and didn’t know just what to do with it.” A big question was who Thurgood would take to Class Day. His favorite, Anita Short, was not a senior. The answer came when Hughes asked Ivor King, one of her classmates, who her date would be. The surprising reply was Thurgood Marshall. Hughes recalled asking King: “How long has he been going with you?” King replied: “He hasn’t been going with me at all, but I’ve been going with him for four years.”

  Soon after the dance was graduation day. Even an ill Willie came to see his younger son receive the diploma he never got. The graduation ceremony would stay with people for many years because Cab Calloway sang a powerful version of the popular song “To a Wild Rose.”

  Because of the family’s financial struggles, it was still unclear if Thurgood would go to college. At his mother’s direction Thurgood had finished school a semester early and used that time to earn tuition money. But he had the grades and references to get into Lincoln without examination. Colored High Principal Mason Hawkins praised Thurgood in his recommendation as a young man with “very good ability.” Thurgood’s most telling answer on his college application came in response to the question “What do you plan as your life’s work?” The sixteen-year-old wrote simply: “Lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Waking Up

  AT AGE SIXTEEN THURGOOD MARSHALL BEGAN a metamorphosis. The teasing, often goofy boy embarked on a journey of experiences that opened his eyes to the painful realities of economic and racial problems crippling most black Americans. With high school behind him he had to find his place in an adult world where legal segregation and poverty plagued black people.

  His first revelation came with his struggle to attend college. Despite his mother’s protectiveness, it was clear to him that the family could not afford to send him to the school he desperately wanted to attend. Lincoln University was the top choice for the brightest black boys along the East Coast, and Aubrey was still there. Thurgood had been accepted, but the family still owed the school money for Aubrey’s junior year. “After consulting with the Treasurer I find that there is a balance of $330.50 [about a year’s tuition] on your son Aubrey’s account and this raises the question whether it would not be advisable for the younger boy to remain out of school and earn money for a year,” a Lincoln University official wrote to Norma in June 1925.1

  At the request of Norma, W. W. Walker, a minister on McCullough Street and an 1897 graduate of Lincoln, wrote to the president of the university to give personal testimony that Willie Marshall had been ill for a year and that was the only reason for their financial difficulties: “I am well acquainted with the Marshall family. They stand high in the estimation of the people of Baltimore.… The mother is very anxious about the entrance of Thurgood into Lincoln U. fearing the faculty will be influenced versus him because of what she owes.” Lincoln’s president responded that “the case will be considered on its own merits and certainly with a favorable attitude because of your letter and recommendation.”2

  To save money for his college tuition, Thurgood began working full-time as a dining-car waiter on the B & O in February 1925. He had a problem with his uniform, however; it was too small. After he complained to his boss, the chief waiter told Thurgood, “Boy, we can get a man to fit the pants a lot easier than we can get pants to fit the man. Why don’t you just kinda scroonch down in ’em a little more?” Marshall later said he had no choice: “I scroonched.”3

  Thurgood’s work also taught him a lesson about the control the company held over its black workers. The white engineers, conductors, and mechanics were unionized, but the black waiters were forbidden to organize even though they earned just fifty-five dollars a month and were not given overtime pay. One day while he was working on the train, a group of waiters began talking about the need for a union. When the train arrived back in Baltimore, the white inspector of dining cars boarded and went directly to the waiter who had led the discussion. “He tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Get your clothes. You’re fired,’ ” recounted Marshall. “Now how did that word get to Baltimore? … There was nobody on there but us. It was one of the crew … each one looking at the other one like this,” he recalled, giving the accusatory glare of a betrayed co-worker.

  Thurgood kept his mouth shut and in six months he had saved enough to pay Lincoln’s tuition for a year. In September 1925 he packed for the fifty-five-mile car ride up Route One to the small farm town of Oxford, Pennsylvania. Lincoln University, founded by Presbyterians in 1854 (and renamed in honor of President Lincoln after he was assassinated), was known as the Black Princeton, because Presbyterians also ran the famous New Jersey school for young white men and many Princeton graduates taught at Lincoln.

  Thurgood traveled to Lincoln with Aubrey, who was then starting his senior year. There were 285 men at Lincoln that year. Aubrey had pledged a fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, but he was not well established at the school. According to his first roommate, Franz (Jazz) Byrd, Aubrey was a remote person, “kind of irritable.… He just felt that he was superior.” Byrd, a star football player, described Aubrey as a very serious person who did not get along with his jocular younger brother. “The dislike between Thurgood and Aubrey was so intense,” Byrd recalled. “I’ve never seen it in any two brothers that I know who came from the same parents, same background and everything else.”4

  Thurgood spent little time with his brother and almost never talked about him. But they did have regular arguments. Much of Thurgood’s loud, crude behavior in his early years at Lincoln may have been an effort to set himself apart from the reserved Aubrey.

  In Thurgood’s first year at Lincoln, Aubrey was on the senior honor roll. Thurgood, by contrast, was having a great time and hardly ever studying. His inventive use of curse words, his love of storytelling, and his joy in card games made him a good fit for the young, all-male social scene.

  Thurgood had no problem playing along with the Lincoln custom of freshmen wearing little blue beanies on their heads and short pants with garters to hold up their socks. Upperclassmen called the freshmen dogs and tried to steal their beanies, sometimes starting small fights, known as pushing knuckles. Freshmen were also required to know the names of all the buildings on campus, the history of the university, and the alma mater. And they could only enter buildings through the back door.

  In this boys’ paradise the only thing that slowed Thurgood was his campus job. He was in charge of baking bread for the school cafeteria. “We would cook it and then put it in a closet and serve it the second day,” Marshall recalled. “We’d take a loaf of bread right out of the oven. And slice it open like this and lay a quart of butter right there and griddle it. That’s a meal right there, and a good meal, too.”

  Most of the time Thurgo
od lived as a boy without a complicated thought in his head. His friends thought he never studied and he became known as a great pinochle player, a fan of cowboy movies, and a connoisseur of comic books. He was always bumming cigarettes. Thurgood roomed with James Murphy, a friend from Baltimore whose family ran the Afro-American newspaper. They kept a party going in their room on most nights. On their door was a sign welcoming visitors to the “Land of the Disinherited.”5

  One friend later wrote that during their years at Lincoln, Thurgood was a “harum-scarum youth, the loudest individual in the dormitory and apparently the least likely to succeed.”6

  Norma Marshall, aware that Thurgood was not as studious as Aubrey, urged her younger son to become a dentist despite his ambition to practice law. Black dentists were in demand because many whites refused to work on black patients. Also, black people generally did not trust white dentists, who were known in the South for yanking the teeth out of any black person with a toothache. To please his mother Thurgood took some pre-medical classes. But he had little taste for basic science. Even more of a problem, he had a run-in with a professor who saw him as a less than serious student.

  The hardest work he put in was going to the debate team’s get-togethers to show off his talent for argument. Thurgood’s debating skills got him on Lincoln’s varsity team as a freshman. It would be great training for a future lawyer. That year Lincoln’s team debated Oxford University at Bethel AME Church in Baltimore before over a thousand people. Thurgood was not one of the four Lincoln men who debated, but he trained for the event and traveled to it with the team, which thrilled black Baltimore by winning. Later in his Lincoln career, Thurgood was one of the principal debaters when the university’s team traveled to Boston to debate Harvard and later the British Union team (students from Cambridge, the University of London, and Edinburgh).