Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  After the Harvard debate Thurgood attended a dinner where he was seated next to a white female student. He had dealt with white women while working in Baltimore, but there was always the danger, as the hat-box incident in his youth had demonstrated, of sudden violence when a black man got too close to a white woman socially. To sit next to a white woman of his age in a social setting made him nervous. “I never felt good around them,” he said later. “[At the Harvard Club dinner] I was the most uncomfortable son of a bitch in the world. But I managed to just grin and bear it.”

  Traveling with the debate team wasn’t the only occasion for Thurgood to get off campus. On weekends he often went to Philadelphia, about an hour north, or traveled south for an hour and a half to Baltimore. Lincoln men would show off by leaving campus every weekend, claiming to be visiting beautiful women. Thurgood bragged to classmates of being engaged ten times during college. “I went away every weekend—Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington,” he recalled. “Wherever there was some pussy to chase, I was there.”

  His freshman year of college turned out to be a joyride for Thurgood. He had friends all over campus who delighted in the pranks and card games he loved so much. And though he didn’t have great grades, he wasn’t flunking out. His biggest worry, over money for tuition, had faded. Not only was he working on campus but his father had recovered his health and found a good-paying job as the head steward at the Gibson Island Club. The club, on the Chesapeake Bay, was eighteen miles from Baltimore and a golf and sailing haven for Baltimore’s white, upper-class Protestants. Teddy Stewart, who washed dishes there, described it as “one of the best gentile clubs in the state of Maryland if not the best.” Sam Daniels, who worked as a busboy on the island, remembered a sign on the causeway that read: “No Niggers and Dogs Allowed.”

  The light-skinned Willie Marshall was in charge of hiring the allblack dining room staff at the club, and he hired Thurgood as a waiter that summer, after his first year of college.

  Working at Gibson Island, Thurgood became a popular figure with the powerful whites who frequented the exclusive watering hole. And Albert Fox, the club’s secretary, who was in charge of all the staff and facilities, regarded Thurgood as a son. Fox and Willie Marshall were drinking partners, and Fox delighted in introducing Thurgood to first-rate whiskey, “a forty-year-old hogshead of old Pikesville bourbon.”

  Thurgood’s relationship with Fox gave him protection whenever he had to deal with some of the more racist whites at the club, but he still had to face prejudice. One day Thurgood was waiting on tables when in came a U.S. senator, “a very vulgah individual,” according to Marshall. The senator saw Thurgood and shouted, “Hey, nigger.”

  Marshall, who was taught to fight anyone who called him that, for some reason held his temper and went over to his table.

  “Nigger, I want service at this table,” the old senator yelled out. The college man decided to play along, not wanting to lose his job. The senator got more and more into showing off for his dinner guests as he hailed Thurgood with shouts of “Nigger” and “Boy.” But when dinner was over, he left an astounding twenty-dollar tip. He did the same every day for nearly a week, giving Thurgood the best-paying week of his young life and putting Thurgood a major step closer to paying his tuition for the coming school year.

  But one night Willie Marshall overheard the senator’s rank language and saw Thurgood running up to the table, bowing and saying “Yes, sir!” His father pulled Thurgood into a corner and told him: “You are fired! You are a disgrace to the colored people!”

  Thurgood quickly explained that he was making big money off the senator’s obnoxious behavior. In later telling the story, Marshall said he explained to his dad, “Now I figure it’s worth about twenty dollars to be called nigger.… But the minute you run out of them twenties … I’m gonna bust you in the nose!”7

  This more pragmatic Thurgood was a changed man from the youngster who had dropped the hatboxes and started swinging after being called a name. Having felt his father’s money woes, as well as his mother’s ambition to get him into a good college, Thurgood was fast learning the importance of playing the game even as he stood up for his principles.

  Thurgood had his emerging racial consciousness wrenched on another occasion at Gibson Island. He had a steady friendship with a member of the club who was unfailingly courteous and had been giving him generous tips. One day the man’s wife had an accident while driving to the club in her husband’s Rolls-Royce. Thurgood made sure she was okay, phoned her husband to let him know about the accident, and even helped repair the car.

  Later, the man hired Thurgood to work at a private party at the family’s Baltimore home. The woman showed him a room full of toys abandoned by her grown children. Thurgood mentioned that he knew people in Old West Baltimore who worked with handicapped children and that they would love to have the toys. The woman got excited and immediately offered to donate the toys to the children. A moment later, however, she asked Thurgood if the kids were black. “Yes, ma’am,” he told her. Her face suddenly red and drawn tight, she responded, “I’m not going to give them anything.”

  Thurgood finished his work that night with a fascination for what was going on in the mind of that rich, white woman. But he walked away filled with more pity than bitterness.

  Despite his hurtful experiences with a few white people at the club, Thurgood never leaped to the conclusion that whites were all racists. He was still close to several white men he considered his mentors, such as the club’s secretary, Mr. Fox, and white Jews he knew from the neighborhood, such as Mr. Schoen, the hat store owner. Those positive relationships set a pattern for his life.

  His summer of work at Gibson Island left Thurgood free from any fear of not being able to pay his tuition. He went back to school with confidence that he was there to stay and jumped into every activity on campus. He was never on the football team, but during his sophomore year he displayed a talent for talking about the glories of football at the Lincoln team’s bonfire rallies. His wild speeches, elegizing the great Lincoln teams of the past as well as commenting on the mothers of the opposing team’s players, became legend.

  Meanwhile, Aubrey had to take an extra semester to get ready for medical school. Never one for campus life, he spent most of his free time off campus romancing a pretty Baltimore girl, Sadie Prince. And he already had his acceptance to Howard Medical School in hand. In the winter of 1926 he graduated with honors and soon married Sadie.

  Thurgood, meanwhile, was at the heart of campus life. He took part in two rituals of young male college society. First, he joined Alpha Phi Alpha, an elite fraternity of mostly light-skinned boys. Although the fraternity was at the top of campus society, its hazing was rough. “We’d get hit in the morning, hit in the middle of the night … dousing in cold water and all that kind of crap,” recalled Monroe Dowling, who pledged a rival fraternity, Omega Psi Phi. “People came from all over the country to haze you.… You’d be beaten, branded, mistreated, and everything. That was Lincoln. The most uncouth place in the world.”8

  The second male ritual Thurgood joined at the start of his sophomore year was to grow a mustache, a small, bushy one right below his nose—the same style his father wore. Marshall would keep a mustache for the rest of his life.

  Once he became an Alpha, Thurgood delighted in the nasty tricks fraternity brothers would play on each other and on rival frats. “I can throw water around a curve,” he later claimed with pride. “You put the water in a pitcher, and you hold the pitcher straight up … then about the third time swirling the water—whrrrroooo, throw the water and it will go around the corner.”

  After one of his friends was doused with water by a competing fraternity while wearing good clothes, Thurgood and his frat brothers decided revenge was in order. “We knew in the Lincoln Hall dormitory for some reason they had little trapdoors on every floor. So if you opened the trapdoors you could go from the fourth floor all the way down. So we decided we’d open them all at
one time. We got a big bucket, and everybody on that floor peed in that bucket, and they spit, and some of us were chewing tobacco. And we got a real good bucket of real good stuff in about a week or so. So when the guy is coming in the front door, we dropped the bucket of slop on his head through the trapdoor. Bet it broke him of that habit of throwing water.”

  Thurgood took to researching the best pranks. In his favorite, fraternity brothers would take the pants off the freshmen pledges and stick pickles between the cheeks of their buttocks before having them hop around the room in a race. After all the pickles had fallen on the floor, the older boys would put them in a punch bowl. While the boys were pulling up their pants, the old bowl would be switched with a bowl of fresh pickles. Then the pledges would be told to take a pickle out of the bowl and eat it. “Everyone would say, ‘Can’t I get my own pickle?’ ” Marshall remembered with glee.

  Thurgood personally took part in frat pranks such as shaving the heads of other students—against their will. And he used paddles to hit other students, often with too much enthusiasm. The overly aggressive hazing of a younger student got him kicked out of school. “When the blow [the expulsion] descended, Marshall and friends headed for New York to seek jobs on a ship going around the world,” a New York reporter later wrote. “They failed to find employment and had no alternative but to head back to Baltimore in disgrace.”9

  The boys were saved when one clever student decided that the administration might have some mercy on the troublemakers if they admitted to their crimes. A confession was drawn up, and the twenty-six sophomores, including Thurgood, signed it and were allowed to return to school. The student who had come up with the bright idea was none other than Langston Hughes.

  Hughes, already a well-known poet, was completing his college education at Lincoln. He was twenty-five years old and had lived in Mexico, attended Columbia University, and even worked on the docks in New York. He jumped on one ship that took him to Europe for several months and took another ship for Africa. All the while Hughes’s poetry was being published in New York, especially by the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. When he came back to the United States in the early 1920s, Hughes became a celebrated member of the distinctive group of young black artists who were creating the Harlem Renaissance movement. He was circulating in a crowd that included the singer Paul Robeson and the writers Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. And his first book, The Weary Blues, was already attracting critical acclaim.

  Hughes was quite the star on the Lincoln campus when he showed up in 1926. He was immediately drawn to the pranks of the all-male campus life and joined the Omegas, the rival fraternity to Thurgood’s Alphas. But Hughes had a larger life. He left campus regularly, to attend poetry readings and parties with artists and patrons in Manhattan. He was close to the NAACP’s leadership, including the executive director, James Weldon Johnson, and the editor of The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois.

  Thurgood, meanwhile, continued life as the happy-go-lucky college boy. Hughes later described the Thurgood Marshall he knew at Lincoln as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.”10 But Hughes became a friend, largely because he was entertained and sometimes fascinated by Thurgood’s free and easy life on campus.

  Even on Lincoln’s rural campus, however, Thurgood couldn’t escape the racial issues that Hughes talked about regularly, much to Thurgood’s irritation. In Thurgood’s sociology class the students voted on whether Lincoln should integrate its all-white faculty. The majority of students, with Thurgood in the lead, voted to keep the faculty all white.

  That vote angered fellow students, such as Hughes, who had long protested the absence of blacks on the faculty. Hughes immediately called for a campuswide referendum on the issue. The final tally showed 81 of 127 students voted as Thurgood had, to keep the faculty all white. On a campus dominated by frat life, the number one reason offered for opposing black professors at Lincoln was “favoritism,” which might occur if the professor belonged to one of the competing fraternities. The second reason was “we are doing well as we are.” And the third explanation, the most ironic, was that “students would not cooperate with Negroes.”11

  Thurgood’s cavalier attitude about race relations went through a pivotal transformation just after the campus vote. He and some college pals, including Monroe Dowling, had gone into the small town of Oxford to watch a Saturday afternoon silent cowboy movie. After they purchased tickets, they were told that they could not sit on the main floor of the theater but had to move to the “colored” balcony. The students became angry and asked for their quarters back. The usher refused to give refunds. “So we had a disturbance … pulled down curtains, broke the front door,” Dowling said. “I don’t know who chased us. They didn’t catch anybody.” Marshall later said of the incident, “We knew there was only one pot-bellied cop in town and he could not arrest all of us.”12

  The story of the fracas got back to campus as quickly as Thurgood and his friends. Hughes heard about the incident and used it to confront Thurgood about the racial issues he preferred to ignore.

  Thurgood, for the first time in his life, began thinking about Jim Crow practices. He had long talks with his favorite instructor, Robert Labaree, a sociology professor who had become close to Thurgood as head of the debate team. And Thurgood now also opened himself to several heart-to-heart conversations with Hughes.

  “Langston was really sincere about what he was trying to do,” Dowling said. “It was demeaning the way the white folks, the professors and their children, lived on one side of the road and we lived on the other side of the road and never the twain shall meet. They didn’t even eat in the same dining room.”

  Hughes wrote his senior sociology thesis about the referendum: “The mental processes of the hat-in-hand, yes-boss, typical white-worshiping negro is to my mind very strongly shown in the attitude of some of the students there toward an all-white faculty. Sixty-three percent of the members of the upper classes favor for their college a faculty on which there are no negro professors.” Hughes went on to note that Fisk and Howard had mixed faculties and these schools produced “graduates no less capable than our own.” 13

  W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the NAACP’s magazine, called the vote a “most astonishing blow” to the higher education of Negroes in the United States. He asked readers to imagine the reaction if two-thirds of British students declared “they did not wish to be taught by Englishmen, because they doubted if Englishmen had either the brains or the character to be their teachers.” He asked why parents would send children to a school where after four years the young people would “emerge with no faith in their own parents or in themselves.” 14

  Hughes’s talks and writings in favor of integrating the faculty were powerful and persuasive. After Hughes graduated in 1929, Thurgood took over the campaign. During that fall, with the senior Thurgood in the lead, there was a second referendum. This time the students voted to press the administration to bring in black teachers. The first black professor joined the faculty a year later.

  Another factor advancing Thurgood’s maturity and willingness to engage serious issues was his health. In the spring semester of 1928, there was an accident as he and some schoolmates were hurrying back from Baltimore. The boys were hitchhiking when the truck they were riding in broke down and they pushed it to a nearby garage in Rising Sun, Maryland. While the mechanic began repairs, a local sheriff came by and saw the six young black men standing around waiting. “How long is it going to take you to fix that truck?” the sheriff asked the mechanic. “You be sure to have it done before five o’clock, because I want these niggers out of here before sundown.”

  The truck was fixed that afternoon, and the boys—except for Thurgood, who had wandered off—climbed back in. As the truck was pulling away, Thurgood came running, yelling for them to stop. The driver slowed down, but the truck was still moving when Thurgood jumped to get onboard. “In the process of running to catch it, Thurgood got caught on the tailgate [and] i
njured his testicle,” said Dowling. “We stopped … and got him back on the truck.… The pain was so great.… We wanted to take him to the local hospital, but the doctor there said he thought Thurgood’s injury was of such a magnitude that we should get him back to Baltimore quickly.”

  Marshall lost one of his testicles because of the accident and did not get back to Lincoln until the fall semester of 1928, a semester behind his classmates. He was now a member of the class of 1930. And his friends had a nickname for him: One Ball.

  His injury and time away from school slowed Thurgood’s social life. He began to work harder in the classroom. And his trips off campus became less regular. He was looking to settle down. That year the twenty-year-old Thurgood met Vivian Burey, a seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. She had short, wavy hair. Her thin arms and large breasts led boys to call her Buster, and the nickname stuck. She was described as having an outgoing personality, “fair skin and a sparkling smile.”15

  Thurgood said he met Buster in Philadelphia at an ice cream parlor near her parents’ church. But Buster told friends that she met her young love much earlier. But he was “so busy arguing and debating with everybody at the table” that he didn’t even give her a second glance.16

  Vivian, born February 11, 1911, came from a middle-class family. Her father was a caterer for hotels in Philadelphia, and during the summers he catered for several country clubs across the Delaware River in southern New Jersey. Vivian was in the school of education at the University of Pennsylvania when Thurgood asked her to marry him.

  The wedding, held in 1929 at Philadelphia’s First African Baptist Church, known locally as Cherry Memorial, was a society event, followed by a large reception at the bride’s home. Thurgood’s roommate and friend from college James Murphy served as his best man.

  Thurgood returned to Lincoln while his bride lived with his parents in Baltimore. The young man who had been so playful now displayed a serious mind; for the first time friends saw him study. Young Mr. Marshall graduated with honors in January 1930, just months after the stock market crash of 1929.