Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Hill, a classmate known for his humor and love of cigars, fondly remembered that after their last examinations, “Thurgood and I decided that we would have a pregraduation celebration, and in the lingo of that day, we went to a ‘nip joint’ and ‘booted up a few.’ ”

  After law school Marshall went back to Gibson Island for another summer of work, hoping to save money and consider his plans for the future. There were no law firm internships available for Howard’s graduates. None of the white Baltimore firms hired black lawyers, and the few black lawyers in town ran one-man shops. With time on his hands, Marshall traveled with Houston to look at black elementary schools in the South. The NAACP had done a study—the Margold report—in 1931 proposing a legal challenge to segregation in the public schools. But the association had not settled on a legal strategy. Houston was asked to take a firsthand look at the quality of schools available to black children in the South.

  Marshall and Houston traveled in Houston’s car and found abysmal facilities. “Conditions were much worse than we heard they were,” Marshall said. They drove all the way to New Orleans, staying in private homes and eating whatever greasy food they could get since they could not go into Jim Crow restaurants. “That’s why we carried bags of fruit in the car, most of the time we’d just eat the fruit,” said Marshall.

  Somewhere in Mississippi Houston stopped one day to look at a dilapidated school building. All around were broken-down wooden shacks that housed black sharecroppers. There was little plumbing, and open drainage ditches, filled with human waste, ran along the roads. The faces of the people showed nothing but defeat. While Houston walked around the drafty old schoolhouse, Marshall began to eat his lunch. A black child saw the young lawyer eating an orange. Marshall thought the child was staring at him or the car; then he realized the boy was fascinated with the fruit. He handed the boy a fresh orange. “The kid did not even take the peeling off. He had never seen an orange before. He just bit right through it and enjoyed it.”

  Marshall was shocked. Gone was the contented view of a middle-class kid with white neighbors and mentors who easily accepted Jim Crow. Now his eyes were open to racial injustice. And his mind was open to the thought that a lawyer could reshape society. Marshall did not know exactly what a lawyer could do about racists and poor black kids living in such deprived conditions that an orange was an exotic fruit. But for the first time he wanted to do something, and do it soon.

  CHAPTER 6

  His Own Man

  THURGOOD MARSHALL, FRESH OUT OF LAW SCHOOL in 1933, had a choice to make. He could go to Harvard Law School, on a scholarship offered by Dean Roscoe Pound, for an advanced law degree. Or he could open his own law office in Baltimore. Having lived on the thin edge of every dime he and Buster brought into the house, Marshall had a deep need to show his wife, his family, and himself that he had attained some status in the world. The insult he had felt at the University of Maryland Law School’s ban on black students still burned him, and he wanted to show that he was now as good as any white Maryland Law graduate. It was not even a close decision in young Marshall’s mind. He wanted to get out of law libraries, deal with real cases, make money, and be his own man.

  Marshall’s initial challenge out of law school was passing the Maryland bar exam. He did it on his first try, signing an oath in which he promised to act “fairly and honorably” as a lawyer and pledged allegiance to Maryland, the United States, and the U.S. Constitution on October 11, 1933.

  He was now on his own, but Marshall’s craving for independence had to be balanced with his need to make money. For advice on how to make ends meet, Marshall sought the counsel of the best-known black lawyer in Baltimore, Warner McGuinn.

  McGuinn was a small, cocky, Yale Law graduate, who looked close to white and was a former city councilman. Already in his sixties, McGuinn had recently hired one young black lawyer, W.A.C. Hughes, when Marshall came to see him. But McGuinn could not afford another legal associate and did not even listen to Marshall’s request for a job. Before Marshall could even begin his pitch, McGuinn interrupted him. “Young man, you save your time, you can save my ears. Forget it, I’ve known you since you were born, and I have carefully watched your progress in law school. It’s unbelievably good. And you want to let me have your beautiful, great brain, and I am not going to accept it. You’re going to practice by yourself and get your brains kicked out and then come back to me and we’ll talk.” The senior lawyer did promise Marshall that he would help him set up his office and get some work.

  Marshall was not pleased. “And I can remember now I walked down the hall after him, I said, ‘Unreasonable son of a bitch,’ ” Marshall recalled. “But he was right. I lost more cases, whoo-hoo, but we were always very friendly. He was the only one who helped me.”

  McGuinn did counsel Marshall on the personalities and politics of judges, prosecutors, and cops. He also encouraged Marshall not to give up, even when money was so short that the novice had to take a part-time job as a clerk in the venereal disease section of the city health clinic.

  The Great Depression deepened, and money was tight for whites but almost nonexistent for blacks by 1933. Marshall could afford only a tiny office in downtown Baltimore, on the sixth floor of 4 Redwood Street, the Phoenix Building, which housed most of the city’s black lawyers. In addition to Warner McGuinn and Hughes, there were the law offices of Josiah Henry and Robert McGuinn (Warner’s nephew). Marshall’s office was a single room, dominated by a desk that Warner McGuinn lent him, a black phone, and an old but special rug, donated by his parents from their own living-room floor.

  After a few months of sharing a secretary with McGuinn, Marshall got his own assistant, Sue (nicknamed Little Bits) Tilghman. Occasionally McGuinn or one of the older lawyers would hand Marshall a small case. There was not much to share, however. Few black people were willing to trust a black lawyer with their criminal case, divorce, or will. And with the Depression, a paying client was a rarity. Out of his office window Marshall could see bread lines, which had become commonplace in the city. In the fall of 1933 when Marshall opened his office, Baltimore’s unemployment rate was over 20 percent, even higher among blacks.1 He soon began to have regrets about turning down the offer to study at Harvard. In his first year of practice, Marshall lost $3,500. Clients were so scarce that lunch money became a major concern. To alleviate the problem he would bring a lunch of leftovers to the office one day, and his secretary would bring sandwiches the next.

  “Once in a while, I got a good fee,” Marshall recalled. “Then my secretary would immediately take the check to the bank. She’d call her husband and I’d call Buster, and we’d get the biggest steak in town to celebrate.”2

  It was peanut butter sandwiches more often than steak, however. Marshall hustled for any client he could find, and once in a while the judges at the city court would send black clients to him. But sometimes Marshall did not appreciate the generosity. One day a black woman, with a country accent and a red, tattered skirt, walked into Marshall’s office with legal trouble but no money. He asked how she happened to pick him out to handle her case. She said that in her South Carolina hometown, if anyone had a problem they asked a judge what to do. And when she went to see a judge in Baltimore, he sent her to Marshall, telling her, “He’s a freebie” lawyer. “So I said, ‘I’ve got to stop that crap right now,’ ” Marshall recalled with a laugh.

  Marshall’s lack of work meant he had time to take some more NAACP fact-finding trips with Charles Houston. They toured Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Mississippi to investigate segregation in schools. Houston often used a movie camera to document the horrid conditions. The schools usually were wooden structures, no more than shacks. They had no insulation, and it was common to be able to see the sky through the many holes in the roofs. The floors were sometimes dirt and ran thick with mud when rain fell.

  The two men prepared reports to send back to the NAACP. “Charlie Houston and I used to type sitting in the car
with a typewriter in our laps,” Marshall recalled. The sight of two black men investigating segregated schools sometimes led to threats from local whites. In Mississippi the concerns were so great that the state NAACP president assigned a funeral hearse, with two riflemen inside, to ride behind Houston and Marshall for protection.

  Houston’s relationship with Marshall changed during these trips. No longer just Marshall’s teacher, he became a senior partner as they looked at how the law could affect race relations. The always serious Houston engaged Marshall in long discussions over the difference racial integration could make in the lives of black people. If blacks and whites went to the same, integrated schools, Houston argued, then smart black children, like smart white children, could become captains of industry. Integration would mean that whites would interact with blacks, and racist stereotypes would melt away. He impressed upon Marshall the idea that integration was the key to equal rights, because it ensured that blacks and whites got the same opportunities.

  Marshall returned from his trips to the Deep South more convinced than ever of the need to overthrow the racist laws that kept southern blacks poor and uneducated. His day-to-day life, however, saw him still struggling to make his law firm a success. But the greatest burden on him—a young man desperate to proclaim his independence—was that he was still living with his parents, in a house filled with bickering and tension.

  The family house at 1838 Druid Hill Avenue was crowded, with Norma and Willie, as well as Thurgood and his wife, his brother and sister-in-law, and their new infant child, Aubrey Jr. Sadie’s mother also came to live in the house, which had five bedrooms and only one cramped bathroom for the eight people.

  The rough spots in Marshall’s relationship with his father and his brother never did get ironed out; in these conditions they worsened. His father continued to drink heavily, although he still held his job at Gibson Island. The glue that kept the family together was Norma’s strong personality. She held sway over her husband and sons and was the final word in any dispute, over money or the rules for taking food out of the refrigerator. In this household the women often eclipsed the men, much as they had when Marshall was a child.

  Willie Marshall continued to work during the spring and summer months, but the Depression cut down on the money the rich had to fritter away at the club. Meanwhile, Aubrey Marshall opened his own medical practice on Carey Street as a general practitioner. Business was slow, however. One of his Old West Baltimore friends recalled that most of the black doctors in Baltimore were supported by their wives, who were usually schoolteachers. “Negroes didn’t have any money for a doctor,” said Pat Patterson, who lived near the Marshalls.3 As a result, Aubrey was forced to work part-time in the city’s health clinic.

  Despite the money troubles and tense atmosphere at the house, Thurgood and Buster, by most accounts, were happy together. Their main difficulty was with Buster’s attempts to have children. Several of the couple’s friends reported that Buster had a miscarriage during these years in Baltimore. The problems with pregnancy caused more than the usual anxiety for Thurgood; since he had only one testicle after his college accident, he feared that he might not ever be able to father children.

  Despite the miscarriages, Buster continued to work. She went through a series of jobs to help support the family, including one selling Bond Bread in a Jewish store near their house. She also worked in Sally’s Boutique on Druid Hill Avenue, selling women’s hats, belts, and shoes.

  Even when Buster worked, though, she sometimes had trouble getting paid. Once she went to work for a man writing a catalog of Negro businesses. After two weeks, however, the man stopped paying her. Buster asked Thurgood to sue him, but Thurgood refused, explaining it would be a waste of time because the guy probably did not have the money.

  But Buster decided she was going to get her money. She filed a complaint with the local judge, who asked why Thurgood wasn’t handling the case. She explained her husband was too busy trying to find paying clients. The judge laughed. But a few days later Buster’s nonpaying boss was arrested. She came to court and not only listed the paychecks she had not received but took the time to make an account of all the money the scoundrel owed other people around the city. The judge ruled in her favor and she got her money.

  In the meantime, her husband’s practice began to pick up. He handled divorces, personal injury, car accidents, murder, and rape cases. Marshall even handled a case for his brother, in which Aubrey was sued for $2,500 and charged by another motorist with “reckless driving.” Marshall got the case settled out of court.4 This was a vintage early case for the young lawyer.

  But Marshall would soon find himself with three cases that were critical to his development. The first came in June of 1934. Sitting in his office one afternoon, Marshall got a nervous call from his neighbor Pat Patterson. A young black man had been arrested for murder in southern Maryland, and Patterson had convinced the suspect’s parents to hire Marshall to represent their son. Twenty-five-year-old James Gross had been charged with the murder of a man who ran a barbecue stand in nearby Prince Georges County. Local papers ran sensational stories about Gross and his accomplices, dubbing them the Three Black Dillingers, a reference to the gangster John Dillinger.5

  “I knew the family of the boy,” said Patterson, “and they needed a lawyer, so I talked to Thurgood and he was interested. They wanted a black lawyer. There were several black lawyers in Washington that I knew personally, but I didn’t think they had a ghost of a chance in Prince Georges County. I wasn’t sure that even Marshall would have a chance. But I felt that he probably would have a better chance coming from Maryland.”

  The trial, in the county seat of Upper Marlboro, lasted only a few days. Marshall argued that his client had just driven the car while the two other men actually shot the store owner. But the jury was not persuaded. The three were convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang. A few months later one of the men, Donald Parker, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Marshall’s client was not so lucky. On April 19, 1935, James Gross was hanged just after midnight at the Maryland Penitentiary.6

  “The ringleader got off—he had a smarter lawyer than what the other boys had at the time,” said Patterson. “Parker’s lawyers were white. They had practices in Prince Georges County. And if you could afford to hire either of them or both, you could commit murder and get away with it.”

  Upon the death of his client, Marshall felt the sting of his own inadequacies as a lawyer. He was enraged by the arbitrary sentencing. The actual murderer was smiling and strolling out of court with a life sentence while the driver of the getaway car was sobbing and babbling for mercy as he walked to the gallows. Marshall had never opposed the death penalty, but now he saw it as a crude instrument, smashing the little guy while missing the bloody murderer.

  Another case that deeply affected Marshall came two years later. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP asked him to represent a black suspect, Virtis Lucas, who was accused in the fatal shooting of Hyman Brilliant, a white man. The Baltimore police picked Lucas up and questioned him for three days, severely beating him until he confessed. Marshall, using his brother to help with Lucas’s medical condition, went to the city jail and prepared him to stand trial.7

  In a tense March trial that captivated the city, Marshall stood before an all-white jury and this time pointed the finger of blame at the police. It was an emotional trial for him. He didn’t want to lose another client to the death penalty, and he felt the weight of his family’s history, recalling the stories of his grandfather’s stand against police brutality in the “Cake Walk” homicide.

  Marshall began his defense by making sure the jury was aware of just how badly his client had been beaten after the arrest. Then he made his client into a sympathetic figure, a weak-minded boy who had been idly shooting off a gun in an alley a few blocks away around the time of the murder. That youngster, Marshall contended, became an easy target for a murder charge when Baltimore police
could not find the real killer.

  The all-white jury was swayed by the young lawyer’s pleadings. Lucas was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to just six months in prison.8 The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was thrilled that Lucas was not sentenced to be hanged. And they were greatly impressed that a black lawyer had been able to defend a black man in Baltimore’s white justice system.

  Marshall was learning how to work with the white legal system, creating a personal network among lawyers and judges in the city and building a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer. In the third major case of his young career, he broke ground as the first black lawyer to defend a white lawyer in Maryland. The white lawyer, Bernard Ades, had been defending a black client charged with murder. Ades challenged the conviction on the grounds that his client had not been given a fair trial because of his race.

  A radical lawyer best known for his ties to the Communist ILD [International Labor Defense], Ades was not popular with the state’s judges. Baltimore judges were openly hostile to unionization of the city’s blue-collar workforce. Picketing and strikes intended to shut down factories were often thwarted by court injunctions. Communists were frequently blamed by the city’s major employers for union-organizing attempts.

  After Ades charged that his client was a victim of the judge’s racism, Judge William C. Coleman wanted Ades’s right to practice law suspended and started a hearing in state court to take away his license.9 Ades immediately called Charles Houston, whom he knew from the labor movement. Houston agreed to represent him if he could have Marshall, who knew the Baltimore courts and judges, as his cocounsel. Soon after they took the case, Judge Coleman called the two black attorneys into his chambers. He felt Ades had unfairly damaged his reputation by accusing him of racism. If Marshall and Houston made any similar charges, the judge warned, he would have them jailed for contempt of court.