Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  When Marshall heard through the Howard grapevine that some lawyers in Washington were thinking about suing the law school, he got upset and wrote to Houston that he wanted to be the first to file suit. He could not bear to allow any other lawyer to take the lead on this case. Working with William Gosnell, another black attorney in Baltimore, Marshall identified a willing plaintiff in December 1934. Donald Gaines Murray was a black student with good grades from a good college. Marshall did not know the twenty-one-year-old Murray, but once he and Gosnell started talking to him, Marshall found out that Murray was related to Uncle Fearless’s wife, Aunt Florence. And Murray had attended Lincoln College for two years before transferring to Amherst.

  In addition to his good grades from Amherst, Murray had another advantage as a prospective plaintiff. His family was well respected in Baltimore because his grandfather was an African Methodist Episcopal bishop. Murray had been thinking about studying law, and it did not take much for Marshall to convince him to apply to the University of Maryland.

  Just as Marshall had anticipated, Maryland turned down Murray’s application. University officials suggested he apply to the all-black Princess Anne Academy, part of the state university system. But the academy had no law school. When Murray wrote an angry letter of complaint to the university’s board of regents, they replied that he should consider Howard because it was cheaper than Maryland.

  Marshall worked long hours on the case with Gosnell and got advice from Houston, who agreed to have the national NAACP finance the suit. Houston later explained that he saw Murray’s case as a “springboard for extending the attacks [against racial segregation in the United States] on a larger front.”2 On April 20, 1935, with Marshall acting as his attorney, Murray sued in Baltimore City Court, charging the university with violating the Fourteenth Amendment (giving all Americans equal protection of the laws) by refusing his application.

  There was some delay, however, as the state’s lawyers tried every trick to keep the case from coming before a judge. Marshall, not wanting to appear combative and keeping with his style of charming the city’s white establishment, made no objection to the stalling tactics. Finally, the tough, antiunion judge Eugene O’Dunne confronted Marshall: “Excuse me, Mr. Marshall, do you want to try this case or not?” A stunned Marshall shot up from his seat and said he very much wanted to get going. “Well act like it—say no [to the postponement]!” A newly energized Marshall happily raised his voice to shout out “No,” and the judge, now smiling, set the trial date for the next morning.3

  The case began on June 17, with Marshall and Houston sitting next to Murray in the courtroom. The three black men all wore their best clothes, double-breasted wool suits with handkerchiefs in the breast pockets and stiff white shirts underneath. Marshall had to ask the court to admit Houston to the Maryland Bar [he was a Washington lawyer], and Judge O’Dunne joked that it was funny seeing the student asking that his law school dean be allowed to speak to the court.4

  As the case started, Maryland’s assistant attorney general Charles T. LeViness III declared that the university provided “substantially similar educational facilities for Negroes” at the Princess Anne Academy. LeViness also told the judge that the state provided money to black students who wanted to go to school outside Maryland if there were no state schools open to blacks.

  Marshall stood to argue for Murray and cited a 1927 Supreme Court case, Gong Lum v. Rice, in which a Chinese girl in Mississippi sued to gain admission to a white school. The Court ruled against her because schools for colored and Chinese children were available in Mississippi. But in Maryland, Marshall argued, there was no state law school for blacks. In addition, Murray could not go to an out-of-state school because no law school in the country could equal the University of Maryland at teaching the laws of Baltimore and Maryland.

  The next day, in startling fashion, Judge O’Dunne ruled in Murray’s favor. The university appealed but lost. The speed and completeness of the victory surprised Marshall. The young lawyer had expected a longer fight. He had even planned what to do when he lost—he was going to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. “Well, we won,” he said, “and in Maryland. And that wasn’t easy.”

  The Baltimore Evening Sun’s witty social critic, the columnist H. L. Mencken, wrote that while he did not support mixing black and white children in Baltimore’s public schools, he had no problem with Murray studying law with whites as “an Ethiop among the Aryans.” Mencken said law students were not children and neither were they “adolescents going through the ordinary college mill and eager only to dance [and] neck.” He said they were in school to learn and to join an honorable profession. “To think of [the white students] as crackers hugging idiotically their more fortuitous whiteness is to say at once that they are unfit to be admitted to the bar of any civilized state,” he wrote.5

  The victory made history, and it gave Marshall a rush of pleasure at having defeated the law school that had deemed itself too good for any black, including him. Long after Marshall had beaten his personal dragon, he still crowed about getting “even” with the university.

  As the reality of what had happened in the Maryland case took hold and word spread to other cities, the NAACP’s national office realized that something special, even magical, had happened in Baltimore. And inevitably they tied the victory to the local branch’s young attorney. Marshall was now a rising star to people outside of Maryland.

  But Marshall still had to leap two more hurdles to get Murray into the law school. First, Murray could not afford to pay the tuition, and attempts to raise enough money in Baltimore were unsuccessful. At Marshall’s insistence Houston wrote to Walter White, the NAACP’s executive secretary. Houston said if Murray did not go to the school, the case would “become moot and you can see [what] that would do to our plans and programs.”6 The NAACP’s national office and the Afro’s Carl Murphy came to the rescue. The NAACP handed tuition money for the first semester to Carl Murphy, figuring that young Donald Murray was more likely to repay Mister Carl, the local legend, than a big organization based in distant New York.

  Within a year Carl Murphy began hammering the family to repay the money, asking Murray’s sister, Margery Prout, a schoolteacher, to make monthly payments. Prout later said she felt threatened, even “blackmailed” by Murphy’s incessant demands for the money and the possibility that he would print critical remarks about her family’s debt in the Afro-American. Yet, from the NAACP’s point of view, the repayment was necessary to allow the group to fund other civil rights activities.7

  There was still one other hurdle for Marshall to overcome to get Murray into school. When Marshall accompanied Murray to the law school in September, the dean suggested that Murray not sit next to white students. Marshall walked around the campus until he found two white students who agreed to tell the dean they had no problem sitting next to Murray. After Murray’s first week of school in October, the Afro reported that “classmates were exceedingly cordial and so were professors.”8

  In the summer of 1935, while Marshall was busy protecting Murray, Lillie May Jackson and Carl Murphy began looking for a student to test segregation on the secondary school level. The Afro had long written tear-jerking stories about Baltimore County, where there was no high school for blacks. A black child who wanted to go to high school had to travel an average of ten miles to reach Baltimore’s segregated Douglass High.

  Jackson and Murphy wanted a black high school built in the county. Stirred by their lawyer’s unexpected success in the courtroom, they decided to file suit against the county school board. Murphy put up money for Marshall and another young lawyer, Robert McGuinn (Warner McGuinn’s nephew), to travel through Baltimore County, charting a map for the NAACP showing the condition of black elementary schools and comparing them with the nearest white schools. Marshall figured that McGuinn could get into the white school buildings because “he look[ed] enough like our white brethren.” Carl Murphy’s Afro published the results of Marshall and McGui
nn’s trip, reporting that the two found black schools “falling down, [with] tottering roofs, rotten floors.”9

  Houston had taken a leave of absence from Howard Law School to become the NAACP’s lawyer at its headquarters. With prompting from Carl Murphy, who was a member of the national NAACP’s board, Houston used his new position to get the NAACP to finance a suit against Baltimore County schools. The law school dean successfully argued that the legal work being done in Maryland was a laboratory for developing techniques the NAACP could later use to fight segregation laws across the nation.

  In March 1936, Marshall filed a suit that hit Catonsville High School like buckshot. He sued the principal, David W. Zimmerman, and the county superintendent as well as the entire Baltimore County School Board. Even though the suit asked that Margaret Williams, thirteen, be admitted to all-white Catonsville High, the real goal was to get the county to build a high school for black children. By threatening to force black students into the all-white school, Marshall hoped to give the county no choice but to do what Carl Murphy and the NAACP had been pressing for—construction of a separate, equal black high school. Trying to win support from white parents, Houston suggested to Marshall that black parents contact white newspapers to stress that they had no interest in integration but only better schools for black kids.

  The case went to trial in September with Marshall as the lead attorney, supported by one of his former law professors, Leon Andrew Ransom. Edward Lovett, a lawyer in Houston’s Washington law firm, and Oliver Hill, Marshall’s classmate from Howard, rounded out the team.

  In court the school board’s lawyers treated Marshall with no respect. He wrote to Houston that his adversaries were “exceptionally mean, nasty and arrogant.”10 But Marshall kept to his style of always being the helpful black man in the courtroom, never threatening in his manner to a judge or opposing lawyers. At one critical moment in the trial he stood up to lend a hand to his rude legal opponents: “They did not cite a single case other than the Gong Lum case, and we had to tell them the citation of that case.”

  Even with Marshall helping them, the board’s lawyers “injected prejudice” into the case by arguing that admitting a black girl to a white high school would “break down the traits of the state of Maryland.”11 This was the first time Marshall had seen lawyers argue that the essence of southern tradition was to keep blacks on the bottom of the social caste system. He was genuinely hurt. At heart he wanted to be a part of the Maryland establishment. Yet here were educated white people arguing before him in a court of law that all of southern life boiled down to making sure that black people never got above their desperate slave past.

  Judge Frank Duncan refused even to consider Marshall’s argument that the county’s schools were separate but unequal in quality at the elementary level. And he would not consider the absence of a high school for blacks as evidence of racial inequality. The judge limited his rulings to a simple review of whether the plaintiff, Margaret Williams, had passed a qualifying test to get into Douglass High, which she had not. The narrow ruling left little on the record for an appellate court to consider. There was no ruling on the issue of whether schools for black children were inadequate or the wider issue of school segregation. Marshall and Houston decided that an appeal was futile.

  Despite the defeat in the Williams case, the NAACP’s national office was pleased with Marshall’s work. Walter White, the executive director, gained new respect for Marshall and began using him as the NAACP’s point man in Washington in a highly publicized crusade to stop lynching. White made passage of federal antilynching legislation the civil rights group’s major goal. A 1936 NAACP flyer claimed that 5,105 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1936.

  Marshall was well aware of the barbaric act of angry whites lynching blacks, usually in small southern towns. In 1933 Maryland’s black activists had been shaken by a notorious lynching in Princess Anne. After a retarded black man had grabbed at a white woman and torn her dress, 5,000 whites had burned the man alive in the courthouse square.

  Marshall began to lobby Maryland’s senators and representatives. Marshall was ideal for approaching Maryland congressmen. He was a charmer who got along well with whites, and he knew the law. Most important, however, he was persistent. Marshall was already known as a man who would not be brushed aside or intimidated by anyone, including members of Congress.

  Marshall wrote a letter to Millard Tydings, a Maryland Democrat, to say NAACP chief Walter White had informed him that the senator had not taken a stand in support of a bill to stop lynchings. “This was indeed as much of a shock to me as I am sure it will be to many of your constituents when they become aware of the fact,” he wrote.12 Senator Tydings replied that he was concerned that states retain the right to handle their own local crimes. It was a transparent political move. Tydings was really worried that whites in Maryland’s southern counties would not back him in the next election if he had voted for any bill protecting blacks.

  Not wanting to alienate either his liberal or his conservative constituents, Tydings scheduled a long trip to the Virgin Islands to avoid having to take a stand on the antilynching bill. When Marshall found out about the planned trip, he sent an urgent, angry telegram to the senator: “Understand you insist on going to Virgin Islands for last two or three months of Congress despite fact you were absent from early part of session. May we urge you to remain in Washington as our representative until bills of such vital importance as the anti-lynching bill are disposed of?” Tydings gave an angry retort in another telegram: “Please couch your telegrams in the future in more genteel language if you want them answered.”13 Nonetheless, the senator canceled his trip.

  White also got Marshall, in his capacity as secretary of the National Bar Association, to write President Roosevelt, urging the White House to flex its muscle in the fight to ban lynchings. Charles Houston, too, wrote the president, asking Roosevelt to speak out against delays in the Senate vote. Roosevelt did nothing.

  “We couldn’t get a damned thing through Congress,” Marshall said later. “You can’t name one bill that passed in the Roosevelt administration for Negroes. Nothing. We couldn’t even get the anti-lynch bill through. So you had to go to the courts.”

  While he was increasingly engaged in NAACP work, Marshall’s law practice in Baltimore was sinking. He had small cases, but even when he won he had to wait forever to get paid. Although most clients were pleased with the legal work he did, all were not. One black woman filed a complaint with the local bar association charging that Marshall had not earned the twenty-five dollars he charged to represent her in a divorce case. The complaint went before the city’s all-white bar, which ruled in Marshall’s favor. “The judgment of the committee was that she owed me one hundred more dollars,” Marshall said. “And they made her pay it, too.”

  Marshall’s work for the NAACP and his rising profile on the pages of the Afro led to a small movement to get him to run for the House of Representatives. Having been on his own for a while now, Marshall was starting to see the advantages of working with other people. When an independent party asked him to consider a run for Congress in 1936, he was flattered and seriously interested. At the time there was only one black in Congress, Arthur Mitchell, an Illinois Democrat.

  “The gang that has been trying to get me to run for Congress has just left the office,” Marshall wrote to Houston in New York in January 1936. “The fellow whom I thought was a communist has turned out not to be.… I am going to talk the matter over with Carl Murphy tomorrow. I have not decided finally as yet and want you to advise me once and for all as to just what you think is best.”14

  Houston advised Marshall in a telegram to accept the nomination and run for Congress but “avoid communism and personal expense.”15 Marshall was not strongly anti-Communist. Living through the Depression led him to be curious about their efforts to build unions in Baltimore, and their outspoken sympathy for the working class, specifically black people. When Marshall had
represented Bernard Ades, the Communist lawyer, he’d never voiced objection to Ade’s ideology—just to his courtroom antics.

  While Houston gave Marshall the okay on a run for Congress as an independent, Murphy apparently was not so supportive. A staunch capitalist and small businessman, Mr. Carl told Marshall it was a waste of time to get involved with the left-wing economic crowd when he needed to build his law practice. Marshall decided against running.

  However, he was still in the market for a steady paycheck and looking to get more work from the NAACP. He was no longer the young maverick, out to prove he could make it on his own. He even asked Leon Ransom, who was teaching at Howard Law, about getting a teaching job at his alma mater. In April of 1936 Ransom wrote to Marshall, in a letter warmly addressed “Dear No-Good,” that there would be two openings for the next school year. He offered a recommendation, as did Houston. But faculty politics, including a faction that resented Houston and saw Marshall as his protégé, put an end to any chance of Marshall joining the teaching staff.

  By late May 1936 Marshall’s law practice was in serious trouble. He got letters from Prentice-Hall publishing company, complaining that he was six months late in paying his bill for law books. Sinking in debt, the persistent Marshall repeatedly tried to convince Houston to hire him. “The real problem mostly pertains to me,” Marshall wrote to Houston in New York. “As it stands things are getting worse and worse.… If there is a possibility I would appreciate it very much if I could be assured of enough to tide me over, then in return, I could do more on [NAACP] cases. For example, to prepare briefs and research, etc.… [on] the legal matters which you would need assistance on.”16

  Marshall was under severe pressure to bring money home. Aubrey had been unable to work regularly as a doctor for a few months because of a bad cold. And to make matters worse, Thurgood’s father had lost his job at the Gibson Island Club. Willie’s prickly personality had gotten him into a loud dispute with a white staff person at the club, which ended with Willie out of work.