Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Tearing down the walls of legal segregation was a mountain of a task. There were very few black lawyers in the country, little money to pay them, and in some areas of the South their work on civil rights cases could get them run out of business if not thrown out of town. Given that daunting challenge, Houston had taken the job as the NAACP’s lawyer with the idea of enlisting the best and bravest of the black lawyers around the country to form a legal assault team. “This is no star performance,” Houston wrote to Marshall and other black lawyers who were working on NAACP cases. “[I want to] make the movement self-perpetuating so that no loss of the head or any set of members will hamper progress.”1

  Houston’s plan, based on Margold’s blueprint, was to have NAACP lawyers around the country file suits demanding separate and equal facilities for blacks. He expected that whites would not be able to pay to equalize the schools and judges would be forced to end segregation.

  When Marshall arrived in October 1936, the NAACP was just blossoming into a major organization. At twenty-six years old, the group had gone through an infancy in which it was nurtured by mostly white social workers and liberal activists to fight lynching. Slowly it had flowered into the premier agency for battling Jim Crow discrimination. And with W.E.B. Du Bois editing The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, the group’s name had become a siren call to action for people willing to stand together to fight racism. Just joining the NAACP was an act of defiance for blacks in the South. And among intellectuals and activists in the North, association meetings had become the center for all strategy and organizing discussions about race in America.

  Even as it grew, however, the NAACP remained heavily dependent on white philanthropists. The legal department’s money came from Charles Garland, a back-to-the-earth advocate who had inherited his fortune and decided to ease the guilt over his good luck by giving most of it away. The legal department’s budget during Marshall’s first year at the headquarters was only $10,000. Charles Houston was paid $4,000 annually, and after travel and legal expenses there was only $2,400 left for Marshall’s salary.

  Although he was low on money, Marshall felt rich with the excitement of his new job. Buster, by contrast, not only didn’t have any money but she had to get used to a new city and living with a new set of relatives.

  A few weeks after their move to New York, Aunt Medi found Buster and Thurgood an inexpensive room on 149th Street. Near their new Harlem apartment Marshall soon ran into an old Lincoln University buddy, Monroe Dowling. The prideful, ambitious Dowling had a reputation for being a great card player because of his ability as a mathematician. When he ran into Marshall he was working as an accountant for New York State after having earned his master’s degree in business from Harvard. His wife, Helen, quickly became best friends with Buster, and on most nights the couples ate dinner at the Dowlings’ place, played cards, and drank.2

  Dowling frequently got bootleg liquor from underworld friends. After leaving Harvard, he had become the accountant for one of Harlem’s biggest illegal numbers operators. That led to friendships with people who had easy access to whiskey. Marshall and Dowling, both proud and well educated, had a close relationship, although Dowling had little tolerance for Marshall’s antics and his grand stories. “Every once in a while he’d say something and we’d disagree about it,” Dowling said. “I’d say, ‘Thurgood, you know damn good and well that’s a lie,’ and he’d acknowledge it and say, ‘You have to lie sometimes.’ ”

  At the NAACP offices, with Houston often gone on trips, Marshall was left within earshot of Walter White. The ebullient and energetic NAACP leader began enlisting Marshall in a more extensive role in the antilynching campaign. He had him track antilynching legislation and lobby congressmen.

  The NAACP was accustomed to a hostile reception in Washington. The capital was a southern town, and the association was viewed as a radical northern group that stirred up trouble. In the 1930s segregationist Democrats in the House had even passed a bill to erect a monument honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis. It was going to be difficult for a young black lawyer to make much of a difference with legislators in that atmosphere.

  In a summary prepared on the status of the antilynching bill in April 1937, Marshall wrote that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Hatton W. Summers had “boasted for more than four years that he would not report favorably any anti-lynching bill.”3 But Marshall persisted. He began to work around Summers by lobbying other congressmen for a tough “NAACP” bill to halt lynchings.

  Ironically, the lone black member of the House, Rep. Arthur Mitchell, proposed a different bill. His bill was not as strong as the NAACP’s proposal for punishing people who took part in mob action. Charles Houston denounced it as impotent and ineffective. Mitchell dismissed Houston’s statements and claimed that the NAACP was “not seeking to aid the race but intend[ing] only to feather the nest of its officials at the expense of the black public.” He condemned the NAACP as a dishonest group, which “had deteriorated into a bunch of communists.”4

  Marshall had spent several weeks in Washington working to gain support for the NAACP’s bill. Surprisingly, Mitchell’s bill was defeated, and thanks to Marshall’s diligent work the stronger NAACP proposal passed in the House. But the Senate version of the bill died without a vote. Marshall, Houston, and White were left empty-handed for all their efforts. Still, the NAACP had raised the issue to national prominence and put pressure on federal and state officials to stop lynchings.

  In addition to going to Washington, Marshall also started traveling the South for the NAACP. Going to local NAACP chapters, Marshall sought out cases dealing with schools, voting rights, and situations where blacks were unfairly charged with crimes. Marshall’s memos to the New York office on his travels were revealing, sometimes even comic. In a memo from South Boston, Virginia, he wrote: “School situation is terrible. Principal of elementary school is gardener and janitor for the county superintendent of schools and is a typical Uncle Tom.”5

  While Marshall took on more responsibility, Houston spent his time on major cases in Tennessee and Missouri. In Tennessee a black student was trying to get into the state’s College of Pharmacy. With no pharmacy school for blacks in the state, Houston argued that the white school had to integrate. But the court ruled against him. Tennessee officials claimed a historically black school, Tennessee A & I, was equal to the University of Tennessee and could begin a pharmacy program. “This case means nothing in 1937,” Houston told a newspaper reporter. “But in 2000 A.D. somebody will look back on the record and wonder why the South spent so much money in keeping rights from Negroes rather than granting them.”6

  Houston had more success in Missouri. It had no historically black colleges with professional programs to use as a veil. Houston decided that the state was the perfect target for a suit. He got a black college graduate, Lloyd Gaines, to apply to the state law school.

  Houston viewed the Missouri suit as key to the NAACP effort to desegregate schools nationwide. He was laying the groundwork for the argument that if no separate but equal schools existed for black students, there was no option but integration. “I firmly believe the Missouri case is going to set the pace for Negro professional and graduate education for the next generation,” he wrote in a letter to another lawyer, apparently expecting that this case would end with a victory for integration at the postgraduate level.7 But the case proved to be more difficult than Houston had anticipated. He lost on the local level and had to go to an appeals court.

  The case finally worked its way up to the Supreme Court in December of 1938. In a surprise victory the Court ruled that the University of Missouri had to admit the twenty-eight-year-old Gaines to its law school. Houston had successfully used the Murray case in Maryland to persuade the high court that Gaines had a right to attend Missouri’s law school. But while the Murray case had had impact only in Maryland, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Missouri case was felt nationwide.

  “I have been given the right to enter M
issouri University in September,” the wiry, chain-smoking Gaines said in a speech at a St. Louis YMCA in January of 1939. “And I have every expectation of exercising that privilege.”8

  Missouri did not accept defeat easily. In early 1939 officials built a new, Jim Crow law school at historically black Lincoln University in Jefferson City. The state then claimed that with separate and equal facilities available to Gaines, there was no need to admit him to the University of Missouri. The NAACP lawyers rushed to state court to argue that Gaines should be admitted to the university because the new school was not ready to open. After a lower court disagreed, the Missouri State Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NAACP.

  Marshall, celebrating the small victory, wrote to Houston in Washington congratulating him: “I turned the opinion over to leader Wilkins who promised a riproaring press release which can be summed up in the words of the master Joe Louis, ‘I glad I winned.’ ”9

  Meanwhile, Missouri politicians were still trying to put together a new school for blacks before September. Houston and Marshall got sidetracked, however. Their client, Gaines, wanted the NAACP to treat him like a star. He wanted adulation and stroking from fellow students, from his friends, the press, and anyone else who dared to speak to him. At the same time he complained that he was under pressure from all the attention that came to him because he was the NAACP’s client in a case that was attracting national attention.

  To quiet his constant carping the NAACP lent Gaines money so he could get a master’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan while the Missouri case worked its way through the courts. If Gaines threw in the towel, the association would have to go back to the start with a new plaintiff, spending more time and money on the same case.

  While Gaines was throwing tantrums, Houston continued working closely with Marshall on new arguments to thwart Missouri’s attempts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling. Even if the new black law school were opened in time, the NAACP lawyers planned to contend that it could not be the equal of the ninety-year-old University of Missouri law school.

  But no matter what their strategy might be, the NAACP had to have Gaines appear in court. By the first day of school, however, their client was nowhere to be found. The NAACP was unable to proceed with the case. In October newspapers around the country began running headlines about the missing law student. The Baltimore Afro-American said Gaines was not missing but had stopped cooperating with the NAACP because they would not give him more money: “The association in refusing [to pay Gaines] said that it was not marrying him but defending him in court,” the editorial said. “With Gaines gone, however, it might have proved cheaper for the NAACP to marry him.”

  An Afro columnist, Louis Lautier, suggested Gaines could have been bribed or killed. Walter White agreed with the suggestion of bribery. He heard Gaines had sent a postcard from Mexico to a friend and was having “a jolly time on the $2,000” he had been given to leave the country.10

  The last undisputed word from Gaines came in a letter to his mother written in March 1939, well before it was known that he was missing. He wrote from Chicago to say that people were glad to pat him on the back and say pleasant things about his contribution to civil rights history but not much more. “Out of the confines of the publicity columns I am just a man—not one who has fought and sacrificed to make the case possible; one who is still fighting and sacrificing—almost the ‘supreme sacrifice’ to see that it is a complete and lasting success for 13 million Negroes—no!—just another man. Sometimes I wish I were just a plain ordinary man whose name no one recognized.… Should I forget to write for a time don’t worry about it, I can look after myself.”11

  Gaines was never located, and the NAACP was forced to give up the case. Without Gaines they lost the cutting edge of the fight against school segregation. But in 1940 Lucille Bluford, the editor of a black newspaper, The Kansas City Call, agreed to apply for admission to Missouri’s graduate school of journalism. However, the university shut down its white journalism school rather than admit blacks or start a Jim Crow journalism school. The NAACP had lost again.

  While the NAACP’s legal strategy was going through heart-wrenching setbacks, Houston was going through his own personal difficulties. He left New York to spend a month in Reno, Nevada, where he got a divorce from his wife, Gladys, after thirteen years of marriage. When he got back to Washington, he immediately married his secretary, Henrietta Williams.12

  Houston’s crisis went beyond his love interests. By April 1938 he wrote to his father, William—who had recently been named assistant attorney general of the United States—that he was coming home to run the family law firm. He confided that he was tired of the demands of working for a large organization like the NAACP, especially since he had to report to a sizable board of directors: “I have had the feeling all along that I am much more of an outside man than an inside man; that I usually break down under too much routine.”

  Another point of irritation for Houston was that he had to take orders from Walter White, a man he viewed as egocentric. White’s lust for the high-society scene and having his name in the papers was difficult to swallow for Houston, the disciplined former army officer and law school dean. But Houston had no regrets. Although he had made very little money while working at the NAACP, he said, “I would not give anything for the experience that I have had.”13

  Ironically, just as Houston was reducing his responsibilities at NAACP headquarters, the board of directors, in a December 1937 meeting, said Houston’s and Marshall’s legal work for the association was critically important and should be continued “at all costs.”14 Nevertheless, Houston left New York in July of 1938. With Houston gone, Marshall was given a raise to $2,600 a year, still far less than the $4,000 that Houston had been paid to run the NAACP’s legal office.

  “I got a raise after I got up there. I went up there at $2,400, and two years later they raised it to $2,600,” Marshall recalled in an interview. “Two hundred dollars a year. My wife said, ‘How much is that a week?’ ” To supplement his small paycheck, Thurgood persuaded Buster to get involved in a co-op market in Harlem. The Marshalls’ work with the market was in the tradition of Thurgood’s grandparents—all of whom ran markets. The couple even delivered groceries once in a while to earn some money.15

  Despite the poor pay, Marshall was happy at the NAACP. Unlike Houston, Marshall discovered that he was very comfortable being an inside man and having the support that came from being in a big operation. He was thrilled by the opportunity to travel around the nation and work on the major issues of the law and segregation. Furthermore, he had strong support on the NAACP’s board from the Afro-American’s editor and NAACP board member Carl Murphy.

  Speaking about that time Marshall recalled a man-to-man talk he had with Houston: “We were walking down the street together, and Charlie was saying, ‘You know how much money you’re making. And you can imagine how much money I make. And I still say you have more goddamn fun than I do.” After his high twitter of a laugh, Marshall, who now found himself inheriting his dream job of running the NAACP’s legal office, told Houston: “Ain’t no question about that.”

  Five years out of law school, the student who had so much wanted to prove that he could make it—as his own man with a private law practice—now chose to stay within the arguments, the egos, and the bureaucracy of the national office of the NAACP. At age thirty Marshall found he could do more of what he wanted to do—have a free hand to work on civil rights cases around the nation—as an association lawyer than as a starving maverick in Baltimore.

  The only problem for Marshall was that having reached a position of power and authority so quickly, he was unsure of himself. He did not know how far he could go without the security of having Houston by his side. In every civil rights case he had handled, from Murray to the teachers’ pay cases, he had relied heavily on his mentor. And although Marshall had dealt with cases that ended up in the Supreme Court, Houston had always stepped in to argue the
NAACP’s side before the high court.16

  But the time was coming for Marshall to step into the leadership role. As Houston had written when Marshall arrived in the national office, “The best administration is self-executing; where all the subordinated have been well trained and … any one of them is able to step into the chief’s shoes [at] any minute and carry on with no less of a stride.”17

  Now the question was whether Marshall could step into the chief’s shoes.

  CHAPTER 10

  Marshall in Charge

  BY OCTOBER 1938 MARSHALL WAS IN THE LEAD CHAIR at the NAACP’s national legal office in New York. The young lawyer did not have to wait long to find a case he could use to establish his name.

  In the small office he had once shared with Houston, Marshall kept his desk cluttered with law books and legal files. But always on the top of the pile were newspapers from around the country—especially the black press. Several of the papers ran sensational reports about how George F. Porter, the fifty-five-year-old president of a black college in Texas, had been thrown down the front steps of the Dallas courthouse for insisting on his right to serve on a county jury.

  Marshall read that story with a voyeur’s fascination in the gory details. He quickly realized that this case could be a national sensation and force a spotlight on the monstrous reality of second-class treatment given black Americans even in a court of law. His exposure to Walter White had opened his eyes to the idea of civil rights as theater and the power of using dramatic situations to the NAACP’s advantage. This was a chance to fly the association’s flag but also to make his mark in the public mind as the leader of the NAACP’s legal office.