Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Hundreds of people stood in line for hours outside the Supreme Court hoping to get a seat to hear the case argued in April of 1950. Those who were lucky enough to get in saw Marshall make an emotional argument, asserting that Sweatt had a right to attend the state law school without regard to how white segregationists might feel or objections from blacks. “The rights of Sweatt to attend the University of Texas cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of any group of citizens,” Marshall told the justices. “It matters not to me whether every single Negro in this country wants segregated schools. It makes no difference whether every white person wants segregated schools. If Sweatt wants to assert his individual, constitutional right, it cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of every other citizen.”

  Price Daniel, the attorney general of Texas, responded by quoting Abraham Lincoln as saying that blacks and whites should be free but live separately. As a practical matter, Daniel told the justices, if Sweatt were admitted to the law school, then blacks would have to be admitted to swimming pools, grammar schools, and hospitals. “All we ask in the south,” he said, “is the opportunity to take care of this matter and work it out [ourselves].”17

  While waiting for a ruling in the Sweatt case, Marshall was hit with a shock. Charles Houston died of heart failure in Washington. They no longer spoke every day, but his impact on Marshall was still great. Their relationship had evolved from that of mentor and student to professional confidants, but Marshall remained heavily dependent on the fifty-five-year-old Houston, both as a legal mind and as a friend. “Thurgood … didn’t make any moves without [either] Houston [or] Hastie,” remembered Constance Baker Motley, who had joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s staff in 1945.18

  Houston had encouraged the direct attack approach Marshall had employed in the Sweatt case. He wrote to Bob Carter, the number-two man in the NAACP’s legal office, that he was pleased to see an aggressive Marshall arguing that segregation was wrong even if the state said they could build separate and “equal” schools for blacks. “These education cases are now sufficiently tight so that anyone familiar with the course of the decisions should be able to guide the cases through,” Houston wrote, reaffirming his support for abandoning the Margold plan’s strategy. “You and Thurgood can proceed without any fear of crossing any plans I have.”19 But before Houston could see if the direct attack plan would work in the Sweatt case, he died at Freedman’s Hospital, a few blocks from Howard University’s main campus.

  At the funeral William Hastie, governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Truman’s nominee for the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, stood in the pulpit of Rankin Chapel on the Howard campus looking over a distinguished group of mourners. There in the pews on Wednesday, April 26, 1950, were Thurgood Marshall, Walter White and Roy Wilkins, cabinet officials, and two Supreme Court justices—Hugo Black and Tom Clark. “He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship,” said Hastie in a tear-filled eulogy for Houston. “He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land.”20

  Houston had laid the groundwork for the NAACP’s legal fight for integration. It was Marshall’s turn to take the crusade to the next level. Marshall had lost his greatest mentor, the man who had for twenty years nurtured him and guided his development as the nation’s top civil rights lawyer. “Whatever credit is given him is not enough,” Marshall told reporters.21

  Houston’s advice to Marshall had paid off. The bold new strategy that he had encouraged resulted in the Supreme Court’s stunning unanimous decision in June 1950 in favor of Sweatt. Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a hard-nosed Truman Democrat, wrote the opinion: “We cannot find substantial equality in the educational opportunities offered white and Negro law students by the state.… The University of Texas Law School is far superior.… A law school, the proving ground for legal learning and practice, cannot be effective in isolation.… Anyone who has practiced law, would not choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed from the play of ideas and the exchange of views with which the law is concerned.”22

  Vinson’s decision included an idea that caught the attention of NAACP lawyers. He said that a school’s alumni, its prestige and influence, and its history were all to be considered when comparing it with any other school. By that standard, no makeshift Jim Crow school could ever be presented as a facility “equal” to a long-standing state school.

  The ruling meant that for the first time in American history an all-white school was being compelled to admit a black student despite the separate-but-equal laws. The lawyers at the NAACP saw the decision as a sea change in the high court’s thinking on school segregation. Marshall called Sweatt to tell him the good news. “We won the big one,” he said. In the future, Marshall told him, Texas was going to have to “age law schools like good whiskey.”23

  News of the Sweatt victory sent the NAACP office into full-throttle celebration. “Thurgood, he’s a party man,” Constance Baker Motley later said. “You would not have to have much of an excuse for him to throw a party. I mean, that’s the kind of person he was. So anytime we won a case, people came by because they knew there was a party going on there, no question about it.”

  Sweatt started law school in the fall of 1950 and ran into a string of racist incidents and tough breaks. When he first applied to the school, Sweatt had had to deal with suggestions that the real reason he wanted to go there was to meet white women. In The Texas Ranger, the University of Texas student magazine, Sweatt wrote: “I want to get a legal education at the university, not a wife,” noting he was already married.24 After he began attending the university, a cross was burned next to his car and his tires were slashed. During the same time he broke up with his wife and became ill. By the end of his second year, Sweatt had flunked out. He later got a degree in social work and remained in Texas.

  But Sweatt’s personal struggles had little importance to Marshall. His fight remained over the legal ground for segregation, and in truth he did not always focus on individual soldiers in the battle. After his victory in the Sweatt case, Marshall gave a speech at Fisk University’s Institute of Race Relations in which he summed up the significance of the ruling and suggested that it was a foreshadowing of even more important changes in race relations. “Despite the fact that the ‘Separate-But-Equal’ doctrine was not technically overruled by these decisions,” he said, “the force and significance of the language certainly robs the doctrine of most of its validity.… We now have the tools to destroy all governmentally imposed racial segregation. It will take time. It will take courage and determination.”

  At age forty-two Marshall would try to replace Houston, the veritable Moses of the struggle for equal rights. Would Marshall, by himself, be able to finish leading the NAACP on the trek through the desert of laws that separated black and white Americans? He would first have to find out if he had the courage and determination to lead this fight.

  CHAPTER 19

  Number One Negro

  of All Time

  WITH HIS BREAKTHROUGH VICTORY in the Sweatt case, Marshall became a celebrity. He was the most requested speaker for NAACP events. With ten victories before the Supreme Court by 1950, black and white lawyers, including top politicians, saw him as the leading civil rights expert in the nation. His reputation was golden.

  The black press had Marshall’s picture on the front page almost every week, and he was quoted on any civil rights controversy. He was a burgeoning legend; he was trumpeted as the one man able to defend black Americans against the Klan, racist judges, and bigoted small-town cops. “Thurgood’s coming” became shorthand among blacks in the South for the day when the sword of justice would strike out against white oppressors. This esteem was reflected in one poignant letter, filled with misspellings and bad grammar. It opened: “Mr. Turgood—I see by the Courer [Pittsburgh Courier] that you ar the No. 1 negro of all Time, so I take my pen in han as you must be the man I have been lookin for all these yers.

  “.… I hop’ you will come q
uick because these white folks down hear dont ack like they heard of Supreme court or any court or anything. They is runnin wild and we shure could use the No. 1 negro of all time or somebody to stop them from mistreatin’ us.”

  The letter, from Charles Jones who lived in a small town in Georgia, was signed with a big “X” and was written by Jones’s wife, Essie Mae. She added in a postscript that “Charlie, he cant read or rite but he got real good sense.”1

  Marshall was now eclipsing Walter White, the NAACP’s ego-driven executive secretary. White had been a mentor to Marshall, but his pride in his young associate was wearing thin as he got more and more attention. Even White’s socialite friends were talking up Marshall.

  White’s relationship with the lawyer had been on rocky ground since 1948, when the NAACP’s national office found itself caught up in gossip and scandal involving its executive secretary. White, who to all appearances was white, had divorced his wife, Gladys, a black woman, that year. He quickly married Poppy Cannon, a wealthy South African socialite. Black NAACP members, still trying to quiet the ruckus that had ensued after White’s ouster of W.E.B. Du Bois, were outraged that White would divorce his wife of twenty-seven years to marry a white woman who had three children, all by different men.

  Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American, was so upset he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, a fellow NAACP board member, to complain that white board members did not understand that Mr. White was damaging the NAACP’s name. “His sudden divorce and marriage to Mrs. Cannon has so weakened his usefulness that the association will assume a grave risk in attempting to keep him in office. You and I … may marry whom we please without involving the association in a controversy.… But not the chief executive.… My own belief is that Walter White and Mrs. Cannon have a right to marry if they love each other. But, hundreds of colored people in our area do not agree.”2

  White took a leave of absence from the NAACP, but the controversy he had created did not die down. A new round of alarms sounded when he wrote an article for Look magazine in which he extolled the benefits of having blacks take a chemical treatment that would turn their skin white. “Consider what would happen if a means of racial transformation is made available at reasonable costs,” he wrote. “The racial, social, economic and political consequences would be tremendous.” He quoted Lena Horne as saying that the availability of the chemical was “wonderful” and the “greatest thing for world peace.” White also announced that science had now perfected a treatment that would make blacks’ hair “permanently straight.” And he suggested plastic surgery to make Negroid features appear more like Caucasian noses and lips.3

  The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Thurgood Marshall was highly critical in private, but he had no public comment. However, others didn’t hold back. William L. Patterson, executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, said White’s proposed use of chemicals on black Americans “would be laughable were it not such a grievous insult.” Patterson added that White was asking black Americans to “suffer in silence” until “the coming of an insulting and degrading chemical messiah.”4

  While Marshall and Roy Wilkins refused to throw any more fuel on the fire, it was now clear that White’s days at the NAACP were all but over. He had used his connections with white politicians and corporate leaders as the basis for his power inside the organization. But now his base in the black leadership was shaken. And his infamous article cut him off from a broad range of the NAACP’s membership. Still, with Eleanor Roosevelt leading his defense, the board voted 16–10 to let him keep the title of executive secretary, if nothing else. White returned to work with no authority; Wilkins and Marshall now had day-to-day control of the NAACP.

  As Wilkins’s and Marshall’s roles grew, so did their resentment and jealousy of White. “Roy did the work,” Marshall later said. “If it wasn’t for Roy that thing would have fallen apart every day, every hour on the hour.”

  Marshall, even more than Wilkins, had serious problems with White, because the executive secretary would sometimes try to meddle in the legal affairs of the association.

  White was drawn to the high-profile drama of Supreme Court cases involving the NAACP. He would regularly go to Washington for Marshall’s arguments and sit in the section reserved for lawyers. Marshall let it go on for several years, but as their relationship turned icy, he came to resent this behavior. “Now look, you’re not supposed to be in there, and they know you’re connected with me, and one of these days they’re going to find out that you’re not a lawyer,” Marshall told White. “And I’m going to get blamed for it. And it’s going to affect my standing. And I don’t believe in letting anything affect my standing in the Supreme Court. So I’m telling you, don’t let me catch you sitting there again. If you do, I’m going to tell the guard.”

  White said: “You wouldn’t.” Marshall replied, “Try me,” and walked away.

  A few months later Marshall was back at the Supreme Court. White was not in his usual seat, and Marshall thought he had prevailed. Then came a surprise. White was in the judges’ box, where friends of the justices were seated. He had gone over Marshall’s head and asked Justice Hugo Black for the special seat.5

  Marshall had no such tensions with Roy Wilkins. Their common distaste for White had led them to become fast friends. Both were in their forties, and they shared power in the NAACP’s New York headquarters. They also lived in the same Harlem apartment building, and they often traveled to and from work together. “In New York, Roy Wilkins and I would get on the subway,” Marshall said, smiling at the thought. “And we would get a Daily Worker [published by the Communist Party] and The Wall Street Journal. How’re you going to know what they’re doing if you don’t read their paper?”

  Marshall and Wilkins first teamed up against White when he announced to the press that the NAACP was bringing a suit for Josephine Baker, the flamboyant black nightclub entertainer. She wanted to sue Walter Winchell, the nationally syndicated gossip columnist, because Winchell had written that Baker had supported European fascists before World War II. Marshall was angry that White had put the NAACP in the middle of a high-society pissing match. Eventually Baker backed out of the suit, but the episode left White and Marshall barely speaking. “Thurgood was quite furious. He felt, and I think quite correctly, that that was sort of an inappropriate use of the energies and resources of the Legal Defense Fund,” remembered Jack Greenberg, a young white lawyer who had come onto Marshall’s staff.6

  The political warfare also split co-workers inside the NAACP office. “I think it’s fair enough to say that there was a conspiracy to get rid of White,” said Henry Lee Moon, the NAACP’s director of public relations, who was a friend to the executive secretary. “I think the way [Roy and Thurgood] treated Walter was unworthy.” But others in the office saw White’s troubles as his own creation. “Walter thought of himself as the ambassador to the white world,” said Herbert Hill, a white staff member who headed the NAACP’s labor relations department. “Walter was obsessed with important white people.”7

  While White struggled to stay afloat, Marshall began to strut about. He became more of a party-going, drinking man, who wore his courtroom success and increased power on his sleeve. “Thurgood loved to pat women’s asses, drink, and be hearty company,” Hill said in a later interview. “Marshall would parody Uncle Toms [by using a deep southern accent and making his eyes big]. His zest for how he lived—drinking, fucking, arguing—made him a near legendary figure.”8

  Marshall’s reputation for the wild side of life certainly did grow during this period. One letter from a friend ended, “Hoping that you have recovered from your cold and your one night stands.” William Coleman, a Harvard law graduate and the first black Supreme Court clerk, got to know Marshall during this time period. He recalled in an interview that Marshall was a well-regarded Romeo: “He was an exciting and powerful person around women. I don’t think Thurgood would sleep with everybody, but there were some very attractive women who also had sta
tus … [who] Thurgood was very close to.”9

  By this time Thurgood’s relationship with his wife, Buster, had become distant and lifeless. His heart was in his highly publicized lawsuits and the people who cheered his words every time he spoke at NAACP rallies. The reality of a childless marriage and a husband who spent more time with fawning female fans was tearing at Buster.

  Buster’s nephew, Claude Conner, said that “she knew” Thurgood was having a good time with women on the road, although no single affair caused a particularly loud explosion between the two of them. “I don’t think that she made a big fuss about it,” he added. Penny Monteiro, who was related to Marshall by marriage to one of his cousins, said, “I am pretty sure she did [know about his women].” But Buster felt Thurgood’s life was often in danger on the road and he was often lonely. As a woman of that generation, she decided to close her eyes to his extramarital dalliances.

  While Thurgood was having his fun, he was not above becoming jealous. Buster was regularly seen at Harlem social events dancing with Charlie Bease, a mailman who was in many of Buster’s social clubs. “It was gossip,” said Conner, “because Buster was always with Charlie and his wife, Helen, at the dances. Thurgood wasn’t in a position to say a whole lot because there were all sorts of rumors about who he was sleeping with all over the country.”10

  In addition to his sexual adventures, Marshall enjoyed the New York party scene. Evelyn Cunningham, a columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier, recounted in an interview how she and Marshall were once caught by police in a bust of an illegal after-hours club in Manhattan. “The place didn’t open until three A.M.,” she said. When they walked in it was darkly lit, noisy, smoky, and crowded. “There was a lot of music, a lot of interesting people, some not particularly savory, and he immediately loved the atmosphere and got a little loud,” Cunningham said.