Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Thurgood … Thurgood Marshall, Mr. Civil Rights.

  Fought for the teachers, fought for the schools,

  Went down south where they broke all the rules,

  Now he’s working on the swimming pools,

  Justice and right are his fighting tools.

  Thurgood … Thurgood Marshall, Mr. Civil Rights.29

  The celebration of Marshall extended to the white press. A flattering oil portrait of him appeared on the cover of Time that fall. The story said that Marshall’s name was “indelibly stamped” on the Supreme Court’s historic desegregation rulings. Time credited Marshall with starting a “vast and complex social revolution.” The magazine also anointed him as the American who would shoulder the burden of shaping the future of race relations. “What he decides to do about a thousand practical legal questions will … determine the pace, the style and the success of an effort to remove from U.S. life … the ugliest blot upon its good name in the world,” Time wrote.

  The magazine judged Marshall a “sound” and “imaginative legal scholar, although by no means the best of his day.” When it came to explaining the underpinnings of Marshall’s thinking on race relations, the magazine said he was both an idealist and a pragmatist. He preached the ideal of integration but when faced with resistance he would accept halting steps, such as the deliberate speed ruling, toward that ideal. Time described the split within Marshall as “a delicate balance of turmoils.”30

  The seemingly adulatory story got a surprising response from Carl Murphy’s Afro. The paper blasted Time for running a profile that was “counterfeit and … falsely drawn.” And Time’s suggestion that Marshall was willing to bargain to get whatever he could from the court was also wrong. “Neither Marshall nor the NAACP in this crusade against racial bigotry can accept anything less than total victory,” the paper wrote. “To settle for less would be to destroy themselves.”31

  The split between the Afro and Time magazine reflected a genuine split in Marshall. On the one hand, Time was right. Marshall was an accommodationist—he had accepted the Supreme Court and its “all deliberate speed” ruling, even though he personally disagreed with it. He even defended the ruling in speeches, while more militant blacks were condemning the Court for failing to defend the rights of black children. On the other hand, the Afro was right that Marshall was disappointed, even angry, that no deadline was set for school integration. Marshall was privately telling friends he was worried that southern politicians and weak-kneed lower courts would conspire to delay integration.

  By late fall Marshall’s divided mind on race relations was put on full view before a crowded church on a Friday night in Brooklyn, New York. He was invited to speak as the hero of black America, the man who had battled white segregationists and defeated them in court. But Marshall’s speech was a rebuke of his black audience for giving in to calls from black militants for racial solidarity. “Let’s stop drawing the line [between] colored and white,” he told the audience. “Let’s draw the line on who wants democracy for all Americans.”

  Marshall also criticized the attention that many black Americans were giving to the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy who was killed by two white men in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.

  Marshall told the audience that the South had bigger problems than Till’s murder. Black people were being lynched every day in the South, he said. And marching to protest racism in Mississippi was not a good idea. It created a situation where angry segregationist mobs would attack marchers, who would then fight back, and “violence has never been an answer to violence.” He also condemned boycotts as a “double-edged” sword—not a good tool to protest segregation—because segregationists could also boycott black businesses.

  * * *

  While he was chiding blacks in New York for becoming too militant, some federal and southern state officials were worried that Marshall was becoming too powerful and was too close to Communists. The attorney general of Georgia made speeches in which he pointed out that Marshall once was an official of the National Lawyers’ Guild, a “Communist front.”

  Roy Wilkins defended Marshall and the NAACP by circulating copies of the letter J. Edgar Hoover had once written to Walter White saying, “The NAACP has done much to preserve these principles [of equality, freedom, and tolerance] and to perpetuate the desires of our founding fathers.” When Hoover learned that Wilkins was using the letter to shield the NAACP from attacks, he got mad. The political climate in Washington was strongly anti-Communist in the aftermath of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings. And with the Cold War escalating, Hoover did not want to be tied to the NAACP by comments he’d made nine years ago, “when the NAACP, under Walter White, was a well-disciplined group.” Now that Hoover did not want to be associated with them any longer, he had his agents target the NAACP for investigation.32

  Those probes may have included phone taps on Marshall and other NAACP officials. In October 1955, Marshall told a group of delegates to the New York NAACP state conference that both long-distance and local calls going out of the national offices were being “listened in on.” Marshall said he was certain, from “unimpeachable sources” that the phones were tapped.33

  Records of the FBI from that period were subsequently censored, possibly to remove evidence of the wiretaps. But bureau officials concluded that while Communists had gained access to local NAACP branches, they had been unable “to dominate the organization of the national level.” However, the FBI continued to investigate the NAACP, giving special attention to Marshall and building up a large file on him.34

  In the fall of 1955, Marshall was hardly ever in New York. His celebrity made him a big draw at NAACP fund-raisers in the South. He left Bob Carter to monitor school desegregation efforts while he traveled. When Marshall came back to New York, he had curious news for his friends. Just ten months after Buster’s death, he was getting married. The bride was one of the NAACP’s secretaries, Cecelia Suyat, the woman he had been seen celebrating with at the Blue Ribbon the night of the 1954 decision.

  Suyat was a cute, short woman with a formal, polite manner. Hidden behind her demure smile was a steely young woman with strong opinions and a determined personality. She had essentially raised herself since her mother’s death in 1936, when she was nine. Her father, Juan Suyat, a print shop worker, was overwhelmed with the task of caring for seven children on his own. Cissy pushed herself through high school and into business college before shocking her father by announcing she was going to New York. He let her go only when she promised to return home after school. The twenty-year-old arrived in Manhattan and enrolled to study stenography at Columbia University. But to her father’s disappointment she stayed in New York, and a few months later an employment agency sent her to a secretarial job at the NAACP.

  “Cissy was my secretary for eight years,” said Gloster Current, the national office’s director of NAACP branches. “I was surprised because I really didn’t know they were courting. She was a lovely person, very charming and a good cook and convivial. Everybody loved Cissy.”35

  While Current was in the dark about the relationship, others close to Marshall had long been aware that he had been seeing Cissy. William Coleman, the lawyer who became Marshall’s close friend, described the decision to marry as the outgrowth of an extended relationship: “They were together, you know, even before his first wife died,” Coleman later said.

  Monroe Dowling, another of Marshall’s good friends, remembered meeting Suyat in August 1955 at the Red Rooster restaurant in Manhattan. When Marshall had walked away for a moment, Dowling directly asked her, “Are you Thurgood’s girl?” Suyat said, “Yes.” At the time Dowling wondered if the relationship was serious and how it might affect Marshall’s public image. He distinctly recalled the negative reaction to Walter White’s marriage to a white woman. How would black America react, with Buster not yet dead a year, if Thurgood married an Asian-American woman? Would the gossip tear Marshall up? Dowling asked Suyat, “Ar
e you going to marry him?” She replied, “If he asks me.”

  Marshall said he had asked Suyat to marry him “several times” before she agreed. She, too, was concerned that his marriage to a woman who was not black might hurt him. And she had her own worries about how her family would react to a Negro son-in-law. But her family was far away; NAACP members were close enough to voice their criticisms. “They called me a foreigner,” Suyat said, recalling that period. “Not at the office—at the office people knew me—but the outside forces.”36

  But there was one important factor that may have overwhelmed the tittering criticism and convinced Thurgood to marry Cissy: the possibility that she had become pregnant. “He would not, probably, have gotten married before the end of the year if she had not been pregnant,” said Claude Connor, Buster’s nephew. Cissy and Thurgood’s first son, Thurgood Jr., would be born eight months after their wedding.

  “Thurgood was the kind of man who, first of all having wanted children for so long, if he knew this woman was pregnant, he would move heaven and earth to legitimize that child,” said Connor.

  Given the potential controversy about the interracial marriage and the pregnancy, Marshall talked it over with Wilkins and other NAACP officials. They decided that Marshall could marry Suyat without too much damage to his public image if it was handled properly. The key, Wilkins concluded, was to have the marriage first, on December 17, 1955, then hold a press conference at which association officials would endorse Suyat as a member of the NAACP family and describe her as “just about black.”

  The wedding took place at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, where Buster’s funeral had been held. Wilkins gave the bride away, and Thurgood’s mother and Aunt Medi were there as well.

  Then came a press conference at the Red Rooster restaurant. None of the reporters asked about Marshall’s decision to marry a Filipina. Arnold DeMille, the NAACP’s public relations director, was relieved, but he noticed that the reporters were talking about the issue among themselves. “It wasn’t a secret,” DeMille later said, but the strategy was to wait until after the wedding to put it in the papers.37

  The top of the Afro’s next front page announced in bold letters, THURGOOD LOSES HEART. The Afro took care to say that Marshall had been “devoted” to his first wife, who died of cancer. The paper’s usual nose for scandal was not in evidence.38

  The lone editorial attack on the interracial marriage came from a white newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. The paper reported that Marshall, like Walter White, “has broken down and admitted his racial prejudice by marrying a white woman,” Marshall later recalled. “And I wrote a letter back to them and I said, not that I object to it, but I just think you ought to be accurate.… I’ve had two wives and both of ’em are colored.”

  The couple went to the Caribbean for a two-week honeymoon. Left behind was all the backbiting over interracial relationships, school integration, and the FBI’s phone taps. Marshall had a clear vision of an integrated America, with blacks and whites in schools, on buses, and everywhere else. He was now a living model of the integrationist life. As he went off to blue skies and emerald seas with his Asian beauty, he had no idea of the turbulent fights yet to come.

  CHAPTER 23

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  AFEW DAYS BEFORE HE GOT MARRIED, Marshall received a phone call from E. D. Nixon, the former president of the NAACP’s branch in Montgomery, Alabama. Nixon asked him to represent a group that was planning to boycott the city’s segregated buses. Marshall was interested in helping only because he was pals with Nixon. Like Marshall’s dad, Nixon was a train porter who had a deep southern accent and loved to tell a joke. As a favor to Nixon, Marshall directed Robert Carter to handle this minor affair while he and Cissy went off to the Caribbean.

  But when Marshall returned to New York in January, he was stunned to find that the Montgomery bus boycott was national news. Nixon had initially hoped for a one-day boycott, in which blacks would stay off the buses, walking or taking taxicabs to work. But with the support of a black women’s group and black ministers, the boycott had caught fire, and by the time Marshall got back to the office it was in its second month.

  “We were advising them of the legal steps to be made,” Marshall recalled in an interview. “We were proceeding when all of a sudden this preacher started jumping out of there. We’d never heard of him before. I knew his father before in Atlanta, but I’d never heard of him until then.”1

  The “preacher” was twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. King had been in Montgomery just over a year. A graduate of Morehouse College and Crozer Seminary, the five-foot-seven-inch minister was a dapper dresser even as a college student. He was also the son of a well-known Atlanta minister, Martin Luther “Daddy” King, of the large Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  Young King had been finishing his Ph.D. at Boston University when the most prominent black church in Montgomery made the surprising decision to hire him. King had visited and delivered a stirring sermon in his gripping bass voice. The vestry decided to take a gamble on the upstart, and he arrived in the fall of 1954, still working to finish his doctorate in theology.

  Even before King arrived in Montgomery, a small group of civil rights activists had been petitioning to stop rude treatment of blacks on the city’s buses. The effort had barely made a ripple until a well-respected forty-three-year-old black woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Rosa Parks’s arrest led the local NAACP and the Women’s Political Council to activate plans for a bus boycott campaign. E. D. Nixon phoned several local black ministers, including King, to ask for their support. King was initially hesitant, but after much urging, he agreed to attend an organizing meeting at his church. At that meeting King was convinced to take a leading role in the growing mass movement.

  “We are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked around by the brutal feet of oppression,” a fiery King told a loud meeting on a Monday night. “If [we] will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ ”2 King’s riveting speech focused heavily on nonviolence, a concept he had learned at Crozer while studying the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent opposition to British colonial rule in the 1940s.

  At the NAACP’s offices in New York, Wilkins and Marshall found themselves reacting to this homegrown movement, which they did not start and over which they had little control. Ironically, critics in Alabama and around the nation were blaming the NAACP for fomenting the bus boycott and the lawsuit against segregation on the buses. In a New Yorker article Marshall, the man identified as the NAACP ringleader, conceded that he often did not feel in control of the fast-changing movement: “[I’m] supposed to be masterminding this whole campaign.… That’s funny because our people in the south are actually way ahead of us on this thing.”3

  Nixon’s request for legal help had been granted almost as a casual favor, and now the New York office found itself running to catch up with a train that had left the station. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, NAACP officials faced growing impatience among black people for an end to segregation everywhere.

  While Marshall made supportive comments about the boycott, he had deep reservations. In his heart he viewed the bus boycott and King’s speeches as street theater that did not come close to equaling the main event—the NAACP’s effort to get the courts to end legal segregation. Marshall’s negative view of King’s rhetoric and mass protests came out of his experiences investigating riots. He had seen black communities in Columbia, Tennessee, Harlem, and Detroit torn apart by white mobs. That experience led him to fear that organized resistance by black activists inevitably would lead to a white backlash, and “wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”

  Even before King began his advocacy of nonviolent pr
otest, Marshall had been approached by students who wanted him to shift from law books and move toward street demonstrations. At Howard Law School, Harris Wofford (a white student who later became a U.S. senator) gave Marshall a paper on Gandhi’s nonviolent strategies and urged him to get the NAACP to use the same approach against segregationists.

  A few weeks later Marshall sent a handwritten letter to Wofford telling him that Gandhi’s ideas were a bad fit for an American civil rights movement. Marshall wrote that he “couldn’t imagine a worse prescription,” and that it “would devastate and undermine the progress that had been made,” Wofford remembered. Marshall told him he was trying to get people to obey the laws and the courts, even if they disliked them. “For American Negroes or American Civil Rights people, black or white, to start disobeying laws on grounds that it was against their conscience would set it all back,” Marshall wrote, according to Wofford.4

  Despite Marshall’s private misgivings, he acted as if he were in full support of King’s protest. He had already assigned Carter to help King with legal advice. The lone objection Marshall voiced openly to the King-led boycott was that King was only asking for polite treatment of blacks on segregated buses and not demanding an end to the Jim Crow practice. The LDF had filed a transportation suit demanding full integration on buses in Columbia, South Carolina, and it would be damaging, Marshall said, for the NAACP to endorse a suit in Alabama that stepped back from that demand.

  Marshall pressured Fred Gray, the attorney for the Montgomery bus boycott, to file a suit on the exact lines the NAACP was pursuing in South Carolina. Gray worried that Marshall might simply shut off legal support if he did not go along with demands that their suit insist on integrated seating. Gray also realized that the suit was going to have to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and he needed Marshall’s expertise to win. When in April 1956 the Supreme Court ruled in Marshall’s favor in the South Carolina bus case, Gray knew that he had made the right decision.