Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  While Marshall was able to control Gray and the legal maneuvering in Montgomery, he grew irritated at the front-page attention being showered on King. Having won the Brown decision only two years earlier, Marshall saw King as a man who had yet to make a significant mark on American life. Despite his misgivings, Marshall knew it would be damaging to reveal a split among black leaders in the civil rights movement. On the national TV program Youth Wants to Know that spring, Marshall praised King for his refusal to use violence in the bus boycott. King’s house had been bombed, and Marshall said King and the NAACP were in agreement that there should be no violent response to such segregationist attacks.

  * * *

  While King kept the bus boycott going and raised money nationwide, segregationists started their backlash. In March 1956 a hundred members of Congress signed a “Southern Manifesto” written by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, denouncing any attempt to force integration on the South. The manifesto stirred Confederate pride. The manifesto had little real impact on the NAACP, but other battles in the State of Alabama were of genuine concern to Marshall.

  When the twenty-six-year-old Autherine Lucy had tried to integrate the University of Alabama, she was trapped in a classroom building by a violent mob until the state police rescued her. Marshall had won a Supreme Court case in 1955 giving Lucy the right to study at the university, but the mob made his legal victory meaningless by throwing rocks and eggs, and menacing her. The university suspended her, claiming that the threat of violence was too great for the school to handle.

  Marshall and one of the leading figures on his New York staff, Constance Baker Mottley, quickly traveled to Alabama to argue before federal judges that Lucy was not the source of the problem and should be readmitted. Local black leaders surrounded Motley and Marshall with armed bodyguards out of fear that the famous lawyers would be attacked. Marshall worked and slept in the home of Arthur Shores, the NAACP’s lawyer in Birmingham; outside guards armed with machine guns patrolled the sidewalk. The fear in Montgomery’s black community was particularly high because a few weeks earlier, King’s house had been fire-bombed.

  Despite the precautions an attempt was made on Marshall’s life. He and a group of lawyers were at Shores’s house when a car careened onto the sidewalk, with smoke from a lit bomb pouring out of one window. A man tried to throw the explosive, but it went off in his hand, blowing off part of his arm. The car drove away, leaving the injured man behind. Marshall and the lawyers rushed out as the guards stood over the screaming man. Towels and bandages were applied, even while some cursed the bomber. An ambulance eventually took the man away.5

  Back in court, the federal judge ruled that the university had to end Lucy’s suspension. But in a surprise move the university trustees voted to expel her. They charged that Lucy’s criticism of the school amounted to defamation and merited her expulsion. Lucy had said in court that there was a conspiracy to keep her out of the all-white school.

  Marshall finally decided that he could not win the case. The board was within its rights to expel her, he concluded, even if the heart of the matter had nothing to do with defamation and everything to do with keeping the university’s student body completely white. Marshall was convinced any suit against the school would end up costing the NAACP a lot of money and put the traumatized Lucy under tremendous stress for a weak case that would ultimately fail.6

  The pressure was building on Marshall. As far back as the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing schools to desegregate with “all deliberate speed,” he was being torn between the racist backlash among segregationists and the increasing militance among black Americans. Even in 1955 the forces pushing and pulling on Marshall prompted a friend to tell Life magazine that the usually easygoing lawyer was becoming uptight and was like “a tea kettle about to explode.” He told friends he could no longer sit in any meeting where he could not chain-smoke and revealed that he stopped drinking during Lent “to prove to myself that I don’t need liquor.”7 Marshall was also still grappling with grief over Buster’s death. Jack Greenberg, one of his assistants, later said he felt Marshall continued to suffer through a depression.

  The ray of sunshine Marshall found during this turbulent time was his relationship with his new wife. He and Cissy still lived in the apartment Thurgood had shared with Buster, but the place had been revamped with new furnishings and Thurgood was home more than he had been in the past. Cissy had shown no signs of possible miscarriage, and they were more and more excited at the prospect of having a baby. By March, Thurgood and Cissy made it public. The Afro-American reported on the front page that “the Thurgood Marshalls are expecting.”8

  Marshall initially told reporters the baby was not expected until October. He was still leery of negative public reaction to his interracial marriage, although there had been a minimum of unfavorable gossip so far. But if anyone counted the months between the marriage and the baby’s birth, Marshall feared, a new round of gossip might ensue. But he scaled back his estimate when he told the Pittsburgh Courier that the baby was expected in September.9

  The boy was born August 12 at 12:23A.M. Monroe Dowling remembered that the night Thurgood Marshall, Jr., was born, he and Marshall “pitched a drunk” in the Marshalls’ home to celebrate.

  Thurgood Jr. was christened at St. Philip’s, and the godparents included Helen Dowling, Monroe’s wife; Judge William Hastie; and Roy Wilkins. Thurgood’s lifelong desire for a child, and a male child, had finally been fulfilled. His deep insecurity over whether the loss of one of his testicles had somehow led to Buster’s many miscarriages was now put to rest.

  The new mother also had to deal with her Filipino family, who were still concerned over her marriage to a black man. Now twenty-nine years old and having worked for the NAACP for many years, Cissy did not see Thurgood as another black man. He was a star to her, the man who had made her life. But her father, Juan Suyat, was concerned that the baby’s skin not be too dark. “Her family was not particularly fond of blacks,” said Monroe Dowling, who with his wife was helping the Marshalls with the baby. “Cissy was very independent—she didn’t give a damn.”

  With a newborn baby and pressure coming down on him at the office, Marshall was glad to have his mother living in New York. She had initially moved from Baltimore to help take care of her sister Medi, who was living alone and suffering from diabetes. Marshall would sometimes go to visit his mother and aunt, and they would often come to see the baby and cook dinner. It was the first time in many years that Marshall had an extended family near him.

  * * *

  At the office Marshall’s troubles showed no signs of letting up. The Montgomery bus boycott was a half year old, and Marshall’s legal team was still fighting the issue in the courts. To make matters worse, King was now being sued by the city for promoting the boycott. The NAACP was representing him at no cost, but there were growing strains in the group’s relationship with him.

  At the NAACP’s annual convention in San Francisco that summer, King had been invited to speak and was treated as a celebrity. When he was asked by reporters if his nonviolent method could be used to desegregate schools, he said yes. Marshall considered the comment disrespectful of his legal efforts. He barely kept his emotions in check when he told reporters that King was over his head when it came to school desegregation, and they wrote that Marshall viewed King as a “boy on a man’s errand.”10

  Marshall, however, did not enter into public jousting with King. During his own speech to the convention, Marshall praised the bus boycott and the “unblemished forthright Christian leadership of men like Rev. M. L. King, Rev. Abernathy and E. D. Nixon.” Even as he dismissed King’s protest tactics in private, Marshall told the delegates that the NAACP had to evaluate King’s nonviolent technique to see “to what extent it can be used in addition to our other means of protest.”11

  Behind the scenes, however, the NAACP leadership had more serious problems with King. One official, Herbert Hill, remembered that Marshall and Wilkins
saw King as taking money away from the NAACP. “The major resentment, and on this point I heard Roy many times, was that King would raise vast sums of money, and that there was never any accounting,” said Hill. When Wilkins asked King to account for his spending, King reacted as if he was being pestered about trivia. “Roy would be furious,” Hill said. “We heard about a meeting in Los Angeles where they collected something like $20,000. It was put in a suitcase. King leaves with a suitcase full of money. Never accounted for, never reported.”

  While the NAACP was critical of King, his supporters were often highly critical of the NAACP. They called it an old, stuck-in-the-mud group for its ponderous, legal approach to every issue and its failure to embrace the spirit of mass movement that was electrifying the nation. But King still asked the NAACP for legal advice, bail money, and funding. “While King’s people were shitting on the NAACP,” said Hill, “Roy and Thurgood took a very principled position—the struggle always came first.”12

  So, despite the bad feelings, Marshall continued to handle the lawsuit demanding integration on Montgomery’s bus lines. He and Bob Carter wrote the petition to the Supreme Court asking that a lower court’s ruling striking down bus segregation be allowed to stand. The city’s appeal to the Supreme Court was based on a states’ rights argument; it was a matter of local custom for blacks and whites to sit separately.

  On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s appeal and ruled in favor of the NAACP and King’s bus boycott. The court wrote no opinion in the case [Gayle v. Browder] but simply affirmed a lower court’s ruling in supporting King. In Montgomery, King told reporters: “The universe is on the side of justice.”13 The boycott’s goals had been achieved through the courts, although national attention had been focused on King and the people who stayed off the buses.

  King became the first passenger to ride an integrated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The 382-day boycott was over, and King was the hero in the press. But Marshall felt that King had stolen his glory because the preacher would still have been marching and boycotting if not for Marshall’s victory in the high court.

  Marshall’s troubles with King symbolized the growing distance between the NAACP lawyer and a burgeoning, activist, civil rights movement often focused on the energy of young people. This increasing alienation from the movement brought Marshall closer to his former nemesis, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  CHAPTER 24

  Machiavellian Marshall

  AT AGE FORTY-EIGHT Thurgood Marshall had become a pure political player. His idealism had shrunk as he took steps to protect his turf and power within the NAACP as well as to nurture relationships that offered him entrée into mainstream politics and power. By 1956 he was juggling three potentially explosive political balls—his ties to the FBI, his fierce distaste for Communists, and battles within the NAACP, especially with his top assistant, Bob Carter.

  The first intrigue began in early 1956. J. Edgar Hoover was growing increasingly worried that race relations in the United States were about to erupt in violence. In January, when Marshall became involved with Martin Luther King’s bus boycott, Hoover had sent a memo to President Eisenhower’s special assistant, Dillon Anderson, expressing concern over a possible war between the races. The FBI director told the White House official that his field agents were reporting dangerously high levels of friction between the NAACP and its opponents in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling and the start of the bus boycott.

  “Tension is mounting to the point where the two forces may clash,” he wrote. “The potential for violence not only is present but is daily increasing in intensity.” Hoover specifically pointed to the growing number of White Citizens Councils, groups of segregationists who organized to use economic and political pressure against the NAACP’s drive for school integration. And on the other side, Hoover noted, there was a strong black “cult” in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam—“a violently anti-white, anti–United States government group … [which has] embarked on a tour of the south to spread their teaching.”

  The Communists were taking advantage of this racial strife, Hoover reported, to “propagandize” its efforts and advance its own cause. “The communist party has seized upon every possible incident,” he explained. “In addition the party has increased efforts to infiltrate and influence the NAACP.” He said the Communists had tried to exploit the Emmitt Till murder case to open doors with the Chicago branch of the NAACP and had held a secret conference in New York with unnamed “NAACP leaders.”1

  Inside the national office Marshall was in fact worried that militants and Communists were making inroads into the branches and contributing to growing criticism of him. The Montgomery bus boycott caught Marshall off guard and increased his discomfort with the rising power of independent black activists. But he was also worried that the growing infatuation with mass movements among black Americans would open the door to more Communist activity. He had no doubt that was a deadly trap for Americans trying to gain their rights in the rabidly anti-Communist politics of the mid-1950s.

  During this time Marshall began an intense, unpublicized political dance with the director of the FBI. The first short, awkward steps in the minuet occurred when Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a fearless black voice demanding equal rights in Mississippi, gave a spit and fury speech to an NAACP meeting at the Sharp Street Methodist Church in Baltimore. Howard harshly criticized J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI: “It’s getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killings of Negroes in the south.… ” FBI agents in Baltimore sent reports on the speech to Hoover, who wrote a long letter of complaint to Marshall—not the association’s head, Roy Wilkins.2

  Almost from his first days at the NAACP, Marshall had been vocal about the FBI’s failure to protect black people in the South. In 1946 Marshall had taken his concerns to the Justice Department, writing to the attorney general that Hoover’s FBI was too cozy with white southern sheriffs. After Walter White’s death, however, Marshall became the NAACP official whom Hoover knew best. So when Dr. Howard criticized the FBI, Hoover chose to complain to Marshall. Since Howard had used the NAACP as “a forum” to criticize the bureau, Hoover said he was taking “the liberty of writing you to set the record straight.”3

  Given the sometimes barbed comments that had passed between them, Hoover was pleased by Marshall’s response. The NAACP attorney wrote back that Howard had wrongly criticized the FBI with “misstatements of facts.” And in a real stunner Marshall said he knew the FBI had done a “thorough and complete job” in three recent cases where blacks were murdered in Mississippi. “We do feel a responsibility … during these very tense times … to try and keep the record straight,” he said.4

  Marshall’s alliance with the FBI was as strategic as any of his courtroom maneuvers. He had disdain for the Communists, the radicals, even Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent tactics. Marshall viewed the Communists as a particularly strong threat to the NAACP, a harmful extension of the militants and loudmouths who were coming to the forefront of the movement. Marshall was also concerned that the FBI might mix him up with the radicals and make him a target for their wiretaps and investigations. His new alliance with Hoover was protection, Marshall hoped, against FBI interference with his ongoing legal work to defeat segregation.

  The strategy worked. Hoover was so pleased that in a follow-up note he told Marshall to let him know whenever the NAACP had concerns about “improper actions” of FBI agents in the South. Marshall could be assured that such charges would “receive my urgent and vigorous personal attention.”5 Hoover also had an agenda. He desperately wanted inside information from the NAACP, and Marshall was now the key to Hoover’s access to the top ranks of the civil rights movement.

  Marshall and Hoover continued to correspond. Meanwhile, Dr. Howard continued to charge the FBI with racist behavior. In January 1956 Marshall wrote, almost apologetically, to Hoover that the black Mississippi physician wa
s a “rugged individualist” who could not be controlled by the NAACP. He emphasized that Dr. Howard had no official connection with the association.6

  Two weeks later Marshall took advantage of his newly cooperative relationship with Hoover to gain unprecedented access to the FBI. Marshall had conversations with Lou Nichols, the assistant director of the bureau. Marshall said he wanted to meet with Hoover to find out which civil rights groups were Communist fronts. That information, he explained, could be used to keep communists out of an upcoming civil rights conference. Nichols later wrote in a memo to another FBI official that the NAACP lawyer confided to him that “the communist party’s effort to get in the NAACP was the single most worrisome issue.”7 While Marshall was gravely concerned about the Communist influence on the civil rights group, he was also playing a role to put himself in the FBI’s confidence.

  Hoover personally signed off on the meeting. Nichols was instructed to give Marshall information on Communist activities inside civil rights groups, but only from “public source material.” Marshall met with Nichols, with Hoover sticking his head in the door for a brief hello. Nichols gave Marshall the information he wanted, and the two talked generally about Howard and other agitators in the NAACP.

  Afterward Marshall went to lunch at the Palace restaurant in downtown Washington and ran into an FBI agent and a Justice Department lawyer. He warned them to be prepared for a resolution at the upcoming conference that would criticize the FBI for failing to jail violent white racists. Marshall, according to an FBI memo on the lunch, said he was “not sympathetic” to people like Dr. Howard who were making such attacks.8

  Marshall continued to use similar tactics to distance himself from NAACP members he viewed as radicals. In the spring of 1956, he placed another telephone call to ask Hoover about the latest FBI reports of Communist infiltration.