Profiles in Character - Thurgood Marshall Battles Segregation
Thurgood Marshall considered the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision “the greatest one” of his career. He was not referring to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 triumph declaring “in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place.” Instead, he was speaking of Smith v. Allwright, the 1944 decision that held the practice of all-white Democratic primaries in Texas a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Lonnie Smith, a black dentist, had been denied the vote because state law allowed the Democratic Party to set the rules for its primary elections, which made them for whites only. Marshall believed that desegregation in the South depended on the ability of black voters to cast ballots. If they could not vote in heavily Democratic Texas, they could never elect candidates who would secure their rights.
Born in 1908, as Jim Crow laws were spreading in the wake of the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine in the Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, Marshall had been shielded from segregation’s worst ravages by growing up in a middle class Baltimore home. That shield was shattered when he was barred from the segregated University of Maryland Law School. He graduated instead first in his class in 1933 from Washington, D.C.’s Howard University Law School.
While has Aunt Medi recalled young Thurgood was “nothing but a cry-baby,” that label faded under his parents’ influence. His mother graduated college and was a teacher. His father worked on the trains and raised his son to defend himself: “If somebody calls you a “Nigger” take it up right then and there.” His father also loved watching trials in courtrooms and used a lawyer’s approach at the dinner table, forcing his sons to back up anything they said. “I got the idea of being a lawyer from arguing with my dad,” Marshall recalled. That skill got him on his college’s varsity debating team as a freshman and would impress Supreme Court justices for decades.
Because Baltimore firms would not hire black lawyers, Marshall’s law school dean and mentor, Charles Houston, eventually brought him onto the legal staff of the NAACP. Together they documented the faults of segregated schools in the South, helped organize black workers, fought for anti-lynching legislation and won equal pay cases for black teachers. In 1938, just five years out of law school, Marshall became head of the NAACP legal staff when Houston stepped down.
Marshall developed a reputation for hard work, detail and respect for opponents. As recounted in Juan Williams’s biography, Marshall “came in early, always in freshly pressed suits …when he spoke he addressed everyone as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” … and was a taskmaster who insisted that every detail, every word, and every letter be perfect.” One of his great virtues, Williams relates, was “seeing things from the other guy’s side. He was a good tough advocate who functioned without having to feel that his opponents were either knaves or fools.”
He was also a great synthesizer. As June Shagaloff, on Marshall’s staff at the NAACP, put it: “Thurgood had an incredible gift. He’d have his feet upon the table, with all these learned minds around him, in awe of him. He’d make them feel at home. He would pull out from other people their thinking, and he synthesized it and made it his.”
He also modeled the courage without which his legal victories would have been impossible. His close friend, Monroe Dowling, recalled that Marshall “never slept in the same place twice” when traveling in the South. Warned about going to Texas to deal with a case involving a black Texas college president who was thrown down the stairs when he insisted in his right to serve on a jury, he went despite the chief of police’s pledge that “I personally will take him and kick the shit out of him.” He succeeded in securing both the right and protection of blacks to serve on juries throughout the state.
By 1950, Marshall had already won ten cases before the Supreme Court, including rulings overturning segregated seating on interstate buses, excluding potential jurors on the basis of race and restrictive housing covenants. The Brown decision understandably stands out in part because Marshall used sociological evidence – rare in court arguments – to tell the Court that segregation damaged the “development of [black] children . . . destroying their self-respect.”
Marshall would support the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 and sit-ins to integrate lunch counters. He preferred winning rights in the courts, fearful that demonstrations organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would result in violence. Yet he came to admire students tired of waiting for change. “What they are doing is telling us that we are too slow,” he told one audience, “I am telling you they are right.”
In 1961, Marshall became the first black American to serve on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1965 President Johnson made him the first black Solicitor General and in 1967 the first black Supreme Court Justice. Marshall’s dream was an integrated society, and he made giant strides in that struggle.
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