Thurgood Marshall (10 page)

Thurgood personally took part in frat pranks such as shaving the heads of other students—against their will. And he used paddles to hit other students, often with too much enthusiasm. The overly aggressive hazing of a younger student got him kicked out of school. “When the blow [the expulsion] descended, Marshall and friends headed for New York to seek jobs on a ship going around the world,” a New York reporter later wrote. “They failed to find employment and had no alternative but to head back to Baltimore in disgrace.”
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The boys were saved when one clever student decided that the administration might have some mercy on the troublemakers if they admitted to their crimes. A confession was drawn up, and the twenty-six sophomores, including Thurgood, signed it and were allowed to return to school. The student who had come up with the bright idea was none other than Langston Hughes.

Hughes, already a well-known poet, was completing his college education at Lincoln. He was twenty-five years old and had lived in Mexico, attended Columbia University, and even worked on the docks in New York. He jumped on one ship that took him to Europe for several months and took another ship for Africa. All the while Hughes’s poetry was being published in New York, especially by the NAACP’s magazine,
The Crisis
. When he came back to the United States in the early 1920s, Hughes became a celebrated member of the distinctive group of young black artists who were creating the Harlem Renaissance movement. He was circulating in a crowd that included the singer Paul Robeson and the writers Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. And his first book,
The Weary Blues
, was already attracting critical acclaim.

Hughes was quite the star on the Lincoln campus when he showed up in 1926. He was immediately drawn to the pranks of the all-male campus life and joined the Omegas, the rival fraternity to Thurgood’s Alphas. But Hughes had a larger life. He left campus regularly, to attend poetry
readings and parties with artists and patrons in Manhattan. He was close to the NAACP’s leadership, including the executive director, James Weldon Johnson, and the editor of
The Crisis
, W.E.B. Du Bois.

Thurgood, meanwhile, continued life as the happy-go-lucky college boy. Hughes later described the Thurgood Marshall he knew at Lincoln as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.”
¹⁰
But Hughes became a friend, largely because he was entertained and sometimes fascinated by Thurgood’s free and easy life on campus.

Even on Lincoln’s rural campus, however, Thurgood couldn’t escape the racial issues that Hughes talked about regularly, much to Thurgood’s irritation. In Thurgood’s sociology class the students voted on whether Lincoln should integrate its all-white faculty. The majority of students, with Thurgood in the lead, voted to keep the faculty all white.

That vote angered fellow students, such as Hughes, who had long protested the absence of blacks on the faculty. Hughes immediately called for a campuswide referendum on the issue. The final tally showed 81 of 127 students voted as Thurgood had, to keep the faculty all white. On a campus dominated by frat life, the number one reason offered for opposing black professors at Lincoln was “favoritism,” which might occur if the professor belonged to one of the competing fraternities. The second reason was “we are doing well as we are.” And the third explanation, the most ironic, was that “students would not cooperate with Negroes.”
¹¹

Thurgood’s cavalier attitude about race relations went through a pivotal transformation just after the campus vote. He and some college pals, including Monroe Dowling, had gone into the small town of Oxford to watch a Saturday afternoon silent cowboy movie. After they purchased tickets, they were told that they could not sit on the main floor of the theater but had to move to the “colored” balcony. The students became angry and asked for their quarters back. The usher refused to give refunds. “So we had a disturbance … pulled down curtains, broke the front door,” Dowling said. “I don’t know who chased us. They didn’t catch anybody.” Marshall later said of the incident, “We knew there was only one pot-bellied cop in town and he could not arrest all of us.”
¹²

The story of the fracas got back to campus as quickly as Thurgood and his friends. Hughes heard about the incident and used it to confront Thurgood about the racial issues he preferred to ignore.

Thurgood, for the first time in his life, began thinking about Jim Crow practices. He had long talks with his favorite instructor, Robert Labaree, a sociology professor who had become close to Thurgood as
head of the debate team. And Thurgood now also opened himself to several heart-to-heart conversations with Hughes.

“Langston was really sincere about what he was trying to do,” Dowling said. “It was demeaning the way the white folks, the professors and their children, lived on one side of the road and we lived on the other side of the road and never the twain shall meet. They didn’t even eat in the same dining room.”

Hughes wrote his senior sociology thesis about the referendum: “The mental processes of the hat-in-hand, yes-boss, typical white-worshiping negro is to my mind very strongly shown in the attitude of some of the students there toward an all-white faculty. Sixty-three percent of the members of the upper classes favor for their college a faculty on which there are no negro professors.” Hughes went on to note that Fisk and Howard had mixed faculties and these schools produced “graduates no less capable than our own.”
¹³

W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the NAACP’s magazine, called the vote a “most astonishing blow” to the higher education of Negroes in the United States. He asked readers to imagine the reaction if two-thirds of British students declared “they did not wish to be taught by Englishmen, because they doubted if Englishmen had either the brains or the character to be their teachers.” He asked why parents would send children to a school where after four years the young people would “emerge with no faith in their own parents or in themselves.”
¹⁴

Hughes’s talks and writings in favor of integrating the faculty were powerful and persuasive. After Hughes graduated in 1929, Thurgood took over the campaign. During that fall, with the senior Thurgood in the lead, there was a second referendum. This time the students voted to press the administration to bring in black teachers. The first black professor joined the faculty a year later.

Another factor advancing Thurgood’s maturity and willingness to engage serious issues was his health. In the spring semester of 1928, there was an accident as he and some schoolmates were hurrying back from Baltimore. The boys were hitchhiking when the truck they were riding in broke down and they pushed it to a nearby garage in Rising Sun, Maryland. While the mechanic began repairs, a local sheriff came by and saw the six young black men standing around waiting. “How long is it going to take you to fix that truck?” the sheriff asked the mechanic. “You be sure to have it done before five o’clock, because I want these niggers out of here before sundown.”

The truck was fixed that afternoon, and the boys—except for Thurgood, who had wandered off—climbed back in. As the truck was pulling away, Thurgood came running, yelling for them to stop. The driver slowed down, but the truck was still moving when Thurgood jumped to get onboard. “In the process of running to catch it, Thurgood got caught on the tailgate [and] injured his testicle,” said Dowling. “We stopped … and got him back on the truck.… The pain was so great.… We wanted to take him to the local hospital, but the doctor there said he thought Thurgood’s injury was of such a magnitude that we should get him back to Baltimore quickly.”

Marshall lost one of his testicles because of the accident and did not get back to Lincoln until the fall semester of 1928, a semester behind his classmates. He was now a member of the class of 1930. And his friends had a nickname for him: One Ball.

His injury and time away from school slowed Thurgood’s social life. He began to work harder in the classroom. And his trips off campus became less regular. He was looking to settle down. That year the twenty-year-old Thurgood met Vivian Burey, a seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. She had short, wavy hair. Her thin arms and large breasts led boys to call her Buster, and the nickname stuck. She was described as having an outgoing personality, “fair skin and a sparkling smile.”
¹⁵

Thurgood said he met Buster in Philadelphia at an ice cream parlor near her parents’ church. But Buster told friends that she met her young love much earlier. But he was “so busy arguing and debating with everybody at the table” that he didn’t even give her a second glance.
¹⁶

Vivian, born February 11, 1911, came from a middle-class family. Her father was a caterer for hotels in Philadelphia, and during the summers he catered for several country clubs across the Delaware River in southern New Jersey. Vivian was in the school of education at the University of Pennsylvania when Thurgood asked her to marry him.

The wedding, held in 1929 at Philadelphia’s First African Baptist Church, known locally as Cherry Memorial, was a society event, followed by a large reception at the bride’s home. Thurgood’s roommate and friend from college James Murphy served as his best man.

Thurgood returned to Lincoln while his bride lived with his parents in Baltimore. The young man who had been so playful now displayed a serious mind; for the first time friends saw him study. Young Mr. Marshall
graduated with honors in January 1930, just months after the stock market crash of 1929.

Thurgood later said the crash had little effect on his family because they had no money to invest and therefore lost nothing. Jobs, however, were harder to find. Thurgood had to work as an insurance agent, an experience he described as “worse than boredom.” Another career possibility came when one of his professors, impressed by Thurgood’s improved work during his senior year, arranged for a job interview at a bank in New York. Thurgood turned that job down when he was offered just twenty dollars a week; he was making more than that as a waiter at the Gibson Island Club.
¹⁷

The college graduate put on his white waiter’s jacket and went back to work at Gibson Island to support his wife and save some money. Marshall now had a clear goal in mind. He told his mother he was on his way to law school.

Turkey

N
ORMA
M
ARSHALL
was not happy that her son, a college graduate, had to wait tables. But the family needed the money badly. They were spending every last dollar to put Aubrey through Howard Medical School. Still, Norma insisted that Thurgood make his job at Gibson Island nothing more than a stop on his way to law school. She told him to save his money and by that fall they would find a way to pay the tuition bill.

Norma’s greatest hope was that Thurgood could somehow get into the University of Maryland Law School. It was only a few blocks from Old West Baltimore, and it had low public tuition rates. Thurgood talked to Uncle Fearless about the school and called on several of the black lawyers around town, but the answer was always the same. Only two black students had ever graduated from the law school, and no black student had been admitted since the 1890s.

Until now Jim Crow racism had always been more an inconvenience than an obstacle to Thurgood’s success. Suddenly the rules of segregation in Baltimore were like a weight around his neck as he tried to stay above water. In conversations with Uncle Fee and his mother, he railed against the school and insisted that he would get in or find a way to get even. But there was no sign that the school planned to change its policy. And Thurgood did not have the money to pay tuition for any of the northern schools that accepted blacks. He was trapped, and he was bitter about it. He never even bothered to apply to the University of Maryland
Law School.
¹
But his bitterness over Maryland’s segregationist admissions policy was turning into a hard-edged motivation to get a law school education no matter what stood in his way.

Thurgood’s only option was not very appealing. Howard University Law School, in nearby Washington, D.C., was inexpensive and taught the law to black students. But its reputation was mediocre to poor. Thurgood knew of the school’s troubles: “Howard Law was known as a ‘dummy’s retreat’ because the only people that went there were those who couldn’t get in any other school.”

In the fall of 1930, after several months of work, Thurgood was still short of cash for Howard’s fall tuition payment. Even though he had been accepted at Howard, he had resigned himself to work another year to save more money. His mother, however, insisted that he go to law school immediately. She even pawned her wedding and engagement rings so Thurgood could matriculate.
²

Although the tuition was in place, Thurgood still couldn’t afford to live in Washington. So every morning at 5:00 he was up and out of the house. With a heavy bag of books under his arms, he took the long walk to the train station and caught the early commuter. Once in Washington he walked from Union Station to his law classes at 420 5th Street, Northwest, a brownstone near the city’s courthouse.