Thurgood Marshall (11 page)

On the first day of classes, Thurgood and thirty-five other young black men filed into the school. It was a new day for the students and the school; this was the first year that Howard Law would be solely a day school for full-time students. As Thurgood and the other men walked up the stone steps and into the large first-floor room, they spoke in quiet voices, waiting for the appearance of the dean, Charles Hamilton Houston.

The room fell silent when Houston, an imposing, stiff man in a woolen suit, came in and simply stood looking at the students. He was a tall, brown-skinned man with clipped short hair. The students took their seats, and Houston began to speak. He didn’t bother to welcome them. He bluntly announced that Howard was no longer for students who did not want to give their full attention to the study of law. He warned them that their success in college meant nothing to him, and it would give him great pleasure to flunk out Phi Beta Kappas.

His stern lecture ended with a caution: “Each one of you look at the man to your right and then look to the man on your left. Realize that two of you won’t be here next year.” After Houston left the room there was
hushed grumbling. Thurgood thought to himself that he had a lot riding on making the grade. The idea that two of every three students would be gone by next year made him nervous—he was determined to be the one who succeeded.

Houston was the dominant figure among the law school’s brand-new eleven-man faculty. It was a thoroughly integrated and first-rate group. There were five white professors, and the six black professors included a young lawyer fresh out of Harvard Law School and a future federal judge, William Hastie. James Cobb, the highly regarded constitutional law scholar, was also on Houston’s new faculty.

The students quickly fell into a tightly ordered world, ruled by Dean Houston. The first floor of the school was a large room that could be used for moot court and classes; the second floor was the library, with space for classrooms. On the top floor was the office of the dean. Houston worked at a neat desk with a green visor over his eyes as he read and typed. Students walking by the office would glimpse him typing intensely with two fingers. One student described the dean’s rapid, mistake-free typing as “a Gatling gun.”
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Houston’s formal manner, his constant focus on work, and his strict regimen for his students led them to call him Old Iron Shoes and Cement Pants.

Despite their carping, the students regarded Houston as a role model. He had been born in Washington, D.C., on September 3, 1895. His father, William Houston, was one of the city’s most prominent black lawyers, and his mother was the hairdresser for several wives of white senators. Houston grew up in this middle-class home as an only child. He attended Washington’s famous M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School) and finished at just fifteen, then went north to the nearly all-white Amherst College. He graduated a top student, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1915. After that he went off to Europe as part of the U.S. Army in World War I, becoming a second lieutenant.

While in the racially segregated Army, Houston acted as a military lawyer for blacks facing charges of misconduct even though he had no formal legal training. He found that black soldiers were often convicted on flimsy charges with no evidence. After he lost several misconduct cases involving black soldiers, he decided to follow his father and become a lawyer.

In 1919, just after the war’s end, Houston started at Harvard Law School. He was one of the few blacks at the school and not always welcomed at a time when openly racist behavior was still common, even in
Massachusetts and at Harvard. But Houston worked hard and became the first black student to edit the
Harvard Law Review
. He graduated with honors in 1922 and began working with the law school dean, Roscoe Pound, and Professor Felix Frankfurter, later an associate justice of the Supreme Court, as he pursued a doctorate of law. Harvard gave him a scholarship to study civil law in Spain in 1923. The following year, after earning his doctorate, Houston made his way home to join his father’s law firm and start teaching at Howard.

Howard Law was unaccredited and sinking out of business when Houston joined the faculty. To persuade the school’s trustees to get rid of the night law school, Houston did studies on black lawyers around the country. He found there were only about a thousand black attorneys in the United States and only a hundred practicing law full-time in the South. By comparison, the nation had nearly 160,000 white lawyers. Houston made these findings the basis of his argument that Howard had to do a better job of training black lawyers. Even while he was sick with TB in 1928, Houston built support among black lawyers and educators in Washington for an overhaul of Howard Law.
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When Houston became the school’s vice dean in 1929, he began an effort to make Howard a fully accredited day program. He had support from prominent people, including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Brandeis confided to Howard’s president, Mordecai Johnson, that his colleagues on the high court could tell a black lawyer’s brief from a white lawyer’s by its lack of research and sloppiness. Houston’s effort was to make Howard Law a “West Point of Negro leadership.”
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Thurgood Marshall was in the first class of men Houston wanted to transform into this cadre.

A younger Marshall might not have understood Houston. But Marshall was changing. Now twenty-two years old, he did not mind Houston’s high expectations, and by his own account he was scared of what would happen to him if he did not become a lawyer. With the country in the middle of the Great Depression, a wife working to support him, and his mother hocking her valuables to help with his tuition, Marshall was no longer the Lincoln cutup who played pinochle all day and viewed school as a site for fraternity pranks. On his train rides to and from Baltimore, his head was buried in law books. “All of my notes I would take down in the book by hand and that night I would type them up after I rode back to Baltimore,” he remembered. “My evidence notebook—got at least half a dozen people by just by reading my notebook.”
Marshall’s constant hard work paid off. He became the top student in the first-year class. That ranking won him a job as the student assistant in the law library, which helped to pay his tuition and gave him the chance to begin working personally with Houston. “I’d got the horsin’ around out of my system and I heard law books were to dig in so I dug deep,” according to Thurgood.
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Marshall’s time in the library was time to do not only his job but also schoolwork and the extra research that set him apart from other students. “You see, as a librarian in the law school for eight hours, I didn’t have nothing to do but read law,” Marshall remembered. “Sometimes we’d take the rape cases and read all the rape cases. And sometimes we’d get on another kick and we’d read all that.” Also in his second year, Marshall’s classmates elected him to the Court of Peers, which judged legal arguments presented by students.

By now Houston and Marshall had developed a close personal relationship. Houston admired his willingness to do hard work, and Marshall wanted to be part of the elite fraternity of lawyers, including Hastie and Houston, who were respected, had some money, and seemed to be in control of their destiny.

The library job and Houston’s mentoring meant that Marshall did not leave the school until 10:00 P.M. each night. “When I was in law school, in my first year I lost thirty pounds solely from work,” he recalled. “Intellectual work, studying. And that’s how you get ahead of people.”

Even though he was working long hours for the first time in his life, Marshall did not lose his taste for outrageous stories, good liquor, and women. “Thurgood, he walked with a gangling gait, and he always had some new lie to tell you,” said Oliver Hill, a classmate and close friend at Howard, recalling that Marshall’s strut earned him the nickname “Turkey.”
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Marshall and many of his law school pals ate lunch at a restaurant run by Father Divine, a charismatic black preacher who surrounded himself with young women he called his “angels.” Lunchtime was a chance for Marshall to make jokes about Father Divine and ogle the angels.

Marshall’s life at Howard also included some fraternity run-ins. Half the class was made up of Alpha Phi Alpha, his fraternity, but the other half included members of Omega Psi Phi and other fraternities. Marshall represented the Alphas as they competed with the Omegas, led by Oliver Hill, to win elections as class officers. “The Alphas thought that they
could run the class,” Hill recalled. “But the opposition coalesced. We could not or would not agree on who would be the class president, therefore the class was never able to elect an official set of class officers.”

Meanwhile the academic pace was severe. Houston began flunking students out. In the first year alone about half were asked to leave. Houston had a standing, icy comment for Marshall and any other student who complained that he was working them too hard: “No tea for the feeble, no crepe for the dead.”
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The high standards did achieve Houston’s goal, however. During Marshall’s second year the school won its American Bar Association accreditation.

Houston kept the law school jumping for the students who could keep up. He brought in a fabulous cast of visiting professors, including Roscoe Pound from Harvard. Houston also drew world-famous lawyers to lecture, including Clarence Darrow, who was famous for handling the Scopes monkey trial. Another visitor was Arthur Garfield Hays of the ACLU. Being in Washington, Marshall took the initiative to go to the Supreme Court and see some of the best lawyers in action. The most memorable was John W. Davis, a South Carolina native and Democrat who ran for president in 1924. Davis was renowned for his arguments before the high court, and Marshall would skip class to hear the man he regarded as the nation’s best attorney. “Every time John Davis argued, I’d ask myself, ‘Will I ever, ever …?’ and every time I had to answer, ‘No never.’ ”
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Houston also kept his students’ attention by walking them through the District of Columbia legal system, visiting police precincts, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, courts, and jails. Marshall recalled with great pride that he and his classmates discovered that Congress’s code of laws for Washington, D.C., included no equal rights protection—a guarantee for all Americans under the Fourteenth Amendment. Houston and the law students brought the omission to the attention of newspapers and Congress. The D.C. code was changed.

By Marshall’s final year of law school, Houston began to treat the few remaining students, especially the transformed Marshall, as if they were partners in an elite black law firm. One problem for Houston and the other black lawyers was that no matter how good their school, they could not become members of the segregated American Bar Association. In response to the ABA’s whites-only policy, Houston became one of the leaders of the National Bar Association, a black lawyers’ group founded in
1925. “I remember in our senior year there was a National Bar Association meeting in Baltimore,” Oliver Hill recalled. “Charlie carried Thurgood and me to the convention as his protégés.”

Houston also began to give his top students the chance to work on real cases. In 1933, Marshall’s senior year, Houston was asked by the NAACP’s national office in New York to help with the case of a Virginia black man charged with murdering two white women. The accused, George Crawford, had fled the state for fear of lynch mobs and was arrested in Boston. When Virginia tried to extradite him, the NAACP, which had no legal staff, asked Houston if he could find a way to keep Crawford from being sent back. They feared a return trip to Virginia was a death sentence, since he would have to stand trial before twelve white men in a community itching to see Crawford hang.

Houston took the case but failed to stop the extradition. Afterward he asked Walter White, the flamboyant head of the NAACP, if the civil rights group would hire him to defend Crawford during the trial. The case was an opportunity to take a dignified stand by having black lawyers defend a black man in Virginia, the state that had been the capital of the Confederacy. If black lawyers handled the murder trial, it would “be a turning point in the legal history of the Negro in this country,”
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Houston told White.

White gave Houston permission to use his Howard faculty and students to defend Crawford. Marshall spent countless hours in the library and in Virginia doing research on extradition law. He then joined Houston and Leon Ransom, another law professor, in discussing strategies for defending Crawford. White later wrote: “There was a lanky, brash young senior law student who was always present.… [I] was amazed at his assertiveness in challenging positions taken by Charlie and the other lawyers. But I soon learned of his great value.… [He did] everything he was asked, from research on obscure legal opinions to foraging for coffee and sandwiches.”
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White’s first encounter with Marshall created a lasting impression.

The Howard legal team’s first move in the case was to charge that the absence of blacks from the list of prospective jurors was evidence the state was illegally keeping blacks off all juries. The circuit court, however, ruled against the Howard lawyers, and Crawford went to trial in Leesburg. Houston argued the prosecution did not even have the murder weapon or a witness to the crime. Crawford had told police he had tried to rob the women but had not killed them—a friend had done it. Crawford,
however, could not produce his friend, and the jury found him guilty. Still, he escaped the death penalty.

Marshall and Houston celebrated as if they had won. “If you get a life term for a Negro charged with killing a white person in Virginia, you’ve won,” Marshall said later. “You’ve won because normally they were hanging them.”

The
Crawford
case was the first time Marshall had seen Houston in action, and it left an impression that would last a lifetime. Marshall felt the preachers, the politicians, the businessmen, and even the civil rights leaders like Walter White could talk and raise money and put stories in the newspapers. But it was up to lawyers, like Houston, to stand up and help a black man with his life on the line. “The lawyer was there to bear the brunt of getting rid of segregation,” Marshall said. “And Houston made public statements that black lawyers he trained at Howard would become social engineers rather than lawyers. That was our purpose in life.”