Thurgood Marshall (13 page)

In the meantime, her husband’s practice began to pick up. He handled divorces, personal injury, car accidents, murder, and rape cases. Marshall even handled a case for his brother, in which Aubrey was sued for $2,500 and charged by another motorist with “reckless driving.” Marshall got the case settled out of court.
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This was a vintage early case for the young lawyer.

But Marshall would soon find himself with three cases that were critical to his development. The first came in June of 1934. Sitting in his office one afternoon, Marshall got a nervous call from his neighbor Pat Patterson. A young black man had been arrested for murder in southern Maryland, and Patterson had convinced the suspect’s parents to hire Marshall to represent their son. Twenty-five-year-old James Gross had been charged with the murder of a man who ran a barbecue stand in nearby Prince Georges County. Local papers ran sensational stories about Gross and his accomplices, dubbing them the Three Black Dillingers, a reference to the gangster John Dillinger.
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“I knew the family of the boy,” said Patterson, “and they needed a lawyer, so I talked to Thurgood and he was interested. They wanted a black lawyer. There were several black lawyers in Washington that I
knew personally, but I didn’t think they had a ghost of a chance in Prince Georges County. I wasn’t sure that even Marshall would have a chance. But I felt that he probably would have a better chance coming from Maryland.”

The trial, in the county seat of Upper Marlboro, lasted only a few days. Marshall argued that his client had just driven the car while the two other men actually shot the store owner. But the jury was not persuaded. The three were convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang. A few months later one of the men, Donald Parker, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Marshall’s client was not so lucky. On April 19, 1935, James Gross was hanged just after midnight at the Maryland Penitentiary.
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“The ringleader got off—he had a smarter lawyer than what the other boys had at the time,” said Patterson. “Parker’s lawyers were white. They had practices in Prince Georges County. And if you could afford to hire either of them or both, you could commit murder and get away with it.”

Upon the death of his client, Marshall felt the sting of his own inadequacies as a lawyer. He was enraged by the arbitrary sentencing. The actual murderer was smiling and strolling out of court with a life sentence while the driver of the getaway car was sobbing and babbling for mercy as he walked to the gallows. Marshall had never opposed the death penalty, but now he saw it as a crude instrument, smashing the little guy while missing the bloody murderer.

Another case that deeply affected Marshall came two years later. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP asked him to represent a black suspect, Virtis Lucas, who was accused in the fatal shooting of Hyman Brilliant, a white man. The Baltimore police picked Lucas up and questioned him for three days, severely beating him until he confessed. Marshall, using his brother to help with Lucas’s medical condition, went to the city jail and prepared him to stand trial.
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In a tense March trial that captivated the city, Marshall stood before an all-white jury and this time pointed the finger of blame at the police. It was an emotional trial for him. He didn’t want to lose another client to the death penalty, and he felt the weight of his family’s history, recalling the stories of his grandfather’s stand against police brutality in the “Cake Walk” homicide.

Marshall began his defense by making sure the jury was aware of just how badly his client had been beaten after the arrest. Then he made his client into a sympathetic figure, a weak-minded boy who had been idly
shooting off a gun in an alley a few blocks away around the time of the murder. That youngster, Marshall contended, became an easy target for a murder charge when Baltimore police could not find the real killer.

The all-white jury was swayed by the young lawyer’s pleadings. Lucas was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to just six months in prison.
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The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was thrilled that Lucas was not sentenced to be hanged. And they were greatly impressed that a black lawyer had been able to defend a black man in Baltimore’s white justice system.

Marshall was learning how to work with the white legal system, creating a personal network among lawyers and judges in the city and building a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer. In the third major case of his young career, he broke ground as the first black lawyer to defend a white lawyer in Maryland. The white lawyer, Bernard Ades, had been defending a black client charged with murder. Ades challenged the conviction on the grounds that his client had not been given a fair trial because of his race.

A radical lawyer best known for his ties to the Communist ILD [International Labor Defense], Ades was not popular with the state’s judges. Baltimore judges were openly hostile to unionization of the city’s blue-collar workforce. Picketing and strikes intended to shut down factories were often thwarted by court injunctions. Communists were frequently blamed by the city’s major employers for union-organizing attempts.

After Ades charged that his client was a victim of the judge’s racism, Judge William C. Coleman wanted Ades’s right to practice law suspended and started a hearing in state court to take away his license.
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Ades immediately called Charles Houston, whom he knew from the labor movement. Houston agreed to represent him if he could have Marshall, who knew the Baltimore courts and judges, as his cocounsel. Soon after they took the case, Judge Coleman called the two black attorneys into his chambers. He felt Ades had unfairly damaged his reputation by accusing him of racism. If Marshall and Houston made any similar charges, the judge warned, he would have them jailed for contempt of court.

Marshall and Houston did not know what to do. If they abandoned their arguments, they had no defense for Ades. But if they went into court the next day and contended that racism was at the root of the case, the judge was going to put them in jail. Word of their dilemma spread through Baltimore.

“The judge was about to put me in jail, and this client of mine, John
Murphy [of the
Afro
newspaper], came by,” Marshall remembered. “Here, I’ve got something for you to go to court,” Murphy told him. A curious Marshall opened the envelope and found inside five $1,000 bills. His eyes wide with astonishment, he turned to Murphy, who told him, “That’s for your bail.”

Luckily for Marshall and Houston, Judge Coleman decided to recuse himself from the case, and another judge took his place. The case ended with Ades being given a reprimand, but he was allowed to continue practicing law. Marshall and Houston had won an important case. In local legal circles Marshall’s reputation now stood large. He was seen as a good attorney and also the black lawyer who made integrationist history by defending a white lawyer.

Now that he was a courthouse regular, Marshall tried his best to become an insider among the white legal fraternity. He brought a personal yet respectful manner to the legal bar and its white judges. Despite the segregated nature of legal proceedings, he learned to work within the ropes of legal segregation. He only demanded fair treatment.

To bolster his case for racial equality, Marshall took to heart Houston’s advice to be twice as good as white lawyers. His briefs were carefully written, and his arguments were well reasoned. “I never filed a paper in any court with an erasure on it. If I changed a word, it had to be typed all over,” he said.
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Marshall’s diligence regularly won judges to his side. Once, when an opposing white lawyer asked a white judge for time to check on the legal citations in Marshall’s brief, the judge said it was not necessary. Even though the judge had a reputation for giving black lawyers a rough time, he told the white attorney: “You don’t have to worry about that—if Mr. Marshall puts his signature on it, you don’t have to check.”

Marshall’s good relationship with white judges, including the bigots, led them to call on him in cases where they wanted a solid black lawyer in the courtroom to protect themselves against charges of racial bias. One night Marshall got a call from the local judge in nearby Frederick, Maryland, alerting him that a lynching was about to happen. Marshall hopped in his rickety, used 1929 Ford, nicknamed Betsy, that he had bought with Uncle Fee’s help. When he got to Frederick, Marshall saw a scary, chaotic scene. The police were racing around, some grabbing black men and leading them to the jails. Marshall became worried for his own safety. Working up his courage, he drove his car next to a state trooper and asked for an escort to the judge’s house. “You want some protection?”
the policeman asked him. Marshall, who by then had sweated through his shirt with worry, replied: “That’s what I’m talking about.”

When a relieved Marshall arrived at the judge’s house, he told him that Geraldine Kreh, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a local bank president, had been beaten up during an attempted rape by a black man. Marshall was called to make sure that all the rules were followed in identifying and charging a suspect.

That night William Carter, a black workman, was identified by Kreh as her assailant. He was charged with assault with intent to rape, a crime punishable by death. The
Afro-American
, the activist Baltimore paper, and the Baltimore NAACP hired Marshall to “observe” the trial and note any evidence of racial bias. With Marshall in the courtroom as a spokesman for the NAACP, the man was convicted but given a life sentence. Marshall later wrote to Charlie Houston, “He is guilty as the devil.”
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Marshall’s reputation had now extended outside the halls of Baltimore courts. He had become known to judges around the state as the eyes and ears of Maryland’s NAACP.

Marshall’s growing profile led local labor leaders to ask him for help in organizing black workers. The young lawyer began to see a role for himself beyond the confines of the court. As Charles Houston had long preached to him, Marshall was using his legal training to become a social activist.

One of the city’s biggest employers was Bethlehem Steel. A third of the labor force at its Sparrow’s Point plant was black, but they did not trust the all-white leadership of the labor unions. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s
Crisis
magazine, had come to Baltimore in the early 1930s to give speeches urging black workers to join white workers in unions. In many companies black workers were not even allowed to unionize. And when the companies allowed blacks to join unions, the unions often forced them into segregated units. But high unemployment during the Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal spurred a new wave of labor organizing in the city.
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However, the antiunion tenor among Baltimore’s white establishment continued to prevail. Eugene O’Dunne, a leading judge in city courts, derided the strikes as evidence of labor radicalism. “A man has a right to work for whom he will and what he will,” O’Dunne said during one union-busting trial. He charged that labor groups had no right to set working conditions.
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Marshall was one of a few activists who challenged this policy.

As a member of the union’s organizing committee, Marshall began secret meetings with black workers at Bethlehem Steel. Despite their anxiety about white union leaders, Marshall persuaded the black workers that the best way to protect their rights was to create an integrated union. To reassure black workers of fair treatment, he proposed that they run a candidate for a leadership post in the union. Marshall led a successful campaign to elect a black union treasurer.

Bethlehem Steel was not pleased; they saw a cohesive, racially integrated union as a major threat to their control over workers. The company hired goons, armed with nightsticks, to break up several union meetings where Marshall was advancing the idea of black and white worker cooperation.

One night, Marshall had to run from the company thugs. “It was raining and we started running and two of us saw a church. It had a big hedge around it so we got down in the hedge and these guys were coming by shouting: ‘Black son of a bitch’ and knocking heads. We lay down in the mud. At first, that mud was cold, but it got real warm. We stayed there until they left, after midnight.”

Despite challenging Baltimore’s power structure, Marshall was careful to keep good relationships in the city’s establishment legal circles. He remained the warm, wisecracking black lawyer with whom white judges felt comfortable dealing. Marshall wanted acceptance from the city’s white lawyers; the only sign of defiance came when they would not let him or any other black lawyer in the Baltimore City Bar Association. Marshall became a leader in the Monumental City Bar Association, the black lawyers’ alternative bar. Marshall and six other black lawyers incorporated it in April of 1935. That year thirty-two black lawyers were working in the city, an all-time high.
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The same year Marshall became treasurer of the National Bar Association. Marshall joked that the group had so little money, he could “carry the treasury around in my mouth.”

For all his activism Marshall’s law practice was still struggling. His biggest client was the Druid Hill Laundry until John H. Murphy, Jr., treasurer of the Afro-American Co., the country’s largest black newspaper chain, walked into his office.

John Murphy had had a spat with his longtime lawyer, Warner McGuinn. Marshall had been college roommates with John’s nephew, James, who had referred John Murphy to the young lawyer. McGuinn did not object to giving Marshall a little business to keep him afloat. In fact, McGuinn was confident that his disgruntled client would soon return.
As Marshall remembered their conversation, McGuinn told him: “Go ahead. You’ll fuck it up, and it’ll come back to me anyhow.”

Marshall’s work with John Murphy paid off in more than cash. It brought him closer to the president of the Afro-American Co., John’s brother, Carl Murphy. Mister Carl, as he was called in Old West Baltimore, was a tough-minded bantam rooster of a man. He was fluent in German, with a master’s degree in the language from Harvard. He came to the paper in 1917 and when his father died five years later took control of the
Afro
at the age of thirty-three.