Thurgood Marshall (14 page)

Mister Carl was an activist editor. He saw no distinction between running the
Afro
and being a key player in the NAACP. A lifelong integrationist, he had been on the board of directors for the national NAACP since 1931, and in 1935 he led the coalition that restarted the Baltimore branch. “I can’t remember anytime when I asked Carl for money for legal cases that I didn’t get it,” Marshall said. “That was when it wasn’t so fashionable but Carl always believed.”

In 1931 the Baltimore NAACP had only five active members, but the five included Murphy and another dynamic personality, Lillie May Jackson. A driven woman who at a young age had suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of her face, Jackson had a shrill voice and no capacity for embarrassment. She regularly harangued city officials, the police, the
Sun
, and the
Afro
about racial discrimination in Baltimore. For years her leading crusade was against the bigoted treatment given black customers in the stores on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Pennsylvania Avenue was the gathering place for Baltimore’s black population. Church ladies and teachers as well as gamblers, prostitutes, and bootleggers all watched one another parade along the avenue. The Royal Theater, built in 1921, was a palace of black entertainment. With New York’s Apollo and Washington’s Howard theaters, the Royal made up the famous black entertainment “Chitlin’ Circuit,” with regular performances during the 1930s by world-known entertainers such as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and the Baltimore native Billie Holiday.

Pennsylvania Avenue, however, also reflected the racial problems of the city. Walter Carr, then a youngster who was a neighbor of the Marshalls in Old West Baltimore, remembered the indignity he felt while on Pennsylvania Avenue: “You were supposed to walk out in the gutter when you saw white folks walking down the street,” he said. “My grandmother knocked me in the gutter half a dozen times.”
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The harsh emotional impact
of Jim Crow segregation on Pennsylvania Avenue upset Marshall, too: “The only thing different between the South and Baltimore was trolley cars.” Many stores on Pennsylvania did not let dark-skinned blacks come in the door; others would sell to blacks but refused to let them try on clothes. Marshall’s mother and other blacks had their credit accounts taken away at one point when store owners suddenly insisted that blacks pay up front.

In response to the daily racist practices on Pennsylvania Avenue, Lillie May Jackson, with her daughters, Juanita and Virginia, started a forum to discuss racial and job issues affecting young blacks in Baltimore. It was called the City-Wide Young People’s Forum.

One of the biggest complaints at Jackson’s forums was that many white store owners in Old West Baltimore refused to hire black workers, but it was not until a religious mystic, Prophet Kiowah Costonie, appeared in Baltimore in June of 1933, that public sentiment was widely stirred to get jobs for black workers in stores patronized by black shoppers.

Costonie was one of many faith healers operating among blacks in big eastern cities during the early thirties. Black people were ripe for any savior. Unemployment and frustration with ongoing oppression in the South resulted in northern neighborhoods crowded with poorly educated blacks. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore all had black cultists promising a better day to people who would attend their meetings.

In Old West Baltimore, Costonie held revivals at which he laid his hands on the sick; newspapers said he supposedly made the deaf hear, the blind see, and cripples walk again. However, Costonie was more than a good tent show revivalist. He began attending the Young People’s Forum. With Costonie, often dressed in a turban, drawing the crowds and Lillie Jackson stirring public anger, they began a “Buy Where You Can Work Campaign.”
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Costonie and Jackson led dozens of people in picketing the stores and had immediate success. Black customers boycotted the stores as Murphy’s
Afro
carried headlines that championed the cause. Some white store owners started to lose money and offered to negotiate a settlement.

“The first Saturday that we put the campaign on, we cut their sales off so bad that one store sent a man down from New York to find out what happened,” Marshall said later. The NAACP sent Jackson and a young activist named Clarence Mitchell to meet with the man. Marshall
went along as the NAACP’s lawyer and successfully negotiated a deal in which A & P began training black clerks and store managers.

Not all the stores complied so easily; some owners hired black thugs to beat up the picketers. When Marshall found out that one of the store owners was Jewish, he went to see the man’s rabbi. The rabbi promised to speak to the man, but when Marshall returned, the rabbi told him there was nothing he could do. “I’m sorry, I can’t do anything. I’m embarrassed. I’ve never had one of my people in my synagogue talk to me like he did. He told me to go to hell.”

The hired toughs attacked some black picketers, including Marshall’s wife. He came home one evening to find Buster bruised and crying. She was hurt but announced that she was going to be on the picket line the next day. Marshall sought out one of his clients, Scrappy Brown, and asked him to serve as a bodyguard for Buster and himself. “Scrappy was one of them nice, peaceful guys,” Marshall said, laughing. “He carried an ax up the back of his coat.”

The campaign ended with mixed results. Some store owners got court injunctions banning picketing in front of the stores. Nevertheless, many businesses on Pennsylvania Avenue began to hire black workers. Murphy, whose
Afro
carried front-page stories about the blacks who were hired, urged Jackson to continue her campaign. He offered financial support and publicity if she could employ her success to revive the city’s flagging NAACP branch. With the
Afro
as her booster, Jackson began using the Pennsylvania Avenue boycotts, as well as stories about lynchings on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to build membership for the local NAACP. In less than a year she enrolled 2,000 members.

Jackson also used Marshall as the local branch’s lawyer. She did not pay him but took care to remind Marshall that Mr. Carl might give him more of the
Afro’s
legal work—and fees—if he helped the NAACP. She would call the young lawyer and tell him what she expected and when. At times, Marshall remembered, he would lay the phone down on his desk, continue his other work, and every few minutes shout into the phone: “Yes, Mrs. Jackson. Yes, Mrs. Jackson,” as she continued to talk.

But there were times when Jackson and Marshall came close to falling out. “Mrs. Lillie would actually call me up and say, ‘I heard a horrible story about my lawyer,’ ” an exasperated Marshall recalled. “She said that I was drunk at such and such a club.… I said, ‘I was and I got up there two nights and I got drunk both nights.’ She said, ‘You’re not ashamed of it?’ I said, ‘Proud of it.’ ”

Mrs. Jackson also cracked down on Roy Wilkins, Walter White’s young assistant from the national office. When Wilkins visited Baltimore he spent time with Marshall drinking at jazz clubs. Jackson complained to Carl Murphy, who sent a letter to New York chastising Wilkins for damaging the organization’s image.

Finally Marshall told her his drinking and chain-smoking were none of her business. “Well, look, start paying me some salary and I will think about listening to you. But you don’t pay me a goddamn nickel, then you want to run my life. You can’t do ’em both.”

Despite his bluster Marshall was happiest doing Mrs. Jackson’s civil rights work. He was now looking for that one breakthrough case that would make him a leading lawyer. It was coming fast.

Getting Started

T
HURGOOD
M
ARSHALL DECIDED IT WAS TIME
to take action. He read the
Afro
’s regular stories about the University of Maryland’s continuing refusal to take black students with growing disgust. As early as January 1933, the paper reported that blacks were trying to break the Jim Crow admissions policy but had been turned away by white law school officials who declared they were preserving the color line in law school education.

Marshall began to discuss with Charles Houston how to attack the university’s ban. At Howard, Marshall had done research for one of his professors, William Hastie, who had tried to get a black student, Thomas Hocutt, admitted into the school of pharmacy at the University of North Carolina. That case failed on a technicality when the black president of North Carolina College, a historically black school, refused to release Hocutt’s transcript. The college president said he did not want to integrate the state’s university system. Marshall later said Hastie and Houston’s theory in the
Hocutt
case was sound; the only reason they lost was because of the school president. “He was a first-class Uncle Tom,” Marshall said. Even in defeat Hastie, Houston, and their star pupil were confident that a legal attack against segregation in the graduate schools was the best way to break apart racially separate schools around the country.

In the early 1930s the NAACP had hired Nathan Margold of Harvard, one of Houston’s friends, to come up with a legal approach to stop
school segregation. Margold wrote that the NAACP should not challenge racial segregation directly but insist that states provide truly equal schools for blacks. His theory was that southern states could not afford to build equal facilities and ultimately would have to admit blacks and whites to the same schools. “I must have read the report at about the time of the
Hocutt
case,” Marshall recalled. “It stayed with me.… The South would go broke paying for truly equal, dual systems.”

With the Margold report in the back of his mind, Marshall now saw his chance to take revenge for the hurt he felt when he discovered his home state law school was closed to him. He had held the anger for years, later saying that the first thing he wanted to do after he got out of Howard was “get even with Maryland for not letting me go to its law school.”
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When Marshall heard through the Howard grapevine that some lawyers in Washington were thinking about suing the law school, he got upset and wrote to Houston that he wanted to be the first to file suit. He could not bear to allow any other lawyer to take the lead on this case. Working with William Gosnell, another black attorney in Baltimore, Marshall identified a willing plaintiff in December 1934. Donald Gaines Murray was a black student with good grades from a good college. Marshall did not know the twenty-one-year-old Murray, but once he and Gosnell started talking to him, Marshall found out that Murray was related to Uncle Fearless’s wife, Aunt Florence. And Murray had attended Lincoln College for two years before transferring to Amherst.

In addition to his good grades from Amherst, Murray had another advantage as a prospective plaintiff. His family was well respected in Baltimore because his grandfather was an African Methodist Episcopal bishop. Murray had been thinking about studying law, and it did not take much for Marshall to convince him to apply to the University of Maryland.

Just as Marshall had anticipated, Maryland turned down Murray’s application. University officials suggested he apply to the all-black Princess Anne Academy, part of the state university system. But the academy had no law school. When Murray wrote an angry letter of complaint to the university’s board of regents, they replied that he should consider Howard because it was cheaper than Maryland.

Marshall worked long hours on the case with Gosnell and got advice from Houston, who agreed to have the national NAACP finance the suit. Houston later explained that he saw Murray’s case as a “springboard for extending the attacks [against racial segregation in the United States] on
a larger front.”
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On April 20, 1935, with Marshall acting as his attorney, Murray sued in Baltimore City Court, charging the university with violating the Fourteenth Amendment (giving all Americans equal protection of the laws) by refusing his application.

There was some delay, however, as the state’s lawyers tried every trick to keep the case from coming before a judge. Marshall, not wanting to appear combative and keeping with his style of charming the city’s white establishment, made no objection to the stalling tactics. Finally, the tough, antiunion judge Eugene O’Dunne confronted Marshall: “Excuse me, Mr. Marshall, do you want to try this case or not?” A stunned Marshall shot up from his seat and said he very much wanted to get going. “Well act like it—say no [to the postponement]!” A newly energized Marshall happily raised his voice to shout out “No,” and the judge, now smiling, set the trial date for the next morning.
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The case began on June 17, with Marshall and Houston sitting next to Murray in the courtroom. The three black men all wore their best clothes, double-breasted wool suits with handkerchiefs in the breast pockets and stiff white shirts underneath. Marshall had to ask the court to admit Houston to the Maryland Bar [he was a Washington lawyer], and Judge O’Dunne joked that it was funny seeing the student asking that his law school dean be allowed to speak to the court.
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