Thurgood Marshall (16 page)

However, he was still in the market for a steady paycheck and looking to get more work from the NAACP. He was no longer the young maverick, out to prove he could make it on his own. He even asked Leon Ransom, who was teaching at Howard Law, about getting a teaching job at his alma mater. In April of 1936 Ransom wrote to Marshall, in a letter warmly addressed “Dear No-Good,” that there would be two openings for the next school year. He offered a recommendation, as did Houston. But faculty politics, including a faction that resented Houston and saw Marshall as his protégé, put an end to any chance of Marshall joining the teaching staff.

By late May 1936 Marshall’s law practice was in serious trouble. He got letters from Prentice-Hall publishing company, complaining that he was six months late in paying his bill for law books. Sinking in debt, the persistent Marshall repeatedly tried to convince Houston to hire him. “The real problem mostly pertains to me,” Marshall wrote to Houston in New York. “As it stands things are getting worse and worse.… If there is a possibility I would appreciate it very much if I could be assured of enough to tide me over, then in return, I could do more on [NAACP] cases. For example, to prepare briefs and research, etc.… [on] the legal matters which you would need assistance on.”
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Marshall was under severe pressure to bring money home. Aubrey had been unable to work regularly as a doctor for a few months because of a bad cold. And to make matters worse, Thurgood’s father had lost his job at the Gibson Island Club. Willie’s prickly personality had gotten him into a loud dispute with a white staff person at the club, which ended with Willie out of work.

“He ran it all until he got in the way of somebody who was white,” the son recalled later. “I mean after all, a Negro steward is a little high, you know, for a Negro.” Willie Marshall subsequently got a job at the
Afro-American
, with Thurgood’s help, but that job didn’t last long. “He was on the newspaper a month or so,” Marshall said, thinking back to
that time. “I mean he had a low boiling point, man. He’d quit at the drop of a hat for nothing.”

Unlike his father, the shrewd young lawyer did not blow his cool over his difficulty with people or jobs. He waited and planned, looking for the right moment to push for a contract with the national NAACP. That effort got a boost in the summer of 1936, when the NAACP held its twenty-seventh annual conference in Baltimore. During the weeklong conference he dined nightly with Houston, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins. Best of all, Carl Murphy arranged for Marshall to give a major speech on disparities between the education of black and white children. White was impressed with Marshall’s forceful yet down-home and personal speech. In addition, Marshall benefited from the afterglow of the conference because a record number of new members signed up, and money poured into the NAACP national treasury.

“It was one of the greatest conferences in the history of the association,” Wilkins wrote to Marshall just after the convention. “The success of the Baltimore conference was due in no small measure to your assistance on the program.”
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Houston used the upbeat feelings generated by the conference to press White for help in handling the NAACP’s legal affairs; specifically he wanted White to go to the board and ask them to hire Thurgood Marshall. Houston spent most of his time on the road as an “evangelist and stump speaker,” raising money for the NAACP. He felt there was a need for someone to take care of the daily legal affairs in the office. White agreed.

“I don’t know of anybody I would rather have in the office or anybody who can do a better job of research and preparation of cases,” Houston wrote to Marshall. But he insisted that Marshall close his Baltimore law practice. “It simply isn’t possible to do two independent jobs to full satisfaction.… You would be of more value to the Association at $200 in New York than at $150 in Baltimore.”
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Marshall did not take long to come to Houston’s point of view when he looked at his law practice’s lack of profits. And he realized that without Houston’s guidance and the NAACP’s treasury, he might never get to do the work of breaking down segregation—the work he really wanted to do. In an October 1936 letter agreeing to take a six-month assignment with the NAACP, Marshall wrote to White: “I will be indebted to you and Charlie for a long time to come for many reasons, one of which is
that I have an opportunity now to do what I have always dreamed of doing!”
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Despite the thrill of getting the big job he coveted, Marshall was torn about leaving Baltimore. The family house on Druid Hill was in turmoil. His mother would never stop him from leaving for the job in New York, but Marshall worried that the family was on the verge of exploding.

Leaving Home

J
UST AS
B
USTER AND
T
HURGOOD
were about to leave Baltimore in October 1936, all hell broke loose.

Aubrey’s lingering cold had gotten worse. Thurgood could hear his hacking and coughing through the night. His older brother looked frail and was missing more and more work. His body, as well as his stylish dress, began to deteriorate. Sadie, his wife, started to shun him, pushing her husband out of their bed. Aubrey was left to the care of his mother and father.

Willie Marshall had his own troubles. He was still out of work and bitter about it. That led to more drinking and more fights with his wife. And when Sadie and her mother were around, Willie blasted them over their callous treatment of Aubrey.

Thurgood and Buster tried to support the family as best they could. But when the job offer came from the NAACP in New York, they did not know what to do. Norma Marshall, however, did not hesitate. She was steadfast in her ambition for Thurgood, and told him it was time for him to go. She even made plans for him and Buster to stay with her sister, Medi.

Thurgood was still not sure he should go; he felt obligated to his family. Torn between ambition and emotion, he reluctantly decided that New York wasn’t that far away. He began to make plans to close his office when the family was hit with a jolt. Aubrey’s watery eyes and hacking cough turned out to be tuberculosis.

The once debonair Dr. Aubrey Marshall was totally crushed by the news. As a physician he realized how far developed the potentially fatal disease was in his body and feared he was about to die. The highly contagious nature of the illness forced him to close his medical practice.

Aubrey had no idea where he had contracted TB, but his work had clearly exposed him to a number of people who had it. Both in his office and at the city health clinic in Old West Baltimore, he had tended to patients from areas where the poor were forced to crowd together in alleys littered with open bags of garbage, scrawny stray dogs, and rats. Thirty years earlier the disease had reached epidemic proportions in urban areas throughout the nation. By the mid-1930s it was slowing, but its victims were still a common part of the American scene.

Now that Aubrey was identified as a TB carrier, his wife would not even come close to him. Even worse, Sadie refused to let him within sight of his only child. Norma Marshall and Sadie got into furious arguments over Sadie’s unsympathetic attitude. Norma wanted her son at home, with family, where someone would always be with him. But Sadie, fearing for her own well-being, wanted Aubrey out of the house and in a hospital.

“My mother said he had to go because she didn’t want him breathing germs around me,” Aubrey Jr. said as an adult.
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The argument between the two women climaxed when Sadie, her mother, and Aubrey Jr. packed their belongings and without a word moved out of the house. Aubrey, already sick and now depressed, was left at home with his mother and father and in need of medical care. The best TB hospitals in Maryland, however, admitted only whites.

Still, Norma Marshall, with tears in her eyes, told Thurgood and Buster that her troubles should not be their troubles. With a plainspoken approach, she said Thurgood’s future was in New York and the family owed him as much support as they were giving Aubrey. After she coached Uncle Fearless, Norma brought him in to tell Thurgood that staying in a failing law practice wasn’t going to help Aubrey or anyone else.

Thurgood and Buster made the move to New York in October 1936, and began living with the Dodsons (Aunt Medi and Uncle Boots). They were in the same Harlem apartment that Thurgood had lived in as an infant when his father had worked on the New York Central with Boots. The apartment seemed uncrowded and quiet in comparison with the coughing, the fighting, and the crying baby that had filled their home in Baltimore. Thurgood had little memory of his childhood days in
Harlem, but he immediately took to the bustling, big city atmosphere. He had no money and few friends outside the NAACP’s offices, but just walking around was a kick for him. He and Buster spent most of their time playing cards with the Dodsons, who were in their late fifties and loved the young couple’s energy.

When his mother wrote or on rare occasions called, Thurgood would hear about Aubrey’s declining health and the segregated hospitals in Maryland. Norma asked if he could find a good hospital in New York that accepted blacks. “I got him in Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he had an operation to take that lung out,” Marshall later recalled. Aubrey also lost half his other lung, leaving him with only half a lung and labored breathing. Aunt Medi, Thurgood, and Buster made frequent visits to the hospital to see him. Thurgood was religious about spending Monday nights visiting his brother.

Aubrey’s medical bills, especially for the operation, were a heavy financial burden on Norma. Willie brought money into the house only now and then; his drinking made it difficult for him to find a good-paying job. The family’s only steady paycheck these days came from Norma’s teaching job. It was the key to what remained of the family’s ebbing stability. That job, so crucial to the family, did not come about just because of Norma’s intelligence and warmth with children. She had to veil her considerable pride to ask for the job from black Baltimore’s political boss, Tom Smith.

A heavyset man who wore only tailored suits and drove a big black car, Smith had earned a small fortune running an illegal numbers game, with backing from white racketeers, out of a small saloon on Jasper Street before he built the grand Smith Hotel in 1912. But he had really made his name in the late 1920s, when he allegedly stole ballot boxes from black precincts that were strongly Republican. With those votes out of the way, Howard Jackson was able to beat his Republican mayoral opponent, and Tom Smith became the king of Baltimore black politics.

And Smith held the key to full-time work in the city’s black schools. Essie Hughes, one of Thurgood’s classmates, recalled: “Any black person who wanted an outstanding job, even in teaching, had to consult Tom Smith.”
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“I don’t think you will ever see another black with such extensive power in Baltimore,” said Teddy Stewart, one of the Marshalls’ neighbors. “Yes sir, he was a giant. If you wanted to run an illegal business—liquor, gambling, or prostitution, you had to see Tom Smith. He kept his
hotel open during Prohibition. All the whites would come to Smith’s Hotel because the policemen were taking money from Smith and they would be standing at the door, nobody bothered, didn’t care.”
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“He controlled everything in the district,” said Cab Calloway, who recalled that gambling at Smith’s began around 8:00 P.M. and lasted into the early morning, with many patrons dressed in tuxedos. “It was the only spot to be,” said Calloway. “It was elite.”
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To see Tom Smith about a teaching job, Norma Marshall had to go into the Smith Hotel. The short man with the shiny bald head would sit in the lobby on a lounge chair, watching over the characters and businessmen who flowed through the hotel’s ornate front doors. Not only did he know everyone in Old West Baltimore, but he made it a point to keep up with neighborhood gossip. So Smith likely knew Norma Marshall the minute she put her head in the hotel. And he no doubt knew about her husband’s drinking problems, his difficulty keeping jobs, Thurgood’s departure for New York, and the family’s money troubles.

Norma Marshall always walked with an erect posture, head held high. One look at her told children and adults that she was a dignified woman with no tolerance for fools, chicanery, or political players. But a humble Norma walked over to Smith and waited until he spoke to her. In the swirl of painted women and cigar smoke, she introduced herself. Smith listened politely as she pleaded with him for a full-time job in the city schools.

Smith liked her daring approach and pride. He took to Norma. He decided he wanted her loyalty and friendship. After all he was a politician, and he understood that the black schools were beloved in Old West Baltimore. If he didn’t keep the schools filled with good teachers, it could cause problems for him. Soon after her trip to the hotel, Norma got a call telling her where to go downtown to get a full-time teaching assignment for the coming year.
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