Thurgood Marshall (2 page)

That two-hour visit in July 1989 began six months of almost weekly interviews. The result was a 1990 article in
The Washington Post Magazine
. But that article could hold only so much of the rich material Marshall had shared in the exclusive interviews. I hoped that he might agree to cooperate with a more lengthy biography. But his earlier experience with a book project had left a bad taste, and he confided that he was tired. He wanted neither to do the work required for a biography nor to defend his views to critics. He agreed, however, not to burn his personal papers, as he had always threatened to do. He let me know he had sent them to the Library of Congress, where they could be opened after his death.

I was in Japan and still hoping Justice Marshall might change his mind about doing a book when I heard that he had retired from the court. The ensuing fury over the confirmation of his successor, Clarence Thomas, made Marshall all the more gun-shy about doing a biography. He felt both out of sync with the times and forgotten.

As I persisted, Marshall gave me some tips on people to interview and I got started on the book in 1992. His wife, Cissy, refused to cooperate with the project and persuaded her children to do the same. Marshall’s FBI files were shut to me for years and opened only in stages, after painstaking struggles. Even worse, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund withheld its cooperation despite Marshall’s long, happy association with that group. Justice Marshall had offered to have the LDF’s files opened to me while I was working on the magazine article. But later
the head of the LDF, angry over a column I wrote defending the conservative Clarence Thomas’s right to confirmation hearings based on his merits and ideas—and not on charges of making off-color sexual comments ten years earlier—shut the door on my efforts to see those files.

Despite a petition by more than ten leading historians, as well as requests by the Library of Congress that terms be set for legitimate research, the LDF tried to stop my work. They discarded a powerful chance to promote the LDF and advance Marshall’s legacy by deciding to keep the history of the LDF’s heroic struggles closed to the American people.

Ultimately other sources of documents and stories opened up and more than covered that time period. Marshall’s friends, schoolmates, fellow lawyers at the LDF, and colleagues on the court provided me with more than 150 interviews.

Marshall also arranged for me to see the oral history he had contributed to Columbia University in the 1970s, and I reviewed interviews he had done for the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries, as well as files in archives and repositories nationwide. In addition, there was a wealth of fascinating newspaper coverage of his exploits against the worst bigots in southern courtrooms. Best of all, I had his words and memories of the work he had done.

After Marshall died, in 1993, there was still no authoritative, thorough account of his life and the impact of his work. The combination of his reclusiveness and his standing in popular culture as an elderly, establishment figure blinded much of the nation to the importance of his legacy. Young people were especially uninformed about the critical role Marshall had played in making history.

This book is intended to fill some of that vacuum. In these pages the great storyteller tells his stories. And the history, of both his family and the civil rights movement, is in one place so that future generations can understand the dynamics that created and sustained Thurgood Marshall’s conception of successful race relations. Given that Marshall laid the foundation for today’s racial landscape, his grand design of how race relations best work makes his life story essential for anyone delving into the powder keg of America’s greatest problem. He was truly an American Revolutionary.

Right Time, Right Man?

R
UMORS FLEW THAT NIGHT
. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark had resigned a few hours earlier. By that Monday evening, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall and his wife, Cissy, heard that the president was set to name Clark’s replacement the very next morning. At the Marshalls’ small green town house on G Street in Southwest Washington, D.C., the phone was ringing. Friends, family, and even politicians were calling to see if Thurgood had heard anything about his chances for the job. But all the Marshalls could say was that they had heard rumors.

As Marshall dressed for Clark’s retirement party on that muggy Washington night of June 12, 1967, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. Years ago some of his militant critics had called him “half-white” for his straight hair, pointed nose, and light tan skin. Now, at fifty-eight, his face had grown heavy, with sagging jowls and dark bags under his eyes. His once black hair, even his mustache, was now mostly a steely gray. And he looked worried. He did have on a good dark blue suit, the uniform of a Washington power player. But the conservative suit looked old and out of place in an era of Afros and dashikis. And even the best suit might not be strong enough armor for the high-stakes political fight he was preparing for tonight. At this moment the six-foot-two-inch Marshall, who weighed well over two hundred pounds, felt powerless. He was fearful that he was about to lose his only chance to become a Supreme Court justice.

Staring in the mirror as if it were a crystal ball, Marshall could see
clearly only that he would have one last chance to convince the president he was the right man. That chance would come tonight at Justice Clark’s retirement party.

In his two years as solicitor general there had been constant rumors floating around the capital about Marshall being positioned by the president to become the first black man on the high court. However, with one exception, no one at the White House had ever spoken to him about the job. That exception was President Lyndon Johnson. Whenever Johnson talked about the Supreme Court in front of him, the tall, intense Texan made a point of turning to Marshall, thrusting a finger in his face, and reminding him there was no promise that he would ever have a job on the high court.

But Johnson was privately talking about putting Marshall on the Supreme Court. For a southern politician, Johnson had a strong sense of racial justice. As a skinny twenty-year-old, he had taught school to poor Hispanic children in south Texas and seen firsthand the disadvantages they faced. Now Johnson’s fabled political instincts had drawn him to the idea that he would be hailed by history as the president who put the first black on the Supreme Court. The president had set the wheels in motion by making Marshall the nation’s first black solicitor general. And he had confided to his wife, Lady Bird, that he wanted to appoint Marshall to the Supreme Court. But the president had been having second thoughts about Marshall. Was he really a good lawyer? And what about talk that Marshall was lazy? Was it realistic to think he could win enough votes to get by white racists in the Senate and be confirmed?

As he finished getting ready for the party, Marshall replayed all the rumors he had heard about why the president was reluctant to appoint him to the high court. Thinking about it, Marshall got grumpy, then angry. His chance to be in the history books as the first black man on the Supreme Court was fading, and he felt abandoned. The word around the capital was that the nomination would be announced tomorrow. Marshall had heard nothing from the White House.

Looking in the mirror, Marshall began to buck himself up. He decided that he had run this course before—and won. He remembered when, as a failing lawyer in Depression-era Baltimore, he had pressured the NAACP for a job. He had peppered Charles Houston, his former law school dean, who was then running the NAACP’s legal office, with letters and phone calls detailing ideas for lawsuits to fight racial segregation. The NAACP had little money and could not afford to hire a junior
lawyer. But Marshall’s aggressiveness and his record of early successes in Maryland civil rights cases finally paid off. Houston offered him a small salary if he would move to New York. Marshall jumped at the chance.

Once in New York, Marshall won case after case, culminating in the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
, desegregating America’s public schools. Then a driven Marshall played his political cards with care. When the Democrat John Kennedy won the White House, the successful and persistent Marshall headed everyone’s list of black lawyers deserving a top federal judgeship. However, Attorney General Robert Kennedy feared that southern segregationists would be angered by the nomination of any black man, especially the famous black lawyer who had been on the cover of
Time
magazine for having undressed them as bigots and defeated them in court.

But Marshall played tough. He refused the Kennedy administration’s offer to be a judge on any lower court. He told the attorney general it was the appeals court job or nothing. Then Marshall increased the political pressure on Robert Kennedy’s left by drumming up support in the black press and among civil rights leaders who had been crucial to John Kennedy’s narrow election as president. Robert Kennedy weighed the price of angering the civil rights groups and decided to give Marshall the seat he wanted. The determined and willful Thurgood Marshall had won.

Marshall’s forceful personality usually allowed him to get his way. He could charm a racist cop with stories and jokes, and he was also capable of intimidating black political rivals by being loud and defiant. But Marshall was full of nagging doubts about this Supreme Court job. He had a desperate need to be respected, to be seen as the equal of top white lawyers who had always looked down on black lawyers. The Supreme Court job would distinguish him for all history and make him the equal of any lawyer. Marshall’s personal ambition went deeper than most because it was inextricably tied to his idea of what was best for a racially tense nation. All his life Marshall had been an integrationist. If black people could mix freely with white people, study and work together, he believed, there would be no racial problems in America. He had pushed that theory in courtrooms throughout the nation, won in the Supreme Court, and created the foundation for a modern civil rights movement that to this night still had the nation in turmoil. As a matter of principle, history, and personal ambition, Thurgood Marshall wanted to be the man to integrate the high court. This desire stirred a lifetime of passion and determination in him.

But campaigning for a seat on the Supreme Court might be self-defeating; President Johnson was the kind of man to kill a deal if his hand was being forced or someone was telling him what to do. When newspapers wrote stories in advance of his policy decisions and appointments, Johnson would change his mind just to prove the papers wrong.

Marshall had asked Louis (pronounced “Louie”) Martin, the smooth, senior black political player at the Democratic National Committee and deputy chairman of the party, to speak to the president about the nomination. Martin had known Marshall since the 1940s, when Marshall was director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Martin ran several black midwestern newspapers. Martin, a tall honey-brown man who spoke slow, thoughtful words in a raspy voice, was entertained by Marshall’s rapid, blunt comments and his gusto for an argument or a drink. Martin often told friends how after one bout of drinking in Harlem years before, he had driven Marshall around in the early morning hours to give him some air and sober him up before taking him home.

But when Martin sat and talked with the president about Marshall, Johnson fired back, “That son of a bitch is not worth a damn; he is lazy.” Martin did not tell Marshall about that conversation. He didn’t want to deflate Marshall’s ego, and he didn’t take Johnson’s outbursts all that seriously. Martin figured it was just “Lyndon being Lyndon.” He continued saying a good word here and there to the president on his friend’s behalf and getting Marshall into meetings so the president saw him regularly.
¹

But Martin could never give Marshall any guarantee, and Marshall realized that his friend’s best efforts may not have been enough. Marshall saw other indications that Johnson was slowly moving away from giving him consideration as a nominee for the Court. The president had told Ramsey Clark, then the acting attorney general and the son of Justice Tom Clark, that Marshall’s reputation as solicitor general worried him. With the keen eye of a man who had been watching the scoreboard, the president precisely noted that by the end of 1966 Marshall had lost five of fourteen cases he’d argued as solicitor general before the Supreme Court. That was not good enough. Johnson wanted a perfect record—no losses—so that even Marshall’s most racist critics would have to say he was qualified.