Thurgood Marshall (22 page)

But the car trip was a nightmare. The woman became increasingly paranoid, worried that someone might see them. She ordered the butler to drive across the state line into New York. When they parked near the Kensico Reservoir, however, she ran from the car. Spell tried to go after her, but when he got near her she jumped in the water, then told him to leave her alone and go home.

Strubing told a different story. She claimed Spell had used a knife to kidnap and rape her. She said he forced her to write a ransom note for $5,000 before tying her up with ropes, pushing her into the car, and driving her away from the estate.

At the trial, however, Marshall got the police to concede that they never found a ransom note or any ropes. Mrs. Strubing also failed to show up for court three times, forcing postponements. And the police testified that the doctor who had examined Mrs. Strubing quoted her at the time as saying she pleaded with Spell not to “inseminate her.” Marshall and his cocounsel later argued to the jury that since Spell had not ejaculated in her, “there must have been an agreement or arrangement.”
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The jury of six men and six women, all white, found Spell not guilty. “Yes, the jury turned that man loose,” Marshall said later, his voice breaking in high tones with excitement. “But he was supposed to have raped this woman four times in one night. All I got to tell you is when the story got in the newspaper, all the secretaries, all of ’em, came and said, ‘Hey, defend that man. We want to see it. Four times! Ha ha. Ha ha. Four times in one night. Yeah, bring him in here, let us see him.’ I told ’em get out of my office.”

The secretaries’ fascination with Marshall’s criminal cases was just a sample of the talk going around the nation, especially in the black community. At this point in his career, Marshall was better known to the public for his defense of criminals than for his attacks on Jim Crow. He stood as a living, breathing shield for black people against the lynch mob as well as the judge’s death sentence. Marshall, a very good lawyer at this point, was now growing into a mythical figure, a crusader and a savior. And he enjoyed playing the role. He liked people, and he liked to travel. He enjoyed going out drinking in these tiny towns until the small hours of the morning. He could joke with the guys, charm the women, and tease the children.

Marshall would have to call on all those skills and more in the next few years. The nation was beginning a transformation of its own during World War II, fighting overseas in the name of equality and democracy.
On the home front an embarrassed nation would also have to confront its own racism or risk facing the same dark days of trauma that tore apart Europe’s soul. In the war against racial hate on its home soil, the United States needed a battle plan. But first the nation and Marshall would have to deal with racism in its own war machine.

The War Years

A
MERICA’S WAR EFFORT
was aimed overseas, but it would revolutionize race relations at home. As far back as 1937 Charles Houston, who had been an army lieutenant in World War I, had been sending letters to President Roosevelt asking that Negroes be given the right to serve on a nonsegregated basis in the military. But as World War II broke out, the armed forces remained segregated.

Blacks were also trying to break through the Jim Crow line that kept them from good-paying jobs in factories that produced military equipment and weapons. Marshall and the NAACP got involved in two widely publicized cases, one against the Boilermakers Union in Rhode Island and the other against the largest marine shipworkers’ union in San Francisco. Both unions segregated their black workers into auxiliary labor groups, which kept the blacks out of any union leadership posts and limited their rights to equal pay and job protection. Just as Marshall had been in the forefront of integrating the steelworkers’ union in Baltimore, he wanted to end Jim Crow in these industries.

While Marshall worked in court to break down segregation among boilermakers and shipbuilders, A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s largest black union, took another approach. He applied large-scale political pressure to President Roosevelt. Randolph, a tall, elegant man who had trained to be a Shakespearean actor, spoke in a deep, theatrical voice that mesmerized
people. He threatened a march of black workers on Washington if defense industries were not desegregated.

Ironically, though Marshall and Houston were allied with Randolph in the fight to break down segregation in the military and in industry, they differed with him on his plan for a march featuring only black workers. Houston wrote an ideologically revealing letter to Randolph in which he argued for an integrated march: “Fundamentally, I do not believe the Negroes can win the battle for integration and citizenship by themselves. What success Negroes have had in the past has been due in large part to their ability to interest and enlist other persons in their cause.”
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Randolph was not convinced by Houston’s letter, but the split among the civil rights leaders didn’t matter. President Roosevelt, hoping to avoid a racially explosive march as the nation prepared for war, negotiated a settlement. He established the Fair Employment Practices Committee [FEPC] and desegregated some munitions factories.

Houston’s focus on integration and using political ties with whites to advance the black cause was exactly in line with the views of Walter White, Thurgood Marshall, and other leaders of the NAACP. There was intense concern at the association over whether blacks would be given the chance to serve in integrated military units and become officers. Marshall and others even held discussions about whether Marshall or one of the other leaders of the NAACP should enlist and force the allwhite military hierarchy to promote him to a high-ranking officer. But White did not want to lose Marshall or the momentum the NAACP had going in its legal campaign to end segregation.

In fact, Marshall, then in his mid-thirties, held lengthy conversations with officials of the New York draft board to avoid being drafted. “The director of selective service thought I was more valuable in than out,” Marshall said. “He thought that the Negro soldiers needed me to handle their courts-martial and stuff like that. Which I did.” Marshall added that he also had friends at the draft board in New York who told him not to worry about being drafted because they wanted him at the NAACP and had the situation “under control.”

As the war progressed, however, Walter White worried that Marshall still might be drafted. White appealed to Bill Hastie to speak to military officials in Washington about allowing Marshall to stay at the NAACP.
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Hastie had been a civilian aide to the secretary of war but had resigned in
protest over the continued segregation of blacks in the military. He was happy to help. He wrote a strong letter to the draft board, asking them to consider the damage that would be done to the NAACP and the nation’s race relations if Marshall were drafted.
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The appeal succeeded. Marshall never served in the military.

While White was trying to keep Marshall out of the military, he was also trying to keep the Justice Department from recruiting Marshall, who had gained a good reputation in Washington for his legal work. Several lawyers in the ACLU recommended Marshall for a post at Justice.

“Sometime ago I suggested to Justice that Thurgood Marshall ought to be put on the staff—I understand that you are blocking this brilliant move on my part,” Morris Ernst, a prominent white lawyer and board member of the legal committee of the NAACP wrote to White. “For God’s sake, lay hands off. You can pick up a dozen Thurgoods and you can tell him so, but Justice cannot get a guy as good as Thurgood.”
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White replied in blunt language: “I don’t want to lose him, but I told [a Justice Department officiali that I would not stand in the way of any member of the NAACP staff doing a necessary job or advancing himself. Now that that’s off my chest I’d be ever so grateful to you if you would let me know the place where I ‘can pick up a dozen Thurgoods!’ ”
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Marshall’s high profile as an NAACP leader also meant he was a target for the association’s enemies. The FBI, which investigated subversive and anti-American groups during the war, kept watch on Marshall beginning in 1938, when he traveled to Dallas to argue that blacks had a right to serve on juries. But the bureau’s surveillance of Marshall increased during the war, as the agency began to aggressively patrol the activities of all left-wing organizations, including the NAACP. The FBI was probing for Communists who might be using liberal groups as fronts for their operations inside the United States.

An FBI report on a 1943 speech Marshall gave in Florence, South Carolina, said: “Informants state the meetings dealt principally with general betterment of conditions for Negroes, but all were urged to be Americans first and look for racial advancement secondly.” Marshall was described by one of several FBI informants as a “loyal American who will go far as he can to further the aims [of the NAACP] … but will not permit anything radical to be done to accomplish desired ends.”

The FBI informants also noted that Marshall praised the Army’s treatment of blacks. One informant wrote: “Marshall said the war was being fought for the benefit of all and that colored people had more to
gain than white persons—for white persons already had all rights that could be desired, whereas victory could also open the door for the black man. He said colored persons also had more to lose, for they would be punished more, should Axis nations be victorious.”
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Marshall’s positive comments about the military may have been made partly out of concern that he was being watched. Overly critical remarks could have undermined his relationships with federal officials in Washington at a time when he was making appeals for black soldiers. The NAACP was getting hundreds of complaints from black soldiers about unfair assignments, phony charges that led to dishonorable discharges, and top officers’ failure to give medals and honors to black soldiers. The wave of such complaints led the biggest black newspaper, the
Pittsburgh Courier
, to start a “Double-V” campaign, for victory over racism both abroad and at home. More and more black soldiers and black workers in the United States were becoming vocal in their demands for equal treatment.

The volume of complaints from soldiers in 1943 led Marshall to hire two new lawyers for the LDF, Milton Konvitz and Edward Dudley. Marshall’s work on the soldiers’ cases also brought more contributions into the NAACP, allowing him to expand his budget and staff. The next year he hired an Army Air Force veteran and Howard law graduate, Robert Carter, to strengthen his staff.

Dudley, in an interview, recalled that when he first came to the LDF’s office, “Thurgood was a one-man band.” Carter gave much the same description of the LDF: “There was no law library and few books in the office and for a long time I did my research at Columbia University.… It is only in retrospect that I am amazed at how much Thurgood had been able to accomplish.”
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With the LDF busy with military discrimination, Marshall now found his life picking up to an even faster pace. Between traveling, giving speeches, and staying abreast of politics in Washington, he had to keep track of the cases being handled by his new assistants in New York. Time with his wife was rare. When a reporter from the
Baltimore Afro-American
came to visit Marshall at the LDF’s offices in 1944, their interview was interrupted by a phone call from Buster. Marshall barely spoke during the conversation. He simply said, “Yes, baby … yes, dear … right away, darling.”

“That’s my wife,” Marshall said to the reporter after hanging up the phone. “I’m henpecked. My wife is jealous of every minute I have to spend here. Most of the time I’m on the road.”
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Marshall was traveling over 30,000 miles a year and was away from home for the better part of any month. When he was in New York he and Buster would spend time cooking and entertaining. The Marshalls’ favorite pastime was still playing cards with Thurgood’s old college buddy, Monroe Dowling, and his wife, Helen. They dealt games like bid whisk, tonk, and Pokeno. And Dowling said the two couples would “drink and eat until three in the morning.”

Dowling noticed some tension between Buster and Thurgood because of Thurgood’s frequent absences from home. While Thurgood was away Buster spent her time with her uncles, who lived in New York. She also belonged to the Urban League and organized events for a black women’s social club, The Girlfriends. She would go to dances and social affairs with the Dowlings and other friends.

The couple remained childless as Buster had another miscarriage. Doctors had prescribed bed rest, but she nonetheless lost the fetus. The miscarriages added pressure to a relationship that already had its problems. Thurgood very much wanted to have a child. While he gave Buster comfort, she felt her husband’s regret to the point of becoming melancholy. And Thurgood resented that. “They wanted children so bad it was pathetic,” said Dowling. “I had a son, a baby boy. And everybody that Thurgood knew had something, even Aubrey.”