Thurgood Marshall (25 page)

October 4, the final day of the trial, was tense. The jury returned quickly, and newspapers later wrote that the judge was in disbelief as he announced the verdict. The all-male, white jury acquitted twenty-three of the twenty-five black men charged in the riot; only two were found guilty of attempted murder for shooting a policeman, and the jury recommended a sentence of three years for each man.

Paul Bumpus, the lead prosecutor, said the jury never seriously considered the case. He said the people in Lawrence County “felt Maury County had dumped its dirty laundry on them.” To get rid of the case, he said, the jury had convicted only two. “And those were the two weakest cases,” Bumpus said. “I didn’t think it was fair so I got up and asked the court to dismiss those two defendants.”
¹⁸

The
Afro-American
, reflecting the nationwide euphoria among black Americans, wrote in an editorial that the all-white jury’s verdict stood “in legal significance” alongside the infamous
Dred Scott
decision as one of American history’s landmark legal rulings. Walter White was quoted as saying: “American justice has triumphed over the Klan” and congratulated Looby, Ransom, and Weaver by describing them as lawyers who
had “under the most trying conditions fought courageously to ensure the defendants a fair trial.”
¹⁹

* * *

Despite the acquittals two other men still had to be tried on attempted murder charges that stemmed from the riot. William “Rooster Bill” Pillow and Lloyd “Papa Lloyd” Kennedy were charged with firing shots at Tennessee highway patrolmen. The other twenty-five defendants had been charged only with firing at Columbia police. The judge refused a change of venue for this case; the trial was held in Columbia. Marshall, now over his pneumonia, came back to town to handle the case on November 16, 1946.

He tried to argue that the absence of blacks in the jury pool meant there would not be a fair trial, but the judge again dismissed his objections. Marshall was left with trying to convince the jury that the defendants had not fired the shots but were caught in the middle of a community simply trying to defend itself from a lynch mob. Marshall told the all-white jury that he was a fellow southerner from Baltimore, and he would not have traveled to Columbia to handle the case unless he sincerely believed these men were innocent.

District Attorney Bumpus, always the quintessential southern gentleman, nonetheless belittled Marshall. “I wonder why he wanted you to believe that he wasn’t from New York,” Bumpus said to the jury. He quipped that if Marshall only represented innocent people, as he had claimed to the jury, “he belongs on Ripley’s radio program
[Believe-It-Or-
Not] as the greatest curiosity in the nation.”
²⁰

The four-day trial ended with a “not guilty” verdict for Rooster Bill Pillow, but Papa Lloyd Kennedy was found guilty. “They were guilty and they weren’t guilty. They were defending themselves,” Marshall said in an interview. “The mob came down there, and the police were in front of the mob when they shot.”

The trial ended at about 7:00 P.M. on November 18. Marshall, with Looby, Weaver, and Harry Raymond, the reporter for the
Daily Worker
, got into Looby’s car to go back to Nashville, celebrate their victory, and plan an appeal for Kennedy. It was then that state highway patrolmen and Columbia police stopped them and Marshall was pushed into the backseat of the unmarked police car.

The police did not want any eyewitnesses. One of the plainclothesmen
got out and told Looby he was to drive away immediately. Looby pulled off slowly, but when he saw the police car head in the other direction, he turned around and sped after it. He watched with growing horror as the car turned off the highway and headed down a dirt road toward the river. Undaunted by their threats, Looby followed the police car. Pulling over, one policeman got out shouting, his face red in anger, and ordered Looby to get back on the highway and drive to Nashville. Speaking slowly out of fear, Looby said he wasn’t leaving until he saw Marshall.

Looby stood there, waiting to be arrested. But to his surprise the policeman stomped away to talk with the others in the car. The police were worried that even if Looby were to leave then, there would be witnesses to the fact that Marshall had not been driven back to town. There was also worry that if word of these events got back to Mink Slide, there might be another riot by blacks who now felt empowered after their court victories.

The policeman got back in the car. To turn around they had to drive closer to the river, and that was when Marshall, from his uncomfortable perch in the backseat, saw an angry group of men waiting by the water. But the police car did not stop. It simply made a loop and headed back to the highway.

With Looby still driving his car behind them, the police drove back to town. When they got to the square, they ordered Marshall out of the car and told him to go to the judge’s chamber on the second floor of the courthouse by himself. Marshall told them he would walk over, but only with them. “You ain’t gonna shoot me in the back. We’ll go together,” he said.

Across the dusty and strangely empty street that separated the police station from the courthouse, Marshall and the officers walked side by side. Marshall kept turning his head, looking for trouble. Looby and the others had followed and stood outside their car watching. Inside the turn-of-the-century courthouse, Marshall was taken before an elderly judge, just over five feet tall and completely bald. The policemen told the judge: “We got this nigger for drunken driving.” The little judge looked up at the six-foot-one-inch Marshall and said: “Boy, you wanna take my test? I never had a drink in my life, and I can smell a drink a mile off. You want to take a chance?”

All of Marshall’s legal training went out of his mind. He decided he had a better chance with this offbeat judge than he had an hour ago with
the white mob at the river. So he blew into the judge’s face so hard that the judge rocked back. “That man hadn’t had a drink in twenty-four hours, what the hell are you talking about,” the judge declared. And in an instant the policemen left Marshall and walked out the door. “I turned around to look and they were gone,” he said.

Marshall walked outside, and to his surprise Looby wasn’t there. Taking quick action, Marshall ran down to Mink Slide and found Looby and the other lawyers in a barbershop with several of Columbia’s leading black citizens. They hurriedly took Marshall into a back room to make sure he was okay. Then they made plans to leave town, this time in different cars. A decoy driver took Looby’s car in one direction while the lawyers went the other way. “And sure enough, the mob was coming around the corner when we left,” Marshall recalled. “So they followed Looby’s car, which we’d hoped they’d do. And incidentally, when they found out that I wasn’t in it, they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.”

The mob never caught up with Marshall. He made it back to Nashville, where he immediately called the U.S. attorney general, Tom Clark, Marshall recalled: “When I told him I was arrested for drunk driving, Tom said, ‘Well, were you drunk?’ I said, ‘No, but five minutes after I talk to you …’ ”

In a 1993 interview Flo Fleming, the older brother of Billy Fleming, the radio repairman who was pushed through the window, setting off the events that led to the Columbia riot, said he was one of the men who arrested Marshall for drunk driving. “They were drunk, but the magistrate turned them loose,” said Fleming.
²¹
Jack Lovett, who was a deputized member of the Columbia police force at the time of the riot, however, described Marshall’s drunk driving arrest as “a cock-and-bull story.” Lovett said, “They just wanted to harass him, that’s all. They had nothing to pick him up for.”

The FBI, which was asked by the Justice Department to do an investigation, issued a report in which Flo Fleming was identified as the person responsible for stopping Marshall’s car. In the FBI report, one source claimed that “Fleming wanted to get a ‘last crack’ at Weaver, Looby and Marshall.”
²²

The FBI never brought any federal charges in the case. And Papa Lloyd Kennedy, who was initially given a five-year sentence as the only person convicted in the Columbia riot, had his sentence reduced and served only ten months. Gladys and James Stephenson, the mother and
son involved in the fight with Billy Fleming, were never charged with any crime.

Three weeks after his near escape from Columbia, Marshall gave a speech to a youth conference in New Orleans. His usual confident and cocky personality was now muted. He had a newly found fear of white mobs and violent policemen.

Asked if he supported the idea of nonviolent protest as exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign against the British in India, Marshall said nonviolent protest movements did not interest him. He said he wanted the right to defend himself against lynch parties. And as for nonviolent protests against segregation in the United States, Marshall said they would “result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”
²³

Thurgood Marshall had defined himself as not wanting to lead protests, but the massive publicity given to the Columbia riot and trials made his name and face synonymous with the growing civil rights movement. Personally and professionally, Marshall found he was achieving a long-held ambition. He was now in the lead of the burgeoning social revolution to end racial segregation.

Jim Crow Buster

M
ARSHALL’S SUCCESS IN
C
OLUMBIA
, T
ENNESSEE
, and his victories in defending black soldiers made him a regular face in newspapers both black and white. And in 1946 he was selected as the winner of the NAACP’s top award, the Spingarn Medal. Walter White, whose ego needs rarely allowed him to profusely praise others involved with civil rights, was the first person to tell Marshall that he had won the award. Afterward White dropped Marshall a note to say, “No more suitable choice could possibly have been made.”
¹

Marshall was thirty-seven when he won the medal in May of 1946, making him the second youngest person to receive the prestigious award; only Richard Wright, the author of
Native Son
, had won it at a younger age, thirty-one. The award had previously been given to such people as the author W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the human rights activist, actor, and singer.

Marshall stood to receive the award at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati. Robert W. Kenny, the attorney general of California, handed him the honor after introducing him as an American hero: “The very immensity of the task [of ending racial discrimination] is one of the things which makes the work of Thurgood Marshall more significant.… His efforts have reached into the lives of many, many thousands—hundreds of thousands—of Americans and throughout the history of the United States.”
²

In the heart of his acceptance speech Marshall proudly declared his
integrationist ideal once again: “A Negro sharecropper’s baby born in the most miserable shack of Mississippi,” he said, should have the same rights as the richest white child born in a mansion. But Marshall added that such equality had yet to be achieved. Reaching back to the Civil War period, Marshall said that after “the shooting war was won,” the northern states had enacted civil rights amendments to the Constitution but did not have the courage to enforce “the principles for which the war was fought.”
³
So, Marshall concluded, the South continued to treat blacks as people without rights—slavery by another name.

Marshall got a standing ovation, and he was genuinely thrilled. Part of the kick for him was that he was being honored by some of America’s most celebrated figures. At that dinner he was sitting next to Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champ, yet he was the one getting the applause.

Marshall and Louis were quite a contrast. The lawyer was not much of an athlete. “I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a paddle or catch a cold in a rainstorm,” he told a reporter for the
New York Post.
⁴
But Marshall liked sports, especially boxing. He attended several of Louis’s fights, including the boxer’s famous victory in New York over Max Schmeling, the German fighter who had been cited as a living example of white racial superiority by Adolf Hitler. “I knew Joe very well, a marvelous guy but just not too intelligent,” Marshall remembered. “The only trouble with Joe was, you know, wine, women, and song, the bad features that kill off all men. He didn’t drink wine and he didn’t play any music. The only thing left was women.”

Marshall’s Spingarn award speech was excerpted in the
Baltimore Afro-American
and the
Pittsburgh Courier
. It was reprinted in its entirety in the
NAACP Bulletin
. The
Afro
also wrote a long feature story on Marshall’s parents, who still lived in Baltimore. The story was almost a psychoanalysis of young Marshall. Its headline read:
MOTHER CONSIDERED POWER BEHIND SPINGARN MEDALIST
.