Thurgood Marshall (29 page)

As a result of his relationship with Hoover, Marshall’s complaint about eavesdropping was immediately given serious attention. Hoover personally instructed his staff to handle the story carefully: “In accordance with your instructions,” Ladd wrote to Hoover, “I told [the New York FBI agent] to call Mr. Thurgood Marshall, to be very courteous to him, and to suggest to him that he endeavor to determine the make and serial number of the microphone from the instrument itself and thereafter, through the manufacturer, endeavor to determine to whom it had been sold.”
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Marshall described the device to the New York agent. The FBI man denied that the bureau used that kind of bug but told Marshall he would make calls to check on who might be interested in putting the NAACP under surveillance. Marshall was still suspicious and asked a private investigator, Buck Owens, to take a look at the situation. But Owens told Marshall he could not trace the bug unless he tore out the walls of the whole building.

The mystery appealed to Marshall’s mind. He wanted to know who had the power, the money, and the need to know about the NAACP’s affairs. He called in secretaries, the night watchmen, and the building superintendent to question them about the bug. To Marshall’s surprise the building superintendent came back a week later with the answer. “Hey, Mr. Marshall, I’ve found out about your bug,” the elderly man called out
as he walked into Marshall’s office. “Calvert Whiskey owned that building before we bought it, and the vice president in charge of personnel bugged every room.”

Marshall was almost disappointed by the news. He thought he might have attracted the attention of some powerful segregationist. In fact, Marshall was gaining a higher national profile. His travels to deal with cases around the South, his many trips to Washington, both to the Supreme Court and to talk with members of Congress, made him an important voice on race relations. One measure of his new status was his meetings with Clark and Hoover; he also received his first honorary degree in 1947, from his alma mater, Lincoln University.

Marshall’s easygoing manner and lanky good looks also made him popular with average folks. “Thurgood Marshall is the amazing type of man who is liked by other men and probably adored by women,” wrote Michael Carter, an
Afro-American
columnist in a feature article on Marshall during this period. “He carries himself with an inoffensive confidence and seems to like the life he lives.”
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On the road Marshall’s casual approach to life, the law, and people meant he got along well with blacks and whites, even white racists. “I ride in the for-colored-only cabs and in the back end of streetcars—quiet as a mouse,” Marshall later said. “I eat in Negro cafes and don’t challenge the customs personally, because I figure I’m down here representing a client—the NAACP—and not myself.”
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As skillfully as he managed his public life, however, his family life continued to be a trouble spot. On March 3, 1947, Thurgood’s father died at home on Druid Hill Avenue of a heart attack. He was sixty-five. Willie had not been well for over a year, and he had worked only sporadically. But between his income and the money sixty-two-year-old Norma Marshall earned as a kindergarten teacher, they took care of themselves. The large funeral was a homecoming for a Marshall family that had grown apart. Willie Marshall’s brothers and sister, as well as his children, buried him at Arbutus Cemetery in Baltimore.

Thurgood also struggled with his own home life. His NAACP work pulled him out of town three weeks during most months. And when he was at home he and Buster had to deal with constant frustration and the grief that hung over their inability to have a child. “Buster had a weak uterus,” said Alice Stovall, Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP. “And Buster became pregnant quite a few times because she said she knew how much Thurgood wanted children.”

Bob Carter, Marshall’s top aide in the NAACP’s legal office, often kept Buster company. “Buster liked to play cards, and I’d sometimes come over and play cards with her and a friend,” Carter said. “And Thurgood might be away. He was away a lot.”

And on the rare days when he was home, the couple loved to entertain their friends. Buster was especially proud of a new apartment she found for them, a two-bedroom at 409 Edgecomb Avenue in Harlem. Alice Stovall recalled that Buster began to call her to occasionally come over to the new place for “Thurgood’s famous crab soup.”

As a well-known black American, Marshall also got invitations to meet several of the stars who were then breaking the racial barrier in professional sports. After Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player in the major leagues, began to make some money, he had every charity sticking its hands in his pockets and could not manage his money. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager, decided it would be best if another black person helped Robinson with his financial problems. Marshall was not a tax lawyer and on his NAACP salary had little experience in saving and investing large sums of money. But as the best-known black lawyer in New York and the nation, he was the man Rickey called. Marshall was thrilled to be asked and held two meetings with Robinson to work out a financial plan.

Marshall’s interest in sports was literally colored by his professional work on civil rights. He rooted for the Dodgers and Robinson but also for the Cleveland Indians, who had the first black player in the American League, Larry Doby. In football he liked the Cleveland Browns, again because they had black stars, Marion Mottley and Buddy Young. Marshall, however, denied to a
New York Post
writer that he was prejudiced in favor of black athletes: “Why I just love to see Spec Sanders lug that ball for the football Yankees and Spec is a white man from Texas.”
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Other than sports Marshall enjoyed playing cards. He did not have time or money for big-money games but was known to win or lose a few hundred dollars while traveling or at all-night games among lawyers, doctors, and businessmen in Harlem. In the late 1940s his annual income was about $10,000. But his constant travels meant he lived on his expense account most of the time; his NAACP paycheck went to Buster.

With the success of the NAACP’s legal work, Marshall’s reputation grew. His regular appearances before the Supreme Court also boosted his standing among lawyers. As a result of his high profile, Marshall’s name regularly came up when federal judgeships began opening to blacks in the
late 1940s. In political circles, speculation about Marshall becoming a judge peaked in 1949, when Congress created four new judgeships for the southern district of New York. The press wrote that President Truman was seriously considering naming a black lawyer to one of the positions.

There were only a half dozen black men in the nation, including Marshall and Bill Hastie, who were considered qualified for the federal bench. The only sitting black judges were in low-level courts, such as the U.S. Customs Court or municipal court judges in Chicago and New York. They had been given their jobs as patronage appointments by their cities’ political machines.

As talk of an appointment intensified, the president of the NAACP, Arthur Spingarn, sent a letter to his nephew, Stephen Spingarn, who was an aide in the White House. Spingarn encouraged the administration to appoint Marshall: “Personally I feel that there could be no better choice for this [job] than Thurgood Marshall,” he wrote. He noted that Marshall had given political support to Truman when a black “left-wing group” condemned the president for not pressing for passage of civil rights bills.
The New York Times
, Spingarn noted, had recently quoted Marshall as standing up for Truman before black critics, saying the president had “done more … for civil rights than all other Presidents put together.”

Spingarn specifically asked that no “political hack” be given the new judgeship. It should be reserved for “a really good lawyer,” he wrote. “With the possible exception of Governor Hastie of the Virgin Islands and Charlie Houston, of Washington, Marshall is by far the best and most favorably known lawyer among the Negro public.… I think that Thurgood Marshall would be an outstanding choice.”
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Spingarn’s effort seemed to have paid off a few days later when the
New York Post
reported that President Truman would nominate Marshall for the federal judgeship. Similar news stories in Washington and Baltimore cited White House aides as saying Truman wanted to give him the job.

Marshall got further support from one of the country’s most preeminent figures, the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt, who remained close to Walter White, had come to know Marshall while she was on the NAACP’s board. Marshall’s secretary, Alice Stovall, remembered meeting Mrs. Roosevelt at the NAACP’s offices. “She stopped [in], and she said, ‘And who do you work for?’ And I said, ‘I work with Mr. Marshall.’ And she said, ’Oh, young lady, you are so lucky. I said, ‘Yes we are.’ ”

In August of 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Paul Fitzpatrick, head of the New York State Democratic Committee, to urge Marshall’s appointment as a federal judge: “I understand that Thurgood Marshall’s name is being presented to the president for one of the new judgeships which has been ear-marked for a Negro. I do not think that there is anyone I know who would do a better service to New York State if he should get the judgeship. You and all of the others could be proud of him.”

Mrs. Roosevelt urged local Democrats to see Marshall’s value despite his lack of any ties to the political machine. “He has been so completely out of politics that I fear he will not know anyone to back him unless you know how good a person he is,” she wrote.
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While Spingarn, Truman, and Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to give Marshall the judgeship, black Democrats in New York City did not support him. They wanted someone who was part of the Tammany political machine. A comment about Marshall appeared in a
New York Post
political column around that time in which an unnamed “local Negro Democratic politician” complained that Marshall had “never done any doorbell ringing for the organization.” Later stories in the
Post
said a black assemblyman, Harold Stevens, was New York’s black political bosses’ choice for the judgeship.

Eventually Paul Fitzpatrick decided that it was better not to appoint any black candidate than to defy Harlem’s political leaders. He sent word to the White House that he preferred not to fight with Harlem Democrats or the black lawyers and simply would not accept any black candidate for the judgeship. Marshall was out, and he was sorely disappointed. He saw the judgeship as a step up, in both pay and status.

The defeat left Marshall suffering internal doubts. He didn’t know where he was going next in his career. He wanted to move up, but given the segregation of the nation’s top law firms, the best hope for him seemed to be starting his own practice. However, his early failure as a private lawyer in Baltimore made him afraid to give up the guaranteed pay and the NAACP’s national platform. To keep a wider and wider sea of personal doubt at bay, he lived his day-to-day life on an island of frantic activity. And increasingly he spent his time battling with Communists inside his own organization.

On the Front Line

M
ARSHALL WAS DEEPLY WORRIED
that his critics would tar him as a Communist. Since the 1930s the NAACP’s opponents had derided it as anti-American for focusing on racial problems while the nation was trying to stand united through the Great Depression and World War II.

The NAACP, with Walter White taking the lead, made every effort to knock down charges that it was linked with any Communist group. But W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous founding editor of the association’s magazine,
The Crisis
, had recently returned to New York from sabbatical and become openly involved in left-wing activities.

Marshall’s office was next door to that of the short, elegantly attired Du Bois, and initially Marshall was excited to have Du Bois so close. He greatly admired the old man, having read
The Crisis
since high school. And he was fascinated by the scholar’s every move—his stylish goatee as well as his status as Harvard’s first black Ph.D. The professorial Du Bois, however, rarely spoke to the younger lawyer. “His whole office was fenced in with books that ran all around the room, and we were always impressed by it,” Marshall said later. One day Marshall decided that he would try to break through his colleague’s aloof demeanor. He stopped Du Bois one morning and said: “Look, Doc, your office and mine are side by side and you come in here every morning and you just walk right by.” Without stopping, or even glancing up as he walked into his office, Du Bois mumbled, “Yeah, that’s one of my bad habits.” Then he shut the door.

Du Bois’s relationship with Marshall never had a chance to improve. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the magazine editor began working with Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party’s candidate for president. Wallace was challenging the incumbent Harry Truman, a close friend of Walter White. White responded by telling Du Bois to stop making comments about politics because his public support for Wallace amounted to a political endorsement, which could endanger the NAACP’s status as a tax-exempt, nonpartisan group.