Thurgood Marshall (33 page)

But Sweatt’s personal struggles had little importance to Marshall. His fight remained over the legal ground for segregation, and in truth he did not always focus on individual soldiers in the battle. After his victory in the
Sweatt
case, Marshall gave a speech at Fisk University’s Institute of Race Relations in which he summed up the significance of the ruling and suggested that it was a foreshadowing of even more important changes in race relations. “Despite the fact that the ‘Separate-But-Equal’ doctrine was not technically overruled by these decisions,” he said, “the force and significance of the language certainly robs the doctrine of most of its validity.… We now have the tools to destroy all governmentally imposed racial segregation. It will take time. It will take courage and determination.”

At age forty-two Marshall would try to replace Houston, the veritable Moses of the struggle for equal rights. Would Marshall, by himself, be able to finish leading the NAACP on the trek through the desert of laws that separated black and white Americans? He would first have to find out if he had the courage and determination to lead this fight.

Number One Negro
of All Time

W
ITH HIS BREAKTHROUGH VICTORY
in the
Sweatt
case, Marshall became a celebrity. He was the most requested speaker for NAACP events. With ten victories before the Supreme Court by 1950, black and white lawyers, including top politicians, saw him as the leading civil rights expert in the nation. His reputation was golden.

The black press had Marshall’s picture on the front page almost every week, and he was quoted on any civil rights controversy. He was a burgeoning legend; he was trumpeted as the one man able to defend black Americans against the Klan, racist judges, and bigoted small-town cops. “Thurgood’s coming” became shorthand among blacks in the South for the day when the sword of justice would strike out against white oppressors. This esteem was reflected in one poignant letter, filled with misspellings and bad grammar. It opened: “Mr. Turgood—I see by the Courer
[Pittsburgh Courier]
that you ar the No. 1 negro of all Time, so I take my pen in han as you must be the man I have been lookin for all these yers.

“.… I hop’ you will come quick because these white folks down hear dont ack like they heard of Supreme court or any court or anything. They is runnin wild and we shure could use the No. 1 negro of all time or somebody to stop them from mistreatin’ us.”

The letter, from Charles Jones who lived in a small town in Georgia, was signed with a big “X” and was written by Jones’s wife, Essie Mae. She
added in a postscript that “Charlie, he cant read or rite but he got real good sense.”
¹

Marshall was now eclipsing Walter White, the NAACP’s ego-driven executive secretary. White had been a mentor to Marshall, but his pride in his young associate was wearing thin as he got more and more attention. Even White’s socialite friends were talking up Marshall.

White’s relationship with the lawyer had been on rocky ground since 1948, when the NAACP’s national office found itself caught up in gossip and scandal involving its executive secretary. White, who to all appearances was white, had divorced his wife, Gladys, a black woman, that year. He quickly married Poppy Cannon, a wealthy South African socialite. Black NAACP members, still trying to quiet the ruckus that had ensued after White’s ouster of W.E.B. Du Bois, were outraged that White would divorce his wife of twenty-seven years to marry a white woman who had three children, all by different men.

Carl Murphy, publisher of the
Afro-American
, was so upset he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, a fellow NAACP board member, to complain that white board members did not understand that Mr. White was damaging the NAACP’s name. “His sudden divorce and marriage to Mrs. Cannon has so weakened his usefulness that the association will assume a grave risk in attempting to keep him in office. You and I … may marry whom we please without involving the association in a controversy.… But not the chief executive.… My own belief is that Walter White and Mrs. Cannon have a right to marry if they love each other. But, hundreds of colored people in our area do not agree.”
²

White took a leave of absence from the NAACP, but the controversy he had created did not die down. A new round of alarms sounded when he wrote an article for
Look
magazine in which he extolled the benefits of having blacks take a chemical treatment that would turn their skin white. “Consider what would happen if a means of racial transformation is made available at reasonable costs,” he wrote. “The racial, social, economic and political consequences would be tremendous.” He quoted Lena Horne as saying that the availability of the chemical was “wonderful” and the “greatest thing for world peace.” White also announced that science had now perfected a treatment that would make blacks’ hair “permanently straight.” And he suggested plastic surgery to make Negroid features appear more like Caucasian noses and lips.
³

The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Thurgood Marshall was highly critical in private, but he had no public comment. However, others
didn’t hold back. William L. Patterson, executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, said White’s proposed use of chemicals on black Americans “would be laughable were it not such a grievous insult.” Patterson added that White was asking black Americans to “suffer in silence” until “the coming of an insulting and degrading chemical messiah.”
⁴

While Marshall and Roy Wilkins refused to throw any more fuel on the fire, it was now clear that White’s days at the NAACP were all but over. He had used his connections with white politicians and corporate leaders as the basis for his power inside the organization. But now his base in the black leadership was shaken. And his infamous article cut him off from a broad range of the NAACP’s membership. Still, with Eleanor Roosevelt leading his defense, the board voted 16–10 to let him keep the title of executive secretary, if nothing else. White returned to work with no authority; Wilkins and Marshall now had day-to-day control of the NAACP.

As Wilkins’s and Marshall’s roles grew, so did their resentment and jealousy of White. “Roy did the work,” Marshall later said. “If it wasn’t for Roy that thing would have fallen apart every day, every hour on the hour.”

Marshall, even more than Wilkins, had serious problems with White, because the executive secretary would sometimes try to meddle in the legal affairs of the association.

White was drawn to the high-profile drama of Supreme Court cases involving the NAACP. He would regularly go to Washington for Marshall’s arguments and sit in the section reserved for lawyers. Marshall let it go on for several years, but as their relationship turned icy, he came to resent this behavior. “Now look, you’re not supposed to be in there, and they know you’re connected with me, and one of these days they’re going to find out that you’re not a lawyer,” Marshall told White. “And I’m going to get blamed for it. And it’s going to affect my standing. And I don’t believe in letting anything affect my standing in the Supreme Court. So I’m telling you, don’t let me catch you sitting there again. If you do, I’m going to tell the guard.”

White said: “You wouldn’t.” Marshall replied, “Try me,” and walked away.

A few months later Marshall was back at the Supreme Court. White was not in his usual seat, and Marshall thought he had prevailed. Then came a surprise. White was in the judges’ box, where friends of the justices
were seated. He had gone over Marshall’s head and asked Justice Hugo Black for the special seat.
⁵

Marshall had no such tensions with Roy Wilkins. Their common distaste for White had led them to become fast friends. Both were in their forties, and they shared power in the NAACP’s New York headquarters. They also lived in the same Harlem apartment building, and they often traveled to and from work together. “In New York, Roy Wilkins and I would get on the subway,” Marshall said, smiling at the thought. “And we would get a
Daily Worker
[published by the Communist Party] and
The Wall Street Journal
. How’re you going to know what they’re doing if you don’t read their paper?”

Marshall and Wilkins first teamed up against White when he announced to the press that the NAACP was bringing a suit for Josephine Baker, the flamboyant black nightclub entertainer. She wanted to sue Walter Winchell, the nationally syndicated gossip columnist, because Winchell had written that Baker had supported European fascists before World War II. Marshall was angry that White had put the NAACP in the middle of a high-society pissing match. Eventually Baker backed out of the suit, but the episode left White and Marshall barely speaking. “Thurgood was quite furious. He felt, and I think quite correctly, that that was sort of an inappropriate use of the energies and resources of the Legal Defense Fund,” remembered Jack Greenberg, a young white lawyer who had come onto Marshall’s staff.
⁶

The political warfare also split co-workers inside the NAACP office. “I think it’s fair enough to say that there was a conspiracy to get rid of White,” said Henry Lee Moon, the NAACP’s director of public relations, who was a friend to the executive secretary. “I think the way [Roy and Thurgood] treated Walter was unworthy.” But others in the office saw White’s troubles as his own creation. “Walter thought of himself as the ambassador to the white world,” said Herbert Hill, a white staff member who headed the NAACP’s labor relations department. “Walter was obsessed with important white people.”
⁷

While White struggled to stay afloat, Marshall began to strut about. He became more of a party-going, drinking man, who wore his courtroom success and increased power on his sleeve. “Thurgood loved to pat women’s asses, drink, and be hearty company,” Hill said in a later interview. “Marshall would parody Uncle Toms [by using a deep southern accent and making his eyes big]. His zest for how he lived—drinking, fucking, arguing—made him a near legendary figure.”
⁸

Marshall’s reputation for the wild side of life certainly did grow during this period. One letter from a friend ended, “Hoping that you have recovered from your cold and your one night stands.” William Coleman, a Harvard law graduate and the first black Supreme Court clerk, got to know Marshall during this time period. He recalled in an interview that Marshall was a well-regarded Romeo: “He was an exciting and powerful person around women. I don’t think Thurgood would sleep with everybody, but there were some very attractive women who also had status … [who] Thurgood was very close to.”
⁹

By this time Thurgood’s relationship with his wife, Buster, had become distant and lifeless. His heart was in his highly publicized lawsuits and the people who cheered his words every time he spoke at NAACP rallies. The reality of a childless marriage and a husband who spent more time with fawning female fans was tearing at Buster.

Buster’s nephew, Claude Conner, said that “she knew” Thurgood was having a good time with women on the road, although no single affair caused a particularly loud explosion between the two of them. “I don’t think that she made a big fuss about it,” he added. Penny Monteiro, who was related to Marshall by marriage to one of his cousins, said, “I am pretty sure she did [know about his women].” But Buster felt Thurgood’s life was often in danger on the road and he was often lonely. As a woman of that generation, she decided to close her eyes to his extramarital dalliances.

While Thurgood was having his fun, he was not above becoming jealous. Buster was regularly seen at Harlem social events dancing with Charlie Bease, a mailman who was in many of Buster’s social clubs. “It was gossip,” said Conner, “because Buster was always with Charlie and his wife, Helen, at the dances. Thurgood wasn’t in a position to say a whole lot because there were all sorts of rumors about who he was sleeping with all over the country.”
¹⁰

In addition to his sexual adventures, Marshall enjoyed the New York party scene. Evelyn Cunningham, a columnist with the
Pittsburgh Courier
, recounted in an interview how she and Marshall were once caught by police in a bust of an illegal after-hours club in Manhattan. “The place didn’t open until three
A.M
.,” she said. When they walked in it was darkly lit, noisy, smoky, and crowded. “There was a lot of music, a lot of interesting people, some not particularly savory, and he immediately loved the atmosphere and got a little loud,” Cunningham said.

About an hour after they had settled into the fun, blue-uniformed policemen came crashing in the front and back doors. “I was scared to death,” Cunningham recalled. “People started running out, and I saw one young cop that I knew. I said to this cop, ‘You can’t arrest this man. He is very, very important, he’s with the NAACP, you’ve got to let him go.’ ”

The cop recognized Marshall and led them to a side door, where Cunningham and Marshall escaped into the night. But Marshall was reluctant to walk away. With a few drinks bolstering his ego, he looked back at the scene of policemen handcuffing the partygoers and taking them off to jail. He turned to Cunningham and in a loud voice said: “I would like to defend these guys—these cops got no right doing this.” Cunningham grabbed his coat sleeve and pulled him away, telling him it was time to go home. “I swear to God he was ready to mess up the whole deal,” she recalled with a laugh. “He was a bit high.”
¹¹