Thurgood Marshall (47 page)

The next morning federal troops arrived at Daisy Bates’s house to
drive the black children to school. The Airborne also circled the school and escorted the black children in the hallways. Integration had come to Central.

In newspapers across the country, Thurgood Marshall was defiant. “Little Rock is not an occupied town,” he told the newsman Mike Wallace. “Troops are there for one purpose only—to see that those children are able to go to school. I hope it’s gotten over to the Southern people that if they allow their governors to defy the Federal Government this is inevitable.” When Wallace asked if he and the NAACP had started a second Civil War, Marshall replied: “If you mean by Civil War that there is continuing effort to emancipate Negroes, towards accomplishing what the Civil War was intended to accomplish—yes.”
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Marshall’s triumph lasted only until the end of the school year. The following summer, after Central had graduated its first black student, the Little Rock school board went to court to ask that desegregation be stopped because of threats of more violence. Marshall, with Branton at his side again, argued that the court should not give in.

Federal District Judge Harry Lemley did not agree. He stunned Marshall and Branton by accepting the school board’s plan to delay integration for another two years. Marshall was angry, but even in his anger he worried about the threatening atmosphere he was in, especially when he looked around the courtroom. Among the spectators, he later recalled, were “the most horrible looking women, with Confederate flags and all that—boy, they were tough looking.”
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The extent of the power of white anger went beyond keeping children out of white schools for an additional two years. It damaged the self-image and confidence of black people in the state. Marshall saw this firsthand when he went drinking with Branton in a local pool hall.

A young black man, smoking a cigarette and carrying a pool cue, walked over to Marshall and said, “Hey, lawyer—you know anything about this thing—where you come back after you die?” Marshall asked the pool player if he was talking about reincarnation. The guy nodded, and a laughing Marshall said he knew more about law than about spirituality. But the young man looked straight at him and said, “Well, if you find anybody that has anything to do with it, tell ’em when I come back I don’t care what it is, whether it’s a man or a woman, a horse, a cow, a dog, a cat, whatever it is, let it be white.”

Though weary, Marshall found the Little Rock crisis spurring him to fight back. It triggered his old spirit of determination. To counter
Lemley’s ruling Marshall immediately appealed to the federal circuit court and boldly told the
Afro-American:
“We are going to drop all other cases and the full legal staff will concentrate on the Little Rock case. The pupils will be back in school in September.”
¹⁹

Marshall’s appeal went to the Eighth Circuit Court in early August 1958. The appeals court called a special session in St. Louis, with all seven judges sitting. The courtroom was packed with more than 150 people, including many blacks who came up from Arkansas. Marshall said that Judge Lemley’s decision sent a message—“that if you merely dislike integration and speak against it, you won’t be successful, but if you throw rocks or commit acts of arson, bombing or other violence then you will be successful.”
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Two weeks later the Eighth Circuit ordered that Central High was to continue desegregating that fall. But Marshall’s victory had little effect. The Little Rock School Board appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

In an extraordinary summer session, all nine justices of the high court gathered in Washington to hear the case. Marshall argued that no society should sacrifice the rule of law to appease violent agitators. He demanded that the Court not “surrender to obstructionists and mob action.” He told the justices that when banks were robbed, “you don’t close the banks—you put the bank robbers in jail.”
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Richard Butler, the attorney for the Little Rock School Board, responded that integration would “destroy the public school system of Little Rock” because of the threat of more violence. Butler’s view was shared by the state’s top politicians, including Sen. William Fulbright, who sent a supporting brief. Butler also told the Court that “the people of Arkansas had not accepted the court’s desegregation decision and … Gov. Faubus [has said] that the ruling is not the law of the land.”

Chief Justice Warren was aghast: “I have never heard such an argument made in a court of justice before.… I never heard a lawyer say that the statement of a governor … should control the action of any court.”

But Butler’s argument seemed to have support from Eisenhower. Just the day before the president had issued a statement that said he preferred a slow pace of integration. Marshall began to lose his usual cool. He was angry at being painted as a crazy radical for simply asking that the Supreme Court’s decision be enforced.

“Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP, who had made the
opening argument for the Little Rock Negro students, listened to Mr. Rankin [the solicitor general] with a hint of a scowl on his face, looking like Othello in a tan business suit,”
The New York Times
wrote.
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It came as a surprise to Marshall, however, when Solicitor General Lee Rankin, in contradiction to Eisenhower, told the Court: “We are now at a crossroads—the people of this country are entitled to a definitive statement from the court as to whether force and violence will prevail.”

Two weeks after the final argument, the Supreme Court issued a short, decisive ruling in
Cooper v. Aaron:
“Law and order are not here to be preserved by depriving Negro children of their Constitutional rights.… The enunciation by this court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land.” Marshall had won his nineteenth case before the Court. The
Pittsburgh Courier
reported in joyous tones that he had “pleaded his second straight 9–0 shutout” in the Supreme Court.
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After the Supreme Court ruled in September 1958, Governor Faubus ordered a citywide referendum on whether to keep Little Rock’s public schools open. Shutting down the schools was the overwhelming choice [19,000 to 7,500], and the city immediately set up private, segregated schools. Marshall and Branton had to go back to the Supreme Court to win confirmation that closing the public schools was illegal. It was not until the fall of 1959 that Little Rock’s public schools were reopened and Central and other high schools allowed black students to study with white students.
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* * *

When Marshall returned to New York, he was greeted as a conquering general. He was on radio and TV, and reporters were literally lined up to interview him at the NAACP offices. But while he was celebrated as a civil rights hero in public, the story was different inside the office.

While Marshall was preoccupied with Little Rock, he had turned down a request from the NAACP chapter in rural Dollarway, Arkansas, demanding that Marshall file a suit for immediate school integration there. Marshall had explained that he wanted to get control of the crisis in Little Rock before taking on another fight in Arkansas. But on his return to New York, he found that a suit had been filed in Dollarway against his orders. And an Arkansas judge had issued a terrible ruling, which allowed the local school board to slow its integration to a near stop
and left little room for appeal. There were almost no school integration cases in the nation not being directed by the Legal Defense Fund. Marshall asked his staff if they knew about the case,
Dove v. Parham
.

“There was this mysterious case,” Jack Greenberg said in a interview much later, “[and] a number of us in the office—-Jim Nabrit, Thurgood Marshall, and I—were looking at this thing and wondering what in the world this case was, because we didn’t know anything about it.”

Marshall went to Bob Carter, who was now technically separate from the LDF and acting as counsel to the NAACP, and asked about the case. As Greenberg recalls, Carter denied knowing about it.
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Several days later, however, as the LDF got hold of the court records, they found that Carter’s name was indeed on the case. “It turned out it was actually his case and he was handling it, and that totally infuriated Marshall,” said Greenberg.
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Soon thereafter Marshall banned Carter from using the LDF’s offices or law library. Just as he had used concern over the LDF’s tax status to separate himself from Wilkins and the NAACP board, Marshall now cited the IRS problem to totally isolate Carter from the LDF.

Although he and Marshall were fighting, Carter had done first-rate legal work for the NAACP. While Marshall and the LDF had been preoccupied with the Little Rock case, it was Carter who had taken the lead on protecting NAACP membership lists. Attorneys general from southern states had continued trying to force the organization to release its members’ names. Carter’s defense was extremely popular with the rank-and-file. He won a Supreme Court case in 1958 protecting the association’s right to keep its membership confidential.

Despite the personal feud and the behind-the-scenes legal dramas, by 1959 Marshall was internationally known as Mr. Civil Rights. And in polls among black Americans, he either beat or tied Martin Luther King, Jr., for the title “Most Important Black Leader.”

He was also finding comfort with a growing family. Cissy had a second boy, John, in July 1958. Just before John Marshall was born, Thurgood and Cissy found an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a brand-new Harlem development, Morningside Gardens. Among Thurgood’s favorite pastimes was running his toy trains with two-year-old Goody and doting over little John.

Marshall was on the road far less these days. At age fifty he was also no longer working day and night when he was in New York. Unlike during the turbulent final years with Buster, he was happy to go home. The
office had changed too; the staff was bigger and less intimate. Also, success had brought the LDF more money. There was less need for Marshall to be on the phone or out giving speeches to raise a few dollars.

Once in a while the Marshalls would throw parties, and Thurgood might cook some crab soup or appear wearing an apron and promising a “mystery stew.” Cissy would cook the main course in case Thurgood’s culinary experiments proved unpalatable. “We’d go up there, especially on New Year’s Eve,” remembered Marietta Dochery, a friend and neighbor. “We had a Fourth of July party here, and Thurgood and Cissy had over Alex Haley and Daisy Bates and Lena Horne. People liked to be around Thurgood, he had lots of friends. Cissy would cook her soul food—pigs’ feet, greens, spare ribs, black-eyed peas. Sometimes Thurgood would sing. Maybe he had a couple of drinks or something, and he would sing ‘Happy Am I.’ ”
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By now Marshall was also becoming more involved in the political life of New York City and Harlem. After his victory in Little Rock, there were regular rumors that he was up for political posts and judgeships. Times had changed since the late 1940s, when black Tammany Hall leaders had blocked the efforts of the Truman administration to put Marshall on the bench. Now his name was put up for a seat on the New York State Board of Regents, which oversaw education in the state. He would have been the first black person to serve on the powerful board, but the Republican-run state legislature killed the appointment.
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His popularity made even national political office a serious possibility. In 1958 Harlem’s congressman, the flamboyant Adam Clayton Powell, found himself under indictment for tax evasion. Prominent politicians, including Gov. Averell Harriman, pushed Marshall to take the seat. He was also the leading choice of Democratic bosses in Tammany Hall. “Tammany leader Carmine De Sapio was credited by the leaders with proposing Marshall,” wrote the
New York Post
, which noted that New York’s Liberal Party was also trying to get Marshall to run for Congress.
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Marshall did not seriously consider going after Powell’s seat, however. He did not want to join hands with Tammany Hall, and he did not have the appetite for raising money and campaigning. Marshall also didn’t want to be labeled as the man who ended Powell’s career. “If Carmine De Sapio or anyone else is putting out a trial horse, they should at least have discussed it with the horse,” he told the
New York Post
.
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Congressman Powell responded to Marshall’s decision not to run by inviting him to speak at the next Sunday’s eleven o’clock service at
Harlem’s famous Abyssinian Baptist Church, which had been founded by Powell’s father. The church was packed as usual, and from the high, white pulpit, Marshall made a passionate speech that drew Amens from the congregation. When he finished, Powell walked to the pulpit to hug and praise him. “And he came up and made a little talk, saying that I was the greatest this and the greatest that. When Powell spoke, he told the congregation: ‘The one man that I will let succeed me in Congress—the only one—is Thurgood Marshall.’ ” As Marshall and Powell walked out, arm in arm, the lawyer exclaimed: “Adam, what the hell you tell that goddamn lie for?” Powell, pulling his cigar out of his mouth to laugh, said, “Didn’t it sound good!”

A few weeks later the
Amsterdam News
wrote that Powell was quitting Congress. A reporter asked him to give names of people he would accept as his replacement. Powell named a dozen people. “My name wasn’t on the list,” remembered Marshall. “He forgot about me five minutes after he said it.” Powell, hungry for the spotlight despite the threat of scandal, eventually changed his mind and won reelection.

By the late 1950s Marshall had passed on several opportunities to leave the LDF—he had said no to running for Congress and to a federal district court job. His position at the LDF remained secure, and he was more popular than ever. Even so, he knew his time at the NAACP and the LDF was coming to an end. He had a family now and wanted more money; and he wanted the prestige he felt he deserved after his years of sacrifice and many victories for the NAACP. A middle-aged Marshall could also see that the civil rights movement was being transformed. Student sit-ins and mass protests had stirred a storm far outside the courtrooms he dominated. Times were changing for the nation and the question for Thurgood Marshall was whether the times had passed him by.