Thurgood Marshall (49 page)

The agents later wrote in a memo to Hoover, “Mr. Marshall mentioned that his purpose in furnishing the information was due to the fact that he believed [Robert Williams] will seek to arouse the people in the North Carolina area to take action which could become violent and cause racial unrest and tension.… He is afraid of people agitating on such matters in the South, since race tensions can be easily aroused, especially during the summer months.”

At the end of the memo the agents noted that Marshall told them,
“No one else in the NAACP was aware of the fact that he had furnished the above information.” More and more, Marshall was acting on his own and at a distance from the organization. He promised to keep the FBI updated on the case, a few days later sending the New York FBI office an advertisement he had found in Detroit for a meeting of the “Friday Night Socialist Forum” held in support of Williams.
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Robert Williams’s ties to Communists had started a year earlier, when two black boys, ages nine and seven, were arrested and charged with rape after they were found playing a kissing game with a seven-year-old white girl. Williams, as the head of the local NAACP branch, tried to get the national office to defend the boys. But Williams said Marshall and the NAACP told him they did not want “anything to do with the case because it was a ‘sex case.’ ” A frustrated Williams turned to a New York civil rights attorney with Communist ties, Conrad Lynn. Despite Lynn’s efforts the boys were found guilty and sentenced to fourteen-year terms in a state reform school.

Williams remained a loyal member of the NAACP. But just a few months later he butted heads with the national office. In the spring of 1959, a Union County white man was charged with attempting to rape a black woman who was eight months pregnant. The man was acquitted by an all-white jury after the defense concluded its argument by saying, “This man is not guilty of any crime—he was just drinking and having a little fun.” Following the acquittal Williams told reporters: “This demonstration today shows that the Negro in the south cannot expect justice in the courts. He must convict his attackers on the spot. He must meet violence with violence, lynching with lynching.”
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It was this call for violence that prompted Roy Wilkins to suspend Williams and led to Marshall’s secret meeting with the FBI. But the case was not over. Wilkins and Marshall feared that the suspension would lead to heated debates at the NAACP’s fiftieth annual convention, set for New York in July. The leaders were specifically worried that the Black Muslims might try to exploit the controversy to disturb the convention.

“We went to see Malcolm to make sure that we could have our convention without any disruption, and Malcolm said he wouldn’t disrupt it,” said Gloster Current, the NAACP’s director of branches.

But Marshall and Wilkins could not stop Williams and his supporters from launching floor fights and holding large street demonstrations outside the convention. Inside, Williams justified himself by telling the delegates
that when Klansmen and Nightriders attacked, “we must defend ourselves.” A good number of the delegates applauded. “This is all I advocated. If I advocated it then, I advocate it now,” he said.

Wilkins and Marshall argued that Williams was undermining the NAACP’s tradition of achieving change through peaceful protest and appeals to the law. They led the convention to vote in support of Williams’s six-month suspension. “We abhor violence,” the NAACP said in a statement. “We reject violence in any way to achieve any of [our] objectives.”

However, there were enough pro-Williams voices to force the addition of a statement supporting black people who defended themselves. Delegates said blacks facing violent racists need not be compliant sheep going to slaughter: “We do not deny, but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults.”
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Williams later was reelected president of the Union County NAACP and in 1960 traveled to Communist-led Cuba. He also went to China and other Communist countries. His travels seemed to validate Marshall’s tips to the FBI. But the Union County NAACP’s vote to reelect Williams indicated their comfort with his militancy and cemented the distance between Marshall and elements of the NAACP rank and file.

Marshall’s alienation from radicals such as Malcolm X and Robert Williams was based on his judgment that they did little to make life better for black Americans. The radicals may have touched a nerve and given release to pent-up anger among black people. But Marshall accurately concluded that compared with his efforts to end legal segregation and win voting rights for all Americans, there was nothing the radicals had to show as evidence of how they improved black life in America.

Hurt by what he perceived as a lack of appreciation for his efforts to create real change in race relations, Marshall became emotionally distant from much of the burgeoning activism in the civil rights movement by the end of the 1950s. He didn’t see the nonviolent strategies of Martin Luther King, Jr., as effective, and he viewed Malcolm X’s talk about separatism and violence as destructive. Marshall thought Robert Williams’s infatuation with Communists was just plain stupid. In an era when government leaders were paranoid about Soviet expansion, Marshall was right to conclude that there was no advantage for already maligned black people to gain by signing up with Communists.

Marshall’s decision to provide information to Hoover’s FBI could have cost him his credibility among civil rights activists had it become known. But the relationship was kept secret. And Marshall did succeed in
keeping the FBI from mistakenly attacking the NAACP and the LDF as Communist fronts or bases for militant violence. In his heart Marshall wanted to protect mainstream civil rights groups from becoming easy targets for attacks that could set back the fight to defeat segregation and win equal rights for all.

Marshall’s secret ties to the FBI and the information he gave the bureau were justified by the arc of the African-American struggle, dating back to antislavery efforts, to end government-sanctioned racism in America. But once he had made his pact with Hoover and set himself apart from the likes of Malcolm X, not to mention much of the NAACP, Marshall had all but ended his time as the much-honored legal leader of the movement.

Exit Time

M
ARSHALL FELT TRAPPED
. He was tired of the young militants who criticized him. And he had grown discouraged with fighting segregationists over issues he thought he had won long ago. His frustration peaked when he lost a Supreme Court case in which the state of Virginia accused the NAACP of instigating frivolous lawsuits against segregation. The Supreme Court ruled on a technicality; the state court had not reviewed the case.

Marshall was upset that the high court would give credence to such a case by allowing it to continue. It just added to the foot-dragging by segregationists. The decision came down in June, and Marshall spent the summer restless and distracted, unable to focus his mind or his legal strategy. His efforts had hit a brick wall—less than 6 percent of black children in the South attended integrated schools despite the
Brown
decision. In the fall he surprised his staff by announcing that he was taking a two-month leave of absence to travel overseas.

The trip came as an invitation from Tom Mboya, the leader of black Kenyans involved in the movement to gain independence from Britain. Mboya had come to the United States early in 1959 and while in New York met black American leaders, including Marshall. Mboya told New York papers that he found “the American Negro community incredibly impressive.”
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He was particularly struck by Marshall’s success as a lawyer. Mboya asked if he would come to Africa and assist in drafting a constitution for Kenya’s independence.

It was the perfect reason to take a break from the U.S. civil rights struggle. Before leaving in January 1960, Marshall did extensive research. “When I did the constitution for Kenya, I looked over just about every constitution in the world just to see what was good,” Marshall said, pounding his fist on the desk to drive home the point. “And there’s nothing that comes close to comparing with this one in the U.S. This one is the best I’ve ever seen.”

But when he arrived in Kenya, not everyone welcomed him. As he tried to go into the constitutional conference in Nairobi, he was barred by police because he and Mboya were seen as supporters of the radical Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta had been convicted and was in jail for leading the Mau Mau rebellion, which had resulted in the widespread murder of white settlers in the early 1950s. Marshall, barred from the meeting, started to argue and push by a white policeman, but he stopped when he realized a police search could land him in jail since he had anti-British pamphlets in his pocket.

Marshall backed away from the confrontation but asked if he could say a few words to the large crowd of black Kenyans waiting outside the negotiations room. The police refused, but Marshall said he would not give a speech, simply offer “one word of greeting.” The policeman, seeing that the light-skinned foreigner with his lawyer’s satchel had attracted attention from the locals, agreed.

Marshall pulled his six-foot-two, 220-pound frame on the top of an old station wagon and waved his arms to quiet the crowd. Then, in his booming voice, he shouted, ‘Uhuru,’ and pandemonium broke out. The policeman was stunned. The one word Marshall had shouted was political dynamite. It meant “freedom now.”
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Marshall was never allowed into the talks in Nairobi. But when meetings resumed in England a week later, the Kenyan delegation asked him to fly with them to London, where he was welcomed by the British.

The black Kenyan nationalists wanted democratic elections in which natives would be given the right to vote. But hard-line white settlers were fearful that majority rule would mean a black-run government that would confiscate their land and property. Marshall told reporters that without a constitution allowing for black rule, there would be an uprising “that nobody can control—any more than they could control the Mau Maus.”
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He was not, however, without concern for the whites. Just as he had made a career of asserting black minority rights in the United
States, Marshall was anxious to protect the white minority in Kenya. “Well, I said that I was going to give the white Kenyan the same protection I would give a Negro in Mississippi. That’s what I did,” he later recalled.

Marshall’s key contribution to the Kenyan constitution was to make it illegal for the government to claim land belonging to white settlers without paying for it. “Kenya only has one asset and that’s land,” he explained. “So I provided in my constitution that they could take the lands but they had to pay you. And if they don’t give you the price you like, you can file an action in the highest court—I’m damn proud of the constitution I wrote.”

Not everyone was pleased to see Marshall in London exercising his influence. Writing from Nairobi, Robert Ruark of the
New York World Telegram and Sun
said Marshall should have stayed home. Under the headline
AFRICA ISN’T
M
ARSHALL’S BUSINESS
, he wrote: “The intrusion of Thurgood Marshall … into the muddled mess between Great Britain and its colony seems to me to be meddling of the highest order.… He is not an African. He is an American and a mostly white one at that. If he knows anything about Africa or Africans, he read it somewhere.”
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But Marshall’s work on the Kenyan constitution was celebrated in black American newspapers, which focused on kinship ties between black Africans and black Americans. The
Afro-American
quoted Marshall as saying the efforts to integrate schools in America and the fight for independence of the colonies in Africa were part of the same “emergent struggle for freedom all over the world.”
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Not all of Marshall’s time was spent reading legal documents. While in London, he met Prince Philip. The prince teased him by asking, “Do you care to hear my opinion of lawyers?” Marshall, with a playful grin, shot back, “Only if you care to hear my opinion of princes.”

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There were some final details still to be cleared up on the constitution, but Marshall was being swamped with telegrams and calls from New York about a new wave of mass protests in the United States. Student sit-ins at segregated restaurants in the South were spreading quickly after their start at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The sit-in tactic, supported by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, produced big headlines around the country as southern sheriffs began arresting hundreds of young people
on charges of trespassing. The students’ parents asked the LDF to get their children out of those dangerous southern jails.

Marshall came home in late February to deal with the crisis. As lead lawyer for the LDF, he became a singular voice of caution. He challenged his staff to tell him why the LDF should do anything for the students. “Thurgood stormed around the room proclaiming in a voice that could be heard across Columbus Circle that he did not care what anyone said, he was not going to represent a bunch of crazy colored students who violated the sacred property rights of white folks by going in their stores or lunch counters and refusing to leave when ordered to do so,” wrote Derrick Bell, a young lawyer who had just joined the staff. Bell recalled that Marshall told the LDF staff it was futile to go before any judge and talk about a sit-in when the law was clear that the students were trespassing on private property. Almost as if he was defying the popularity of the cause, Marshall told his lawyers the only way he would take the cases was if they could find some new, convincing arguments. But he added, “I know you can’t, because they don’t exist.”
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