Thurgood Marshall (6 page)

T
HOROUGHGOOD TOOK HIS FIRST STEPS
out of the cocoon when he was two. In 1910 Willie and Norma Marshall moved to Harlem at the invitation of Norma’s older sister Denmedia. Her name was born out of Isaiah Williams’s imagination: He christened her Denmedia Marketa in honor of the street corner market he opened on Denmead Street. Aunt Medi, as the boys called her, lured her younger sister’s family to New York by telling Willie Marshall that he could get steady work with her husband, Clarence Dodson, on the New York Central while she helped Norma care for the boys.

When Norma and Willie said yes to the invitation, they became part of a wave of black families heading to New York at the turn of the century. The 1900 census indicated that Harlem was quickly becoming a center for the black population of Manhattan. By 1910 Harlem was a mecca for southern blacks eager to escape Jim Crow.

The sudden influx of blacks transformed Harlem. It was becoming world renowned for its electrifying mix of people, politics, and culture. By the time Thoroughgood arrived, black writers, religious leaders, and intellectuals were making Harlem the place for debate about the future of the race. And its many gambling joints, bars, and after-hours clubs drew both blacks and high-society whites. Harlem’s streets became a magnet for black entertainers—from ragtime musicians to vaudeville actors and classically trained singers.

Norma Marshall and Aunt Medi, who was eight years older than
Norma, took the boys for walks in a city both bigger and busier than Baltimore. There was nothing in Old West Baltimore, not even Pennsylvania Avenue, that was as crowded, noisy, and vibrant as the streets around the Dodsons’ apartment on Lenox Avenue. In Baltimore the immigrants were mostly whites from Europe. New York had black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, as well as the surge of black migrants from all parts of the Deep South. And, unlike Baltimore, Harlem had a crowded feeling to it; whereas Baltimore had row houses and alleys, Harlem had apartment buildings reaching several stories high, many divided into single rooms, all packed full of people.

While it was not the South, there was racial strife in Harlem. Some landlords, to attract white tenants, posted signs that read: “This Part of 135th Street Guaranteed Against Negro Invasion.”
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The open display of white racism in the North was a bitter lesson for many blacks who had come in the hope of escaping bigotry. The tense relationship between the races in Harlem set the stage for the emergence of Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, which soon became a rage in New York.

Willie Marshall and Clarence Dodson both worked as waiters on the New York Central, leaving their wives and the boys on their own several days every week. While the men were away Norma and Medi kept the boys under their skirts. Thoroughgood and Aubrey were not exposed to the jive or politics of Harlem’s street life. Among the family’s friends, Thoroughgood was known as a dainty, timid child called Goody. Aunt Medi felt that he was “nothing but a cry-baby.” When he seemed to show some strength of character a few months later, she attributed it to some of the neighborhood boys, who had “slapped his head.”
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Norma doted on her boys, dressing them like little princes, in blue Buster Brown suits with pretty white blouses. One of the family’s friends later said of Thurgood, “He was too good-looking—he should have been a girl.”
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While Aubrey managed to keep his clothes clean, Goody usually came back dirty, once carrying a smelly, gray cat.

“Get that cat out of here,” his mother screamed. But little Goody pleaded until his mother gave in and got a saucer of milk. That led to him regularly caring for the cat as well as a white rat and a dog. After that he did not limit his houseguests to animals. He brought Harlem’s kids as well as strangers over to the house to eat and sleep. His mother later recalled, “Our home got to be known as the ‘Friendly Inn.’ ”
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Although they liked New York, Norma and Willie had to return to Baltimore when Norma’s mother broke her leg in 1914.
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Thoroughgood,
now six, was about to start first grade. By this time he had tired of being teased about his dainty nickname. And he was fed up with having to spell out his complicated given name. In a strike of determined independence, he began telling everyone to call him Thurgood. And he got his mother to change the name on his birth certificate.
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“It was too damn long, so I cut it,” he explained. “I didn’t have nobody’s permission, I did it.”

On January 10, 1915, just as Thurgood was starting school, Thorney Marshall died at age sixty-six of heart failure.
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Thorney’s death marked the end of an era for the family. His powerful personality and larger-than-life stories about everything from slavery to the Buffalo Soldiers had cast a strong shadow over his son and grandsons.

The Marshall family was changing, and so was Baltimore City. Racial hostility had become more common in the five years the family had been away. The
Baltimore Afro-American
, the activist black paper that sold throughout the state, wrote an emotionally pained editorial complaining that no one could remember a time when tensions between the races were so troubled. The city’s black political leaders reacted to the hostile climate by becoming more politically organized and stirring people to join the Baltimore branch of the new NAACP.
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The key political issue in the city was the divide between the all-white segregationists in the Democratic Party and the Republicans over the movement of wealthy blacks into white neighborhoods. The Democrats cloaked their efforts to segregate blacks with claims that they were trying to contain tuberculosis and typhoid. In fact these diseases were raging through the impoverished black sections of Old West Baltimore, not far from the Marshall family. City officials described one street, Biddle Alley, as “the Lung Block” after doctors said every house on that street held someone with TB.
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When George F. McMechen, a black lawyer, moved to a white part of McCullough Street in 1910, the city council’s Democrats banned blacks from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. To make it look more balanced, the Democrats offered a provision also to keep whites from moving into mostly black areas of the city.
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“It is becoming more and more disturbing to permit … unrestricted invasions by Negroes into white-occupied streets,” the Democrats wrote in city council records.
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Baltimore’s black community was politically strong enough to respond to the Democrats. Harry Cummings, the first black Baltimore city council member, was able to attract wide attention for a speech in which
he called the new segregation laws pure racism. He expressed black Baltimore’s desire for integration with whites by saying all they wanted was “an opportunity to secure better homes, live under better conditions, be better citizens.”

Cummings’s passionate speech did not persuade the Democratic majority of the council. The law went into effect, the first time anyone in America had tried to compel residential segregation. A few weeks later, however, it was declared unconstitutional by the Baltimore Supreme Bench.

Even with Baltimore’s racial problems boiling around them, Thurgood’s family found a safe place to set up house when they returned from New York. They moved in with Norma’s brother Fearless Mentor Williams at 1632 Division Street. The Williamses’ house, not far from Pennsylvania Avenue, was on one of the better streets in Old West Baltimore. Families on Division Street were among black Baltimoreans with steady work or their own businesses. It was a middle-class street, and they lived next to a white, Jewish family.

The Old West Baltimore neighborhood had Russian, German, and Italian immigrants, although it was overwhelmingly black. The store owners on Pennsylvania Avenue, however, were nearly all Jewish. And in several of the stores blacks were not allowed to try on clothes; some stores would not even let blacks walk in the door unless their skin was so light they could pass for white. The segregated life in many stores on Pennsylvania Avenue had prompted increasing grumbling among Baltimore’s black community by the time young Thurgood and his family returned.

While Thurgood’s family was living with Uncle Fearless, his life was centered in the warmth of his grandmother’s house. Thurgood’s mother had to spend time with Grandma Mary as she recuperated from her broken leg, and Mary lovingly took her grandson into her kitchen to feed him and teach him to cook. As part of the protective blanket she wrapped around little Thurgood, Grandma Mary also gave him practical advice about his chances as a young black man in turn-of-the-century America. “Your mother and father want you to be a dentist or a doctor, something like that,” she told him. “And I hope you make it. But just in case you don’t, I’m going to teach you how to cook. And you know why? You’ve never seen an unemployed black cook.”

While his grandmother and mother provided the strong female presence in his life, the leading male figure was Thurgood’s Uncle Fearless. Fearless got his name when his father, the imaginative Isaiah Williams,
decided that the infant stared at him just after birth and was “a fearless little fellow.” Although Thurgood’s dad was often gone working on the railroad for several days at a time, Uncle “Fee” was there every afternoon and night to play and talk about school, the family, and the neighborhood with Thurgood and Aubrey.

Uncle Fearless, who was about thirty-four when Thurgood and his family moved in, had a good job as personal attendant to the white president of the B & O Railroad. Fearless set up the president’s meetings and served his lunch. He wore a suit and bow tie to work every day. He was on a first-name basis with the city’s top white business and political leaders. Fearless was a “tall, broad-shouldered, wide smiling man.… A sort of major domo in the office of the president,” the
B & O Railroad Magazine
wrote about him years later.
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“Fearless was the most important black in the B & O Railroad,” remembered Douglas C. Turnbull, Jr., executive assistant to the president of the railroad for many years. “The president talked to Fearless several times a week.”
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Uncle Fee, who had no children of his own, delighted in being a powerful influence on the young boys.

When six-year-old Thurgood began attending school, he went to Number 103 on Division Street, just three blocks from Uncle Fee’s house. The segregated 103 was the best colored elementary school in Baltimore. “Everybody in the community relied on public neighborhood schools but parents … were especially proud of school 103 on Division Street, a model elementary school,” a historian later wrote.
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The school was an old, redbrick, two-story building with twelve makeshift classrooms. The classes were separated by sliding doors, which, when opened, made two or three rooms into an auditorium.

The academic year at the black schools was about a month shorter than it was for the city’s white children. Black children were expected to get jobs, and most did leave school every spring when the strawberry crop was ready to be picked.
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Thurgood’s classmates remembered him as an energetic boy who had to sit in the first seat of the first row. Agnes Patterson, one of his classmates, explained that Thurgood had to sit up front because “he was always playing, and so they had to keep right on top of him.”
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His class was called “The Sissy Class,” because it had few boys besides Thurgood and his best friend, Jimmy Carr, the son of a prominent black doctor. Thurgood and Jimmy took pleasure in teasing the many
girls around them: “He used to drive me crazy,” recalled Julia Wood-house Harden.
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Carrie Jackson, another classmate, portrayed the young Thurgood as annoying but never mean: “Thurgood didn’t get into fights.” Thurgood’s mother remembered her son the same way: “Thurgood wasn’t much of a street fighter—Aubrey was the tough one. He did all the fighting. Thurgood would always come home and tell me about what the boys did to him.”
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Thurgood, a great storyteller even as a boy, told his mother and his friends about the people who lived in the alley streets and their roughneck children. Their scary world fascinated Thurgood, but while he might venture out for a peek, he was much more comfortable at home.

After school Thurgood and his older brother went home to a house ruled by women: Norma Marshall and Aunt Flo (Fearless’s wife) oversaw family affairs, with frequent visits from Grandma Mary, now in her late sixties. Willie Marshall was at work much of the time. Even when he came home, Willie was a distant father figure, an intense, introverted man who liked to drink. Aubrey was not much of a presence either. A bright student and a snappy dresser, he socialized with an older crowd and was a regular on local baseball fields.

“Aubrey was more outgoing,” said Ethel Williams, one of Thurgood’s classmates. She recalled that “Aubrey looked just like white, he was blond, the blondest black guy you’ve ever seen, with sharp features, too.” “You wouldn’t think that they were brothers, other than they were both fair,” said Pat Patterson, who knew both boys. “The interesting thing about the family is that when they were young, Aubrey was the fair-haired boy. They just felt he had a whole lot of promise,” said Elizabeth [Penny] Monteiro, who later married into the Marshall family.
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Thurgood, meanwhile, could be regularly seen in the late afternoons playing and working at the grocery next door to Uncle Fee’s house—owned by Mr. Hale, a Jewish merchant. His job was to pick out items ordered by customers, then deliver them in his little red wagon. Thurgood started the job when he was seven, working for ten cents a day plus all he could eat. On his second day he made a neighborhood reputation for himself when he got “sick as a dog” eating pickles and candy. Mr. Hale had to take him home and later joked, “That’s why I let you do that—I knew you’d break yourself out of the habit.”