Thurgood Marshall (9 page)

Thurgood’s work also taught him a lesson about the control the company held over its black workers. The white engineers, conductors, and mechanics were unionized, but the black waiters were forbidden to organize even though they earned just fifty-five dollars a month and were not given overtime pay. One day while he was working on the train, a group of waiters began talking about the need for a union. When the train arrived back in Baltimore, the white inspector of dining cars boarded and went directly to the waiter who had led the discussion. “He tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Get your clothes. You’re fired,’ ” recounted Marshall. “Now how did that word get to Baltimore? … There was nobody on there but us. It was one of the crew … each one looking at the other one like this,” he recalled, giving the accusatory glare of a betrayed co-worker.

Thurgood kept his mouth shut and in six months he had saved enough to pay Lincoln’s tuition for a year. In September 1925 he packed for the fifty-five-mile car ride up Route One to the small farm town of Oxford, Pennsylvania. Lincoln University, founded by Presbyterians in 1854 (and renamed in honor of President Lincoln after he was assassinated), was known as the Black Princeton, because Presbyterians also ran the famous New Jersey school for young white men and many Princeton graduates taught at Lincoln.

Thurgood traveled to Lincoln with Aubrey, who was then starting his senior year. There were 285 men at Lincoln that year. Aubrey had pledged a fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, but he was not well established at the school. According to his first roommate, Franz (Jazz) Byrd, Aubrey was a remote person, “kind of irritable.… He just felt that he was superior.” Byrd, a star football player, described Aubrey as a very serious person who did not get along with his jocular younger brother. “The dislike
between Thurgood and Aubrey was so intense,” Byrd recalled. “I’ve never seen it in any two brothers that I know who came from the same parents, same background and everything else.”
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Thurgood spent little time with his brother and almost never talked about him. But they did have regular arguments. Much of Thurgood’s loud, crude behavior in his early years at Lincoln may have been an effort to set himself apart from the reserved Aubrey.

In Thurgood’s first year at Lincoln, Aubrey was on the senior honor roll. Thurgood, by contrast, was having a great time and hardly ever studying. His inventive use of curse words, his love of storytelling, and his joy in card games made him a good fit for the young, all-male social scene.

Thurgood had no problem playing along with the Lincoln custom of freshmen wearing little blue beanies on their heads and short pants with garters to hold up their socks. Upperclassmen called the freshmen dogs and tried to steal their beanies, sometimes starting small fights, known as pushing knuckles. Freshmen were also required to know the names of all the buildings on campus, the history of the university, and the alma mater. And they could only enter buildings through the back door.

In this boys’ paradise the only thing that slowed Thurgood was his campus job. He was in charge of baking bread for the school cafeteria. “We would cook it and then put it in a closet and serve it the second day,” Marshall recalled. “We’d take a loaf of bread right out of the oven. And slice it open like this and lay a quart of butter right there and griddle it. That’s a meal right there, and a good meal, too.”

Most of the time Thurgood lived as a boy without a complicated thought in his head. His friends thought he never studied and he became known as a great pinochle player, a fan of cowboy movies, and a connoisseur of comic books. He was always bumming cigarettes. Thurgood roomed with James Murphy, a friend from Baltimore whose family ran the
Afro-American
newspaper. They kept a party going in their room on most nights. On their door was a sign welcoming visitors to the “Land of the Disinherited.”
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One friend later wrote that during their years at Lincoln, Thurgood was a “harum-scarum youth, the loudest individual in the dormitory and apparently the least likely to succeed.”
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Norma Marshall, aware that Thurgood was not as studious as Aubrey, urged her younger son to become a dentist despite his ambition to practice law. Black dentists were in demand because many whites refused to
work on black patients. Also, black people generally did not trust white dentists, who were known in the South for yanking the teeth out of any black person with a toothache. To please his mother Thurgood took some pre-medical classes. But he had little taste for basic science. Even more of a problem, he had a run-in with a professor who saw him as a less than serious student.

The hardest work he put in was going to the debate team’s get-togethers to show off his talent for argument. Thurgood’s debating skills got him on Lincoln’s varsity team as a freshman. It would be great training for a future lawyer. That year Lincoln’s team debated Oxford University at Bethel AME Church in Baltimore before over a thousand people. Thurgood was not one of the four Lincoln men who debated, but he trained for the event and traveled to it with the team, which thrilled black Baltimore by winning. Later in his Lincoln career, Thurgood was one of the principal debaters when the university’s team traveled to Boston to debate Harvard and later the British Union team (students from Cambridge, the University of London, and Edinburgh).

After the Harvard debate Thurgood attended a dinner where he was seated next to a white female student. He had dealt with white women while working in Baltimore, but there was always the danger, as the hat-box incident in his youth had demonstrated, of sudden violence when a black man got too close to a white woman socially. To sit next to a white woman of his age in a social setting made him nervous. “I never felt good around them,” he said later. “[At the Harvard Club dinner] I was the most uncomfortable son of a bitch in the world. But I managed to just grin and bear it.”

Traveling with the debate team wasn’t the only occasion for Thurgood to get off campus. On weekends he often went to Philadelphia, about an hour north, or traveled south for an hour and a half to Baltimore. Lincoln men would show off by leaving campus every weekend, claiming to be visiting beautiful women. Thurgood bragged to classmates of being engaged ten times during college. “I went away every weekend—Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington,” he recalled. “Wherever there was some pussy to chase, I was there.”

His freshman year of college turned out to be a joyride for Thurgood. He had friends all over campus who delighted in the pranks and card games he loved so much. And though he didn’t have great grades, he wasn’t flunking out. His biggest worry, over money for tuition, had faded. Not only was he working on campus but his father had recovered
his health and found a good-paying job as the head steward at the Gibson Island Club. The club, on the Chesapeake Bay, was eighteen miles from Baltimore and a golf and sailing haven for Baltimore’s white, upper-class Protestants. Teddy Stewart, who washed dishes there, described it as “one of the best gentile clubs in the state of Maryland if not the best.” Sam Daniels, who worked as a busboy on the island, remembered a sign on the causeway that read: “No Niggers and Dogs Allowed.”

The light-skinned Willie Marshall was in charge of hiring the allblack dining room staff at the club, and he hired Thurgood as a waiter that summer, after his first year of college.

Working at Gibson Island, Thurgood became a popular figure with the powerful whites who frequented the exclusive watering hole. And Albert Fox, the club’s secretary, who was in charge of all the staff and facilities, regarded Thurgood as a son. Fox and Willie Marshall were drinking partners, and Fox delighted in introducing Thurgood to first-rate whiskey, “a forty-year-old hogshead of old Pikesville bourbon.”

Thurgood’s relationship with Fox gave him protection whenever he had to deal with some of the more racist whites at the club, but he still had to face prejudice. One day Thurgood was waiting on tables when in came a U.S. senator, “a very vulgah individual,” according to Marshall. The senator saw Thurgood and shouted, “Hey, nigger.”

Marshall, who was taught to fight anyone who called him that, for some reason held his temper and went over to his table.

“Nigger, I want service at this table,” the old senator yelled out. The college man decided to play along, not wanting to lose his job. The senator got more and more into showing off for his dinner guests as he hailed Thurgood with shouts of “Nigger” and “Boy.” But when dinner was over, he left an astounding twenty-dollar tip. He did the same every day for nearly a week, giving Thurgood the best-paying week of his young life and putting Thurgood a major step closer to paying his tuition for the coming school year.

But one night Willie Marshall overheard the senator’s rank language and saw Thurgood running up to the table, bowing and saying “Yes, sir!” His father pulled Thurgood into a corner and told him: “You are fired! You are a disgrace to the colored people!”

Thurgood quickly explained that he was making big money off the senator’s obnoxious behavior. In later telling the story, Marshall said he explained to his dad, “Now I figure it’s worth about twenty dollars to be
called nigger.… But the minute you run out of them twenties … I’m gonna bust you in the nose!”
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This more pragmatic Thurgood was a changed man from the youngster who had dropped the hatboxes and started swinging after being called a name. Having felt his father’s money woes, as well as his mother’s ambition to get him into a good college, Thurgood was fast learning the importance of playing the game even as he stood up for his principles.

Thurgood had his emerging racial consciousness wrenched on another occasion at Gibson Island. He had a steady friendship with a member of the club who was unfailingly courteous and had been giving him generous tips. One day the man’s wife had an accident while driving to the club in her husband’s Rolls-Royce. Thurgood made sure she was okay, phoned her husband to let him know about the accident, and even helped repair the car.

Later, the man hired Thurgood to work at a private party at the family’s Baltimore home. The woman showed him a room full of toys abandoned by her grown children. Thurgood mentioned that he knew people in Old West Baltimore who worked with handicapped children and that they would love to have the toys. The woman got excited and immediately offered to donate the toys to the children. A moment later, however, she asked Thurgood if the kids were black. “Yes, ma’am,” he told her. Her face suddenly red and drawn tight, she responded, “I’m not going to give them anything.”

Thurgood finished his work that night with a fascination for what was going on in the mind of that rich, white woman. But he walked away filled with more pity than bitterness.

Despite his hurtful experiences with a few white people at the club, Thurgood never leaped to the conclusion that whites were all racists. He was still close to several white men he considered his mentors, such as the club’s secretary, Mr. Fox, and white Jews he knew from the neighborhood, such as Mr. Schoen, the hat store owner. Those positive relationships set a pattern for his life.

His summer of work at Gibson Island left Thurgood free from any fear of not being able to pay his tuition. He went back to school with confidence that he was there to stay and jumped into every activity on campus. He was never on the football team, but during his sophomore year he displayed a talent for talking about the glories of football at the Lincoln team’s bonfire rallies. His wild speeches, elegizing the great Lincoln
teams of the past as well as commenting on the mothers of the opposing team’s players, became legend.

Meanwhile, Aubrey had to take an extra semester to get ready for medical school. Never one for campus life, he spent most of his free time off campus romancing a pretty Baltimore girl, Sadie Prince. And he already had his acceptance to Howard Medical School in hand. In the winter of 1926 he graduated with honors and soon married Sadie.

Thurgood, meanwhile, was at the heart of campus life. He took part in two rituals of young male college society. First, he joined Alpha Phi Alpha, an elite fraternity of mostly light-skinned boys. Although the fraternity was at the top of campus society, its hazing was rough. “We’d get hit in the morning, hit in the middle of the night … dousing in cold water and all that kind of crap,” recalled Monroe Dowling, who pledged a rival fraternity, Omega Psi Phi. “People came from all over the country to haze you.… You’d be beaten, branded, mistreated, and everything. That was Lincoln. The most uncouth place in the world.”
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The second male ritual Thurgood joined at the start of his sophomore year was to grow a mustache, a small, bushy one right below his nose—the same style his father wore. Marshall would keep a mustache for the rest of his life.

Once he became an Alpha, Thurgood delighted in the nasty tricks fraternity brothers would play on each other and on rival frats. “I can throw water around a curve,” he later claimed with pride. “You put the water in a pitcher, and you hold the pitcher straight up … then about the third time swirling the water—
whrrrroooo
, throw the water and it will go around the corner.”

After one of his friends was doused with water by a competing fraternity while wearing good clothes, Thurgood and his frat brothers decided revenge was in order. “We knew in the Lincoln Hall dormitory for some reason they had little trapdoors on every floor. So if you opened the trapdoors you could go from the fourth floor all the way down. So we decided we’d open them all at one time. We got a big bucket, and everybody on that floor peed in that bucket, and they spit, and some of us were chewing tobacco. And we got a real good bucket of real good stuff in about a week or so. So when the guy is coming in the front door, we dropped the bucket of slop on his head through the trapdoor. Bet it broke him of that habit of throwing water.”

Thurgood took to researching the best pranks. In his favorite, fraternity
brothers would take the pants off the freshmen pledges and stick pickles between the cheeks of their buttocks before having them hop around the room in a race. After all the pickles had fallen on the floor, the older boys would put them in a punch bowl. While the boys were pulling up their pants, the old bowl would be switched with a bowl of fresh pickles. Then the pledges would be told to take a pickle out of the bowl and eat it. “Everyone would say, ‘Can’t I get my own pickle?’ ” Marshall remembered with glee.