Thurgood Marshall

There is properly no history, only biography.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Making of America series traces the constitutional history of the United States through overlapping biographies of American men and women. The debates that raged when our nation was founded have been argued ever since: How should the Constitution be interpreted? What is the meaning, and where are the limits, of personal liberty? What is the proper role of the federal government? Who should be included in we the people? Each biography in the series tells the story of an American leader who helped shape the United States of today.

The following images are courtesy of Alamy: This page, 30,000 Protestors. This page, Thurgood Marshall, age 2. This page, LBJ and Thurgood Marshall. This page, House of Representatives, 1939. The following images are courtesy of Getty: This page, Women Protestors. This page, bus in front of Tar Paper School. This page, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This page, House of Representatives, 2018. The following images are courtesy of the Afro-American: This page, Thurgood’s parents. This page, Irene Morgan. This page, Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill. Courtesy of Lincoln University: This page, Lloyd Gaines. Courtesy of Spelman College: This page, Barbara Johns. This page: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States. All other images are public domain, courtesy of the National Archives, Baltimore Archives, the Smithsonian, or the Library of Congress.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4197-4104-3

eISBN 978-1-68335-830-5

Text copyright © 2020 Teri Kanefield

Edited by Howard W. Reeves

Book design by Sara Corbett

Published in 2020 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE:

A Public Enemy

1   Way Up South

2   College Days

3   Top Man in the Class

4   The Equalization Strategy

5   A Social Engineer

6   Speaking Out

7   Mr. Civil Rights

8   Brown v. Board of Education

9   Massive Resistance

10 Judge Marshall

11 A More Perfect Union

12 Legacy

TIMELINE

SELECTED WRITINGS OF THURGOOD MARSHALL

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Thirty thousand Civil Rights demonstrators gathered outside the Alabama State capitol following their march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965.

PROLOGUE

A Public Enemy

The year was 1967. America was in tumult. African Americans were protesting in the streets, demanding equality. Women, too, were demanding equality, and they, too, were marching. A few militants even talked about using violence to secure equal rights for African Americans. People were protesting the war in Vietnam. Some of the protesters openly flouted the law. College campuses and cities like San Francisco were hotbeds of what was called counter-culture unrest, with young people rejecting what they thought of as restrictive traditional values. They rejected the idea that African Americans were expected to be content with second-class citizenship. They rejected the notion that women should limit their career ambitions to jobs deemed appropriate, like secretary, nurse, or elementary school teacher.

A crowd protesting in front of the Capitol, 1967. Pictured in the center is Stokely Carmichael, a civil rights leader of the 1960s.

1969: A women’s liberation march. The women are marching for both women’s liberation and black equality.

It seemed to many that America was unraveling. Large swaths of the population, mostly in southern, suburban, and rural communities, were alarmed and angry about these upheavals. Many of them placed the blame on one man: Thurgood Marshall.

Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer who had dedicated his career to ending racial segregation. His work culminated in a 1954 Supreme Court decision called Brown v. Board of Education, the case that outlawed racial segregation in schools. Brown v. Board of Education disrupted the South and became a catalyst for the civil rights movement, which in turn paved the way for the women’s rights movement and the 1960s counterculture revolution.

In the words of one U.S. senator, Thurgood Marshall was considered a public enemy of the South.

On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson—who hailed from Texas and had long been an advocate of racial equality under the law—called a press conference. He stood in the White House Rose Garden next to Thurgood Marshall and announced that he was nominating Marshall to the United States Supreme Court.

I believe he has already earned his place in history, President Johnson told the assembled crowd, but I think it will be greatly enhanced by his service on the Court. I believe he earned that appointment . . . he is the best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country.

President Johnson nominates Thurgood Marshall to be an associate Supreme Court Justice.

The word spread like a wildfire. Letters poured in to the president and members of Congress. Some people were thrilled. Others were horrified. Please, sir, no N— on the Supreme Court bench, came a typical letter, with looting and burning and riots all over the country . . . so many feel as we do.

Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina was determined to block Marshall’s nomination. He was the author of the Southern Manifesto, a 1956 document denouncing efforts by the federal government to end segregation. Thurmond joined with three other southern senators: John McClellan from Arkansas, Sam Ervin from North Carolina, and James Eastland of Mississippi. All four were on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so they would have a chance to question Thurgood Marshall in an open hearing. All four resented what Thurgood Marshall had done in their states as an activist lawyer.

Senator Thurmond told his staff to start digging. He wanted dirt he could use to prevent Marshall from taking a place on the United States Supreme Court. His research team plunged into their task. Hearings would begin within a few weeks. They didn’t have much time to come up with a plan.

1

Way Up South

It was taken for granted that we had to make something of ourselves. Not much was said about it; it was just in the atmosphere of the home.

—Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall loved telling stories. He particularly enjoyed telling about his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a notorious rebel whom Thurgood proudly proclaimed was the baddest N— in the whole state of Maryland. As one version of the story went, his master captured him in Africa and brought him to work at his Eastern Shore plantation. According to family legend, he was from Sierra Leone. But we all know, Thurgood liked to say, that he really came from the toughest part of the Congo.

One day—as Thurgood liked to tell the story—the exasperated master said, Now, look—you are so ornery and mean to white people that you’ll never be a good servant, and I in good conscience can’t sell you to another white person. So his master offered him a deal: If you agree to leave the county and the state, I’ll turn you loose and give you your freedom.

I’m not going anyplace, said the ornery slave. His master gave him his freedom anyway. He married a white woman and settled down as a free man on a farm not far from his old master. Eventually his descendants made their way to Baltimore. I’m proud of a guy like that, Thurgood said.

Baltimore, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an exceptional place. In the North, there were so few African Americans that integration was impossible. Further south, the very idea of integration was so repugnant that white southerners fought tooth and nail to prevent it. Throughout the nation, African Americans largely remained in poverty and cut off from opportunities available to whites. Baltimore was different. Maryland was situated just south of the Mason-Dixon line—between the North and South—and had the largest free African American population in the nation. In the part of the city known as Old West Baltimore, whites and African Americans lived in close proximity, and the two races interacted daily. Many African Americans thrived. They became well-to-do homeowners and successful business owners. There were even top-notch private schools for African American children. Later Thurgood Marshall referred to Baltimore as way up South.

Thurgood Marshall’s maternal grandmother, Mary Fossett, was a twelve-year-old free African American girl in Baltimore at the start of the Civil War. She was able to read chilling newspaper accounts of the fighting. She later became a schoolteacher.

Only one of Thurgood Marshall’s grandparents was enslaved when the Civil War broke out—the grandfather for whom he was named: Thoroughgood Marshall. Thoroughgood escaped slavery during the chaos that ensued when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. He went to Baltimore and blended in with the free African Americans. His race was listed in public records as mulatto. He went by the nickname Thorney Good, which he thought suited him better than Thoroughgood.

In Baltimore, Thorney Good worked as a waiter. Later he joined the army and went to Texas with the all-black Twenty-Fourth Regiment of the U.S. Cavalry. After being discharged in 1874, he returned to Baltimore and married a neighbor, Annie Robinson. Their first child, William Marshall, was Thurgood’s father.

Thorney Good and Annie opened the T. G. Marshall store on the corner of Dolphin and Division Streets, both bustling thoroughfares. They sold groceries and dry goods. It became one of the most prosperous stores in Old West Baltimore. Thorney Good and Annie thrived.

Thorney Good Marshall standing in front of the T. G. Marshall Grocery. This image originally appeared in a souvenir booklet for a black business convention in Baltimore in March 1908.

One day the electric company came to install a power pole on the sidewalk directly in front of the store. Annie was having none of it. She marched outside and told the workmen it was her sidewalk and she didn’t want a pole in the middle of it. She shooed them away. They returned with a court order allowing them to install a pole. Annie came outside with her kitchen chair, and placed it over the designated spot on the sidewalk. In the chair she sat. She refused to budge. This went on for days and weeks, Thurgood said, and finally Grandma Annie emerged as the victor of what may have been the first successful sit-down strike in Maryland.

Thurgood Marshall’s maternal grandparents, Isaiah Olive Branch Williams and Mary Fossett Williams, also owned a successful Baltimore store. Their store was located near a well-to-do white neighborhood. Not far away, low-income African Americans lived in a crowded alley. The door was left open to the basement of his home and store, Thurgood Marshall later explained, and the poor Negroes that lived in back had access to go down there and get wood, coal, and vegetables and stuff. And he would tell them, ‘Now, don’t take more than you need.’ Nobody ever did.

Thurgood—whose real name was Thoroughgood—was born on July 2, 1908 in Old West Baltimore. The neighborhood into which he was born was a vibrant, thriving community consisting of about sixty city blocks of row houses, grocery stores, tailor shops, movie houses, barber shops, pharmacies, with a doctor’s office on almost every block. Many of Thoroughgood’s aunts and uncles, as well as all four grandparents, were politically active and prominent members of the community.

Thurgood Marshall at the age of two. It was common in the early twentieth century to clothe little boys in dresses. June 2, 1910.

William and Norma Marshall, undated

Thurgood lived with his parents, William and Norma Marshall, and his older brother, William Aubrey, in a small apartment at 53 McChechen Street. His brother went by his middle name, Aubrey. Thurgood was two years old when his family moved to Harlem. His father hoped to find work on one of the New York railroads, or as a waiter in one of New York’s prestigious establishments. The Marshalls lived with his mother’s sister and brother-in-law, Denmedia and Clarence, who went by the nicknames Medi and Boots. William found work as a waiter for the New York Central Railroad.

Harlem at that time was rapidly