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29 December 2008
Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights
Victor in 29 Supreme Court civil rights cases later serves on high court
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
“No other American did more to lead our country out of the wilderness of segregation than Thurgood Marshall,” said his fellow Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell. Born in 1908 and educated in a segregated Baltimore, Maryland, secondary school, Marshall attended Lincoln University, “the first institution founded anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for youth of African descent.” Knowing he would be turned away by the whites-only University of Maryland Law School, Marshall enrolled at Howard Law School, enduring the long commute from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. His mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. Marshall excelled at his studies, graduated first in his class of 1933, and earned the respect of Charles Hamilton Houston.
Working closely with Houston, Marshall prevailed in the Murray v. Pearson case described previously, then accepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP. In 1938, he succeeded Houston as head of the organization’s legal committee. In 1940, he became the first chief of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
It was a wise choice. Marshall possessed a unique combination of skills. He was, as United Press International later concluded,
… an outstanding tactician with exceptional attention to detail, a tenacious ability to focus on a goal — and a deep voice that often was termed the loudest in the room. He also possessed a charm so extraordinary that even the most intransigent southern segregationist sheriff could not resist his stories and jokes.
Armed with this potent combination of likeability and skill, Thurgood Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-white Southern jury to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge. On other occasions, he escaped only narrowly the beatings — or worse — risked by every assertive African American in the Jim Crow South.
It was under Marshall that the Houston-devised gradualist legal strategy at last succeeded. Case by case, Marshall and the NAACP attorneys chipped away at the legal pillars upholding segregation. In all, Marshall won an astounding 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His legal victories included the following:
• Smith v. Allwright (1944), a Supreme Court decision barring the whites-only primary elections in which political parties chose their general election candidates. According to his biographer, Juan Williams, Marshall considered the case his most important triumph: “The segregationists would [demand that (the candidates) support segregation to capture their party’s nomination], and by the time the blacks and Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, got to vote in the general election, they were just voting for one segregationist or the other; they didn’t have a choice.”
• Morgan v. Virginia (1946), where Marshall obtained a Supreme Court ruling barring segregation in interstate bus transportation. In a later case, Boynton v. Virginia (1960), Marshall persuaded the court to order desegregation of bus terminals and other facilities made available to interstate passengers. These cases led to the Freedom Ride movement of the 1960s.
• In Patton v. Mississippi (1947), the Supreme Court accepted Marshall’s argument that juries from which African Americans had been systematically excluded could not convict African-American defendants.
• In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Marshall persuaded the Supreme Court that state courts could not constitutionally prevent the sale of real property to blacks, even if that property was covered by a racially restrictive covenant. These covenants were a legal tactic commonly used to prevent homeowners from selling their properties to blacks, Jews, and other minorities.
The NAACP team’s victories had established that the courts would overturn separate-but-equal arrangements where facilities were in fact not equal. It was a real achievement, but not the best tool to effect broad change, especially with regard to education. Poor African Americans in each of the hundreds of school districts in the South could hardly be expected to litigate the comparative merits of segregated black and white schools. Only a direct ruling against segregation itself could at one stroke eliminate disparities like those in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where per pupil expenditures in 1949-1950 averaged $179 for white students and only $43 for blacks. Marshall would succeed in getting this direct ruling with the “case of the century,” Brown v. Board of Education.
