Thurgood Marshall (43 page)

But when Marshall returned to New York in January, he was stunned to find that the Montgomery bus boycott was national news. Nixon had initially hoped for a one-day boycott, in which blacks would stay off the buses, walking or taking taxicabs to work. But with the support of a black women’s group and black ministers, the boycott had caught fire, and by the time Marshall got back to the office it was in its second month.

“We were advising them of the legal steps to be made,” Marshall recalled in an interview. “We were proceeding when all of a sudden this preacher started jumping out of there. We’d never heard of him before. I knew his father before in Atlanta, but I’d never heard of him until then.”
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The “preacher” was twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. King had been in Montgomery just over a year. A graduate of Morehouse College and Crozer Seminary, the five-foot-seven-inch minister was a dapper dresser even as a college student. He was also the son of a well-known
Atlanta minister, Martin Luther “Daddy” King, of the large Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Young King had been finishing his Ph.D. at Boston University when the most prominent black church in Montgomery made the surprising decision to hire him. King had visited and delivered a stirring sermon in his gripping bass voice. The vestry decided to take a gamble on the upstart, and he arrived in the fall of 1954, still working to finish his doctorate in theology.

Even before King arrived in Montgomery, a small group of civil rights activists had been petitioning to stop rude treatment of blacks on the city’s buses. The effort had barely made a ripple until a well-respected forty-three-year-old black woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Rosa Parks’s arrest led the local NAACP and the Women’s Political Council to activate plans for a bus boycott campaign. E. D. Nixon phoned several local black ministers, including King, to ask for their support. King was initially hesitant, but after much urging, he agreed to attend an organizing meeting at his church. At that meeting King was convinced to take a leading role in the growing mass movement.

“We are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked around by the brutal feet of oppression,” a fiery King told a loud meeting on a Monday night. “If [we] will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ ”
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King’s riveting speech focused heavily on nonviolence, a concept he had learned at Crozer while studying the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent opposition to British colonial rule in the 1940s.

At the NAACP’s offices in New York, Wilkins and Marshall found themselves reacting to this homegrown movement, which they did not start and over which they had little control. Ironically, critics in Alabama and around the nation were blaming the NAACP for fomenting the bus boycott and the lawsuit against segregation on the buses. In a
New Yorker
article Marshall, the man identified as the NAACP ringleader, conceded that he often did not feel in control of the fast-changing movement: “[I’m] supposed to be masterminding this whole campaign.… That’s funny because our people in the south are actually way ahead of us on this thing.”
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Nixon’s request for legal help had been granted almost as a casual favor, and now the New York office found itself running to catch up with a train that had left the station. In the aftermath of the
Brown
decision, NAACP officials faced growing impatience among black people for an end to segregation everywhere.

While Marshall made supportive comments about the boycott, he had deep reservations. In his heart he viewed the bus boycott and King’s speeches as street theater that did not come close to equaling the main event—the NAACP’s effort to get the courts to end legal segregation. Marshall’s negative view of King’s rhetoric and mass protests came out of his experiences investigating riots. He had seen black communities in Columbia, Tennessee, Harlem, and Detroit torn apart by white mobs. That experience led him to fear that organized resistance by black activists inevitably would lead to a white backlash, and “wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”

Even before King began his advocacy of nonviolent protest, Marshall had been approached by students who wanted him to shift from law books and move toward street demonstrations. At Howard Law School, Harris Wofford (a white student who later became a U.S. senator) gave Marshall a paper on Gandhi’s nonviolent strategies and urged him to get the NAACP to use the same approach against segregationists.

A few weeks later Marshall sent a handwritten letter to Wofford telling him that Gandhi’s ideas were a bad fit for an American civil rights movement. Marshall wrote that he “couldn’t imagine a worse prescription,” and that it “would devastate and undermine the progress that had been made,” Wofford remembered. Marshall told him he was trying to get people to obey the laws and the courts, even if they disliked them. “For American Negroes or American Civil Rights people, black or white, to start disobeying laws on grounds that it was against their conscience would set it all back,” Marshall wrote, according to Wofford.
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Despite Marshall’s private misgivings, he acted as if he were in full support of King’s protest. He had already assigned Carter to help King with legal advice. The lone objection Marshall voiced openly to the King-led boycott was that King was only asking for polite treatment of blacks on segregated buses and not demanding an end to the Jim Crow practice. The LDF had filed a transportation suit demanding full integration on buses in Columbia, South Carolina, and it would be damaging, Marshall said, for the NAACP to endorse a suit in Alabama that stepped back from that demand.

Marshall pressured Fred Gray, the attorney for the Montgomery bus boycott, to file a suit on the exact lines the NAACP was pursuing in South Carolina. Gray worried that Marshall might simply shut off legal support if he did not go along with demands that their suit insist on integrated seating. Gray also realized that the suit was going to have to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and he needed Marshall’s expertise to win. When in April 1956 the Supreme Court ruled in Marshall’s favor in the South Carolina bus case, Gray knew that he had made the right decision.

While Marshall was able to control Gray and the legal maneuvering in Montgomery, he grew irritated at the front-page attention being showered on King. Having won the
Brown
decision only two years earlier, Marshall saw King as a man who had yet to make a significant mark on American life. Despite his misgivings, Marshall knew it would be damaging to reveal a split among black leaders in the civil rights movement. On the national TV program
Youth Wants to Know
that spring, Marshall praised King for his refusal to use violence in the bus boycott. King’s house had been bombed, and Marshall said King and the NAACP were in agreement that there should be no violent response to such segregationist attacks.

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While King kept the bus boycott going and raised money nationwide, segregationists started their backlash. In March 1956 a hundred members of Congress signed a “Southern Manifesto” written by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, denouncing any attempt to force integration on the South. The manifesto stirred Confederate pride. The manifesto had little real impact on the NAACP, but other battles in the State of Alabama were of genuine concern to Marshall.

When the twenty-six-year-old Autherine Lucy had tried to integrate the University of Alabama, she was trapped in a classroom building by a violent mob until the state police rescued her. Marshall had won a Supreme Court case in 1955 giving Lucy the right to study at the university, but the mob made his legal victory meaningless by throwing rocks and eggs, and menacing her. The university suspended her, claiming that the threat of violence was too great for the school to handle.

Marshall and one of the leading figures on his New York staff, Constance Baker Mottley, quickly traveled to Alabama to argue before federal judges that Lucy was not the source of the problem and should be
readmitted. Local black leaders surrounded Motley and Marshall with armed bodyguards out of fear that the famous lawyers would be attacked. Marshall worked and slept in the home of Arthur Shores, the NAACP’s lawyer in Birmingham; outside guards armed with machine guns patrolled the sidewalk. The fear in Montgomery’s black community was particularly high because a few weeks earlier, King’s house had been fire-bombed.

Despite the precautions an attempt was made on Marshall’s life. He and a group of lawyers were at Shores’s house when a car careened onto the sidewalk, with smoke from a lit bomb pouring out of one window. A man tried to throw the explosive, but it went off in his hand, blowing off part of his arm. The car drove away, leaving the injured man behind. Marshall and the lawyers rushed out as the guards stood over the screaming man. Towels and bandages were applied, even while some cursed the bomber. An ambulance eventually took the man away.
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Back in court, the federal judge ruled that the university had to end Lucy’s suspension. But in a surprise move the university trustees voted to expel her. They charged that Lucy’s criticism of the school amounted to defamation and merited her expulsion. Lucy had said in court that there was a conspiracy to keep her out of the all-white school.

Marshall finally decided that he could not win the case. The board was within its rights to expel her, he concluded, even if the heart of the matter had nothing to do with defamation and everything to do with keeping the university’s student body completely white. Marshall was convinced any suit against the school would end up costing the NAACP a lot of money and put the traumatized Lucy under tremendous stress for a weak case that would ultimately fail.
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The pressure was building on Marshall. As far back as the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing schools to desegregate with “all deliberate speed,” he was being torn between the racist backlash among segregationists and the increasing militance among black Americans. Even in 1955 the forces pushing and pulling on Marshall prompted a friend to tell
Life
magazine that the usually easygoing lawyer was becoming uptight and was like “a tea kettle about to explode.” He told friends he could no longer sit in any meeting where he could not chain-smoke and revealed that he stopped drinking during Lent “to prove to myself that I don’t need liquor.”
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Marshall was also still grappling with grief over Buster’s death. Jack Greenberg, one of his assistants, later said he felt Marshall continued to suffer through a depression.

The ray of sunshine Marshall found during this turbulent time was his relationship with his new wife. He and Cissy still lived in the apartment Thurgood had shared with Buster, but the place had been revamped with new furnishings and Thurgood was home more than he had been in the past. Cissy had shown no signs of possible miscarriage, and they were more and more excited at the prospect of having a baby. By March, Thurgood and Cissy made it public. The
Afro-American
reported on the front page that “the Thurgood Marshalls are expecting.”
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Marshall initially told reporters the baby was not expected until October. He was still leery of negative public reaction to his interracial marriage, although there had been a minimum of unfavorable gossip so far. But if anyone counted the months between the marriage and the baby’s birth, Marshall feared, a new round of gossip might ensue. But he scaled back his estimate when he told the
Pittsburgh Courier
that the baby was expected in September.
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The boy was born August 12 at 12:23
A.M
. Monroe Dowling remembered that the night Thurgood Marshall, Jr., was born, he and Marshall “pitched a drunk” in the Marshalls’ home to celebrate.

Thurgood Jr. was christened at St. Philip’s, and the godparents included Helen Dowling, Monroe’s wife; Judge William Hastie; and Roy Wilkins. Thurgood’s lifelong desire for a child, and a male child, had finally been fulfilled. His deep insecurity over whether the loss of one of his testicles had somehow led to Buster’s many miscarriages was now put to rest.

The new mother also had to deal with her Filipino family, who were still concerned over her marriage to a black man. Now twenty-nine years old and having worked for the NAACP for many years, Cissy did not see Thurgood as another black man. He was a star to her, the man who had made her life. But her father, Juan Suyat, was concerned that the baby’s skin not be too dark. “Her family was not particularly fond of blacks,” said Monroe Dowling, who with his wife was helping the Marshalls with the baby. “Cissy was very independent—she didn’t give a damn.”

With a newborn baby and pressure coming down on him at the office, Marshall was glad to have his mother living in New York. She had initially moved from Baltimore to help take care of her sister Medi, who was living alone and suffering from diabetes. Marshall would sometimes go to visit his mother and aunt, and they would often come to see the
baby and cook dinner. It was the first time in many years that Marshall had an extended family near him.

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At the office Marshall’s troubles showed no signs of letting up. The Montgomery bus boycott was a half year old, and Marshall’s legal team was still fighting the issue in the courts. To make matters worse, King was now being sued by the city for promoting the boycott. The NAACP was representing him at no cost, but there were growing strains in the group’s relationship with him.

At the NAACP’s annual convention in San Francisco that summer, King had been invited to speak and was treated as a celebrity. When he was asked by reporters if his nonviolent method could be used to desegregate schools, he said yes. Marshall considered the comment disrespectful of his legal efforts. He barely kept his emotions in check when he told reporters that King was over his head when it came to school desegregation, and they wrote that Marshall viewed King as a “boy on a man’s errand.”
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