Thurgood Marshall (17 page)

Even with the job she had long coveted, Norma was still scraping by. She was paying every extra cent she had to the hospitals and doctors who cared for her Aubrey. After a long recuperation from the surgery on his lungs, Aubrey was moved to a sanitarium in Saranac, New York.

Norma’s struggle to pay her bills was common for the black middle class in Baltimore. She was lucky to have such a good job, but a black teacher made substantially less than a white teacher, sometimes as much as 40 percent less. Carl Murphy’s
Afro-American
had long complained about this disparity. But black teachers were reluctant to risk their jobs by
putting their names on a lawsuit challenging racially separate pay scales, especially during the Depression.

Thurgood Marshall knew about the difference between the pay that went to white teachers and the money his mother brought home every week. Just as he had been angered by the segregation at the University of Maryland Law School, he took it personally that his mother’s work was valued less than a white teacher’s. Even though he had moved to New York, Marshall frequently traveled back to Maryland, seeking black teachers to act as plaintiffs for NAACP suits against school boards to equalize teachers’ pay.

The white leaders of the school systems were aware of Marshall’s efforts and began taking steps to block a repeat of his victory in the
Murray
case. They intimidated or bought off several black teachers rumored to be involved in NAACP suits.

Marshall could have asked his mother to volunteer to have her name on a pay equity suit. But she worked in Baltimore city schools, which did not have as large a difference in pay as the state’s rural counties. In any case, she could not risk losing her job, and her son never put her in the awkward position of having to say yes or no.

He did finally find someone willing to take the gamble. William Gibbs, a principal in Montgomery County, allowed Marshall to use his name. White school officials in Montgomery had not engaged in the tactics used by some of the more southern Maryland counties to scare black teachers. Instead, county officials decided it would be better to avoid a lengthy trial. They had no interest in having Marshall lay out the inequality between school facilities for black and white children as part of his case. Before the July 1937 court date, Marshall won an out-of-court settlement in which Montgomery County agreed to a two-year plan for equalizing the pay between black and white teachers.

“The NAACP won a sudden and sensational victory in its suit to equalize teacher salaries in Montgomery County, Md.,” the
Afro-American
reported.
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The fight was not over quite yet, though.

Several months later, when Marshall traveled from New York to Annapolis, Maryland’s state capital, to deal with a similar suit that black school principal Walter Mills had filed against the Anne Arundel County school system, he ran into a fire wall of opposition from the white superintendent, George Fox. In Fox’s opinion Montgomery County had caved in, and he decided that he would make a stand. He wanted the case to go
to trial and was sure that he could defeat the NAACP and their brash young attorney, Thurgood Marshall.

Superintendent Fox argued in court that “his poorest white teacher was a better teacher than his best colored teacher.” An astounded Marshall did not respond to Fox’s insult. Instead he adopted a strategy of revealing Fox to be no judge of teaching talent and a simple racist. Marshall asked the superintendent why black teachers, and not white teachers, had to scrub classroom floors. The now indignant Fox testified with a vicious scowl “this had always been blacks’ work.”
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Marshall took his seat. It was risky, but Marshall in his charming, deferential way was trying to separate the white judge from the white superintendent by exposing Fox as a hateful buffoon.

The strategy worked. Judge W. Calvin Chesnut ruled for the black teachers. “The crucial question in this case,” he wrote in his decision, “is whether the very substantial differential between the salaries of white and colored teachers in Anne Arundel County is due to discrimination on account of race or color. I find as a fact from the testimony that it is.”
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The governor and the Maryland legislature took grudging note of Marshall’s winning streak on the equal pay issue and decided it would cost them money and time to continue this losing fight from county to county. The state passed a law setting a single standard for black and white teachers.

With his victory in Maryland, Marshall began to pursue equal pay cases in other states. He won most. But a few years later he lost a teacher pay case dealing with the Norfolk, Virginia, school system. Nonetheless, a federal appeals court overturned that decision. Norfolk’s all-white school board appealed to the Supreme Court. It was the first time a teachers’ pay case had risen to that level. The Supreme Court ruled by refusing to hear Norfolk’s appeal, effectively handing a golden victory to Marshall and the black teachers. After the Norfolk ruling was let stand, the NAACP used it as a precedent to insist on the ending of two pay scales for black and white teachers around the country.

That victory was a personal one for Marshall. The NAACP trumpeted the high court’s ruling as a triumph against racism and an endorsement of the dignity and ability of black teachers. But for the young lawyer behind the lawsuits, it was a victory for his mother and for the regular paycheck his family needed so badly.

With that win behind him, a more secure Marshall began to settle
into his work in the national office. The family turmoil that had almost kept him out of New York was now past. His brother was recuperating and was going to live. He and Buster were settled in the city. And the newly confident young lawyer from Baltimore was ready to take on some racial fights that went beyond his mother and Maryland. He was about to redefine America.

69 Fifth Avenue

R
IGHT FROM THE START
, Marshall was thrilled just to be in NAACP headquarters, at 69 Fifth Avenue in New York. He shared a tiny, second-floor office with Houston, but to Marshall it felt like he was at the center of the world.

He was twenty-eight years old and happy—happy to talk to the janitor, share cigarettes with the secretaries, and let his loud laugh ring through the offices when he told jokes. By the end of most days his shirt-tail was hanging out and his tie was loose.

He made quite a contrast to the forty-one-year-old Houston. Cement Pants was still the reserved, formal man he had been as a dean at Howard. He came in early, always in freshly pressed suits and heavily starched shirts. He almost never smiled, and when he spoke he addressed everyone as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” To the secretaries and even the NAACP board members, he was a taskmaster who insisted that every detail, every word, and every letter be perfect.

But Houston and Marshall, an odd couple to everyone who watched them in the office, had become a perfect pair. They had known each other for six years by now, and Houston was constantly impressed with Marshall’s ability to handle the most difficult tasks. Houston had even developed a delight in Marshall’s antics—his large hands moving as he told stories that usually ended with his big voice booming out in laughter. Marshall, for his part, still had eyes filled with awe for his former dean and saw the opportunity to work with him as the chance to play
with the biggest of the big boys. He was eager to learn and willing to live within the small budget Houston had to run the office.

Tearing down the walls of legal segregation was a mountain of a task. There were very few black lawyers in the country, little money to pay them, and in some areas of the South their work on civil rights cases could get them run out of business if not thrown out of town. Given that daunting challenge, Houston had taken the job as the NAACP’s lawyer with the idea of enlisting the best and bravest of the black lawyers around the country to form a legal assault team. “This is no star performance,” Houston wrote to Marshall and other black lawyers who were working on NAACP cases. “[I want to] make the movement self-perpetuating so that no loss of the head or any set of members will hamper progress.”
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Houston’s plan, based on Margold’s blueprint, was to have NAACP lawyers around the country file suits demanding separate and equal facilities for blacks. He expected that whites would not be able to pay to equalize the schools and judges would be forced to end segregation.

When Marshall arrived in October 1936, the NAACP was just blossoming into a major organization. At twenty-six years old, the group had gone through an infancy in which it was nurtured by mostly white social workers and liberal activists to fight lynching. Slowly it had flowered into the premier agency for battling Jim Crow discrimination. And with W.E.B. Du Bois editing
The Crisis
, the NAACP’s magazine, the group’s name had become a siren call to action for people willing to stand together to fight racism. Just joining the NAACP was an act of defiance for blacks in the South. And among intellectuals and activists in the North, association meetings had become the center for all strategy and organizing discussions about race in America.

Even as it grew, however, the NAACP remained heavily dependent on white philanthropists. The legal department’s money came from Charles Garland, a back-to-the-earth advocate who had inherited his fortune and decided to ease the guilt over his good luck by giving most of it away. The legal department’s budget during Marshall’s first year at the headquarters was only $10,000. Charles Houston was paid $4,000 annually, and after travel and legal expenses there was only $2,400 left for Marshall’s salary.

Although he was low on money, Marshall felt rich with the excitement of his new job. Buster, by contrast, not only didn’t have any money but she had to get used to a new city and living with a new set of relatives.

A few weeks after their move to New York, Aunt Medi found Buster and Thurgood an inexpensive room on 149th Street. Near their new Harlem apartment Marshall soon ran into an old Lincoln University buddy, Monroe Dowling. The prideful, ambitious Dowling had a reputation for being a great card player because of his ability as a mathematician. When he ran into Marshall he was working as an accountant for New York State after having earned his master’s degree in business from Harvard. His wife, Helen, quickly became best friends with Buster, and on most nights the couples ate dinner at the Dowlings’ place, played cards, and drank.
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Dowling frequently got bootleg liquor from underworld friends. After leaving Harvard, he had become the accountant for one of Harlem’s biggest illegal numbers operators. That led to friendships with people who had easy access to whiskey. Marshall and Dowling, both proud and well educated, had a close relationship, although Dowling had little tolerance for Marshall’s antics and his grand stories. “Every once in a while he’d say something and we’d disagree about it,” Dowling said. “I’d say, ‘Thurgood, you know damn good and well that’s a lie,’ and he’d acknowledge it and say, ‘You have to lie sometimes.’ ”

At the NAACP offices, with Houston often gone on trips, Marshall was left within earshot of Walter White. The ebullient and energetic NAACP leader began enlisting Marshall in a more extensive role in the antilynching campaign. He had him track antilynching legislation and lobby congressmen.

The NAACP was accustomed to a hostile reception in Washington. The capital was a southern town, and the association was viewed as a radical northern group that stirred up trouble. In the 1930s segregationist Democrats in the House had even passed a bill to erect a monument honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis. It was going to be difficult for a young black lawyer to make much of a difference with legislators in that atmosphere.

In a summary prepared on the status of the antilynching bill in April 1937, Marshall wrote that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Hatton W. Summers had “boasted for more than four years that he would not report favorably any anti-lynching bill.”
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But Marshall persisted. He began to work around Summers by lobbying other congressmen for a tough “NAACP” bill to halt lynchings.

Ironically, the lone black member of the House, Rep. Arthur Mitchell, proposed a different bill. His bill was not as strong as the
NAACP’s proposal for punishing people who took part in mob action. Charles Houston denounced it as impotent and ineffective. Mitchell dismissed Houston’s statements and claimed that the NAACP was “not seeking to aid the race but intend[ing] only to feather the nest of its officials at the expense of the black public.” He condemned the NAACP as a dishonest group, which “had deteriorated into a bunch of communists.”
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Marshall had spent several weeks in Washington working to gain support for the NAACP’s bill. Surprisingly, Mitchell’s bill was defeated, and thanks to Marshall’s diligent work the stronger NAACP proposal passed in the House. But the Senate version of the bill died without a vote. Marshall, Houston, and White were left empty-handed for all their efforts. Still, the NAACP had raised the issue to national prominence and put pressure on federal and state officials to stop lynchings.