Thurgood Marshall (23 page)

Marshall’s difficult life at home made the rush and whirl of his work for the NAACP all the more attractive. Racial flare-ups increased in the big northern cities during the war, as blacks migrated north and clashed with working-class whites over housing and jobs. Marshall became the NAACP’s voice on race riots, one of the most difficult domestic situations during the war years.

Marshall had been in Detroit, home of the association’s largest chapter, to deliver a controversial speech, “Securing Democracy at Home,” at the NAACP Emergency War Conference. The June 1943 speech highlighted racial discrimination in the United States even as black Americans fought against fascism in Europe. Black soldiers and workers faced continuing bias in hiring for jobs, as well as in schools, in housing, and in transportation. The conference was blasted from the start by the
Detroit Daily News
and other critics who charged the NAACP with hurting the war effort when the country needed a united front against its foreign enemies.

Despite efforts by white political leaders to downplay racial problems, signs of simmering racial tensions existed all around. Two weeks after the NAACP conference, on Sunday night, June 20, rioting broke
out around Detroit, involving more than 100,000 people. The trouble started at Belle Island, a city-owned park, when blacks and whites began fighting.

Rioting spread as rumors flew downtown about what was happening at Belle Island. One rumor heard among whites was that a black man had raped a white girl. Among blacks a rumor spread that a white sailor had thrown a Negro woman and her baby into the lake at the park. Neither report was true. But all night and continuing until Tuesday morning, there were outbreaks of violence. Shots were fired throughout the city, people ran from place to place, and houses were firebombed from moving cars. The rioting stopped only after President Roosevelt authorized 2,500 federal soldiers to take control of the city.

Marshall and Walter White flew into Detroit on Thursday, as the city remained tense with soldiers and a curfew in place. The NAACP leaders took rooms at the YMCA and began to investigate the riot, which the
Detroit Daily News
blamed on the association’s conference. That meeting “sowed seeds of violence in the hearts of youths both colored and white,” wrote A. M. Smith in a
Daily News
article. “To contend that a strictly militant convention which ended with a mass meeting of 20,000 colored people had no influence on the fighting spirit of younger, irresponsible colored people is a denial of the laws of psychology.”
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Marshall responded that right-wingers who talked up segregation, not the NAACP, were responsible for dividing the races and creating the tense atmosphere in Detroit.

Michigan’s governor, eager to proclaim that he was fair to both races, agreed to support Marshall’s NAACP investigation into the cause of the riots. But even while working with the governor, Marshall was threatened by whites in Detroit who hired some black thugs to work him over. The governor provided a bodyguard with a “good-sized .38,” but Marshall still had violent run-ins with angry whites.

“I was going up one of the main Negro streets—this was about a day or so after [another outbreak of violence] happened, and a guy drove by, a white fellow,” Marshall said in an interview. “He said something. I said something back to him. And he pulled out a great big shotgun, and I was so glad there was a trooper standing there with a machine gun. And the cop said, ‘Now who is going to drop what?’ So this guy drops his shotgun.”
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In his report on the riot, which was circulated nationwide as an NAACP pamphlet, Marshall pointed at the police for sparking the violence:
“The trouble reached riot proportions because the police of Detroit once again enforced the law under an unequal hand,” he wrote. “They used ‘persuasion’ rather than firm action with white rioters while against Negroes they used the ultimate in force.… 25 of the 34 persons killed were Negroes. Of the 25 Negroes killed, 17 were killed by police.… 85 percent of persons arrested were Negroes.”
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Meanwhile, the nation’s military leaders paid little attention to the riots. They were too busy winning a war against Hitler. But that wall began to break down as black soldiers continued to bombard Marshall’s office with thousands of letters detailing daily insults and second-class treatment. The NAACP became the ideal tool for black soldiers who wanted to put pressure on white military commanders.

One of the early military cases Marshall handled involved three black soldiers from Camp Claiborne who were charged with raping a white woman. Although they were in the Army, the men were tried not in a military court but in a federal court in Louisiana. The case revolved around a strange story. A black sergeant and two black privates said the woman was a prostitute and they had paid her two dollars to have sex. But Alexandria, Louisiana, police later said the three black soldiers gave them signed confessions of rape.
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The soldiers were convicted and asked Marshall and the NAACP for help. They said the confessions were signed only because the police beat them and threatened to let white mobs lynch them. Marshall agreed to appeal the case after he became convinced that they were wrongly charged. More important, he found that they had been improperly tried in a federal district court when they should have been tried in either a military or a state court.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with Marshall’s appeal. The Supreme Court then confirmed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling and sent the case back to military court for retrial, at Camp Maxey, Texas. The men were again convicted and sentenced to be hanged. But further appeals saw the sentences reduced. The men were paroled after serving five years.
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Marshall quickly became involved in another military justice case in 1944, when fifty black sailors at Yerba Buena Island, near San Francisco, were charged with mutiny because they refused to load ammunition during time of war. The mutiny occurred just a few weeks after an explosion
at Port Chicago, a nearby naval depot. Over 300 men, mostly blacks, were killed when white officers began playing a deadly game. The officers placed bets on which group of black sailors was fastest at loading ammunition. They shouted and bullied the sailors to hurry, even instructing them to throw boxes of ammunition so they could win the bet. One case fell, triggering the deadly series of explosions. Reports about what happened spread quickly among black sailors, especially to Yerba Buena, where some of the survivors from Port Chicago were transferred.

Marshall lost his usually cool demeanor in this case. He was incensed that black soldiers were treated like animals for the pleasure of their officers. He flew out to California to begin work. “It was arranged for me to attend the trial on Saturday,” Marshall wrote to Walter White in New York. “Defense counsel are good and know what they are doing. Prosecutor is vicious and dumb.… Most of the accused testified that they told the lieutenant that they were willing to obey orders but that they were afraid of loading ammunition after the Port Chicago incident.… There is no evidence of mutiny and we should be able to beat this in the reviewing board.”
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Despite Marshall’s presence and a good team of defense lawyers, the men were found guilty of mutiny. Marshall could not believe it. He appealed and personally handled the case in Washington, D.C., before the Navy’s judge advocate general [JAG]. Standing in front of a formal military court, with all white officers in their dress uniforms, Marshall appealed for justice. “They obeyed all other orders and did everything they were requested to do,” he said in his oral presentation. “And the attitude was altogether perfect with the one exception of loading ammunition.… At best, it is refusal to obey an order.”
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The case gained attention all over the country. Even the White House got involved. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was alerted to the matter by Walter White, wrote to Navy Secretary James Forrestal asking that the black sailors be treated with compassion given that racism may have played a role in the incident. Forrestal, well aware of the First Lady’s power in the Roosevelt administration, cautiously said he would consider the matter.
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Two months later, in July 1945, the judge advocate general upheld the guilty verdict against the fifty men. A spokesman for the secretary of the Navy said: “The trials were conducted fairly and impartially.… Racial discrimination was guarded against.” Marshall immediately insisted on a meeting with the secretary of the Navy to argue that racial discrimination
was a factor. Forrestal refused to see him but allowed Marshall to “submit to me any memoranda in this matter which you may desire.”
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A subsequent Navy review of the trial found problems with “hearsay” evidence and suggested a retrial. Forrestal, however, was not interested in a second trial that would attract more publicity. And he didn’t want to deal with more political pressure from the likes of the First Lady. He handled the matter quietly and to Marshall’s satisfaction. “The conclusion of that case was extremely interesting, because there was no official notice of what happened,” Marshall said later. “The records of the final disposition were never entered, but I happen to know, from Secretary Forrestal himself, that all of the men were released, and put back onto active duty in the Pacific. But there’s no record in the Navy Department about it.”
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Thurgood Marshall was now the man people called when they needed legal help with racial issues. He was celebrated by blacks as their top criminal defense lawyer and a civil rights leader. The attorney general and politicians in Washington turned to him with civil rights questions. But he was not yet forty years old. As black war veterans came back to the United States with new energy, the nation was poised for the next stage in the civil rights struggle. The question for the NAACP was whether their young chief counsel had the ability to channel the growing momentum into a national legal fight against segregation in the postwar era. Could Thurgood Marshall, using his legal blueprint, construct an America that did not tolerate racism?

Lynch Mob for a Lawyer

O
N THE NIGHT OF
N
OVEMBER
18, 1946, Marshall was in a black sedan, driving out of the small farm town of Columbia, Tennessee. He had just finished representing two black men charged with rioting and attempted murder. This was the start of the forty-five-mile ride he and his fellow NAACP lawyers took back to Nashville every night because they feared they would be killed if they lay down to sleep in Columbia.

On that final trip from Columbia, at about 7:30 P.M., Marshall drove two lawyers, Z. Alexander Looby, Nashville’s most prominent black lawyer; Maurice Weaver, a white labor lawyer from Chattanooga; and a reporter for the Communist Party’s
Daily Worker
newspaper, over the bridge leading out of town. The sun had just gone down, and there were no streetlights. As Marshall drove his headlights picked up a gray car blocking his lane. On the shoulder of the road there was also a police car. Marshall pulled around them and picked up speed. In a few seconds, however, the police car came after him with its siren in full blast. Then another car, with men in civilian clothing, pulled in front of him, forcing Marshall to stop. The men, carrying blinding flashlights, told Marshall and his colleagues to get out of the car. They announced they had a warrant to search for illegal whiskey.

Marshall walked alongside the policemen as they searched to be sure they did not plant evidence. Ironically, the lawyers had tried to buy liquor from a bootlegger on their way through town, but the bootlegger
had been sold out. “I just sold the last two bottles to the judge,” he had told Marshall.

Unable to find any liquor in the car, the police had no reason to detain Marshall. But when they started to drive away, the cops began screaming and waving their arms, ordering Marshall to stop again. Marshall was getting angry, but he knew this was not the time to mouth off. This time the policemen ordered Marshall out and pushed him into their police car. They told him he was under arrest for drunken driving. The lawyer protested that he hadn’t had a drink in several days. The police told him to shut up, then ordered Looby and the others to drive away.

In the backseat of the police car, Marshall was squeezed between two deputies holding guns. They started back to town but then suddenly turned down a small dirt road that led to the secluded Duck River. Marshall, surrounded by four strange, armed, and unsmiling men, was grim and silent as the car drove into the dark woods. As sweat poured off him, he wondered how he had gotten into this situation, and how he was going to get out of it alive.

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Marshall had come to Columbia because the small Tennessee town was the scene of the first southern race riot after World War II. Dozens of people, black and white, exchanged gunfire in Columbia on the night of February 26, 1946, after a white store owner slapped the mother of a nineteen-year-old black navy veteran. James Stephenson, a tall, athletic boy, and his mother, Gladys, had gone into the Caster-Knott electrical appliance store at about ten o’clock that morning. The Stephensons were upset because the store’s repair shop had not fixed their radio—even though they had paid to have it repaired. The repairman, Billy Fleming, age twenty-eight, said that he had fixed it but that Gladys Stephenson had broken it again. When the woman argued that she had done nothing to the radio, Fleming slapped her and pushed her out of the store. The woman’s son became enraged and punched Fleming, knocking him through the store’s plate-glass window.
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