Thurgood Marshall (41 page)

The fast pace of Marshall’s life, the speeches and planning for more arguments before the Supreme Court, hid the troubles in his private life. Buster was now constantly ill, but Thurgood was not in a position to stay
home and comfort her. In fact, he was often out of touch with what she was going through. By November, she was hospitalized. Her illness had now dragged on for over a year. She looked painfully thin and was weak. Buster’s mother, Maude Jones, came from Steelton, Pennsylvania, and moved into the apartment. Her sister and father also were regularly there, leaving Thurgood to feel more and more distant from his wife.

Just before Thanksgiving, Buster told Thurgood she had cancer. He had to go from frustration with his crumbling marriage to the reality that his wife was dying. His reaction was to embrace Buster and try to find the best doctors. Marshall could not understand why no one, especially Buster, had told him about the cancer. On her insistence even the doctors had kept the illness a secret from him until she was so sick that they had no choice but to tell him.

Despite his infidelities and constantly being away from home, Thurgood loved Buster. She had been the most constant figure in his life since he came to New York. And he felt responsible for the chill that had come between them. The fact that he was among the last to know she was dying was a reminder of how little intimacy remained between the college sweethearts. But the full emotional force of her impending death hit him when Buster asked to spend her last weeks at home.

“He took her illness and her death very, very hard,” said Alice Stovall, Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP. “She was in the [Fifth Avenue Flower] hospital—I guess it was around Thanksgiving time—and she wanted to come home. Monroe Dowling—his wife, Helen, was a nurse. And Helen more or less lived in the apartment day and night.”

That Christmas was bittersweet for Marshall. The readers of the
Afro-American
voted him “Man of the Year.” At home, however, Buster continued to deteriorate. There were other problems, too. He had never had a strong relationship with Buster’s mother. Now, with the illness at a critical stage, Maude Jones became the dominant player in his house. Friends said the mother-in-law “shunned” Marshall, leaving him emotionally racked.
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After the holidays Thurgood stopped working to be with Buster during her last days. “He stayed by her bedside constantly,” said Mildred Byrd, the wife of Thurgood’s close friend Dan Byrd. “Thurgood said, when he realized she was dying, he just came off like ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ He was praying while she was dying.”
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Thurgood’s caring for Buster took a heavy toll on him. He had never been one to visit sick people, much less change bedpans and kiss cheeks
hollowed from disease. “My first wife, who died of cancer, I watched her for three months. That took three months out of me,” he later said.
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Vivien “Buster” Marshall died on her birthday, February 11. She was forty-four years old and had been married to Thurgood for twenty-five years. Buster’s death threw Thurgood into an emotional plunge that got worse as he tried to deal with her family over funeral preparations. First, Buster’s mother brought in friends, who took clothes, silverware, blankets, and even wedding presents out of the apartment, claiming that they belonged to Buster and that the family wanted them. Monroe Dowling watched as one of the family’s friends “scurried to hide jewelry so I wouldn’t see it.” Dowling said when Marshall went to the bank to begin funeral preparations, he found that Buster’s mother had taken most of the money out of the account.

“After she died there were a lot of disagreements about who got the fur coat and who got the jewelry,” said Claude Connor, Buster’s nephew. “Almost immediately after the funeral, Thurgood gave back jewelry, rings, and things that were heirlooms. He also gave my mother Buster’s mink stole, for example. Now my grandmother, on the other hand, was a matriarch and a bitch too. She was very, very upset because Thurgood gave his mother Buster’s beaver coat.”
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The funeral service was held at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, the place of worship for the city’s black bourgeois. William Hastie, Channing Tobias, and Manhattan borough president Hulan Jack came. Father Shelton Hale Bishop and others credited Buster as “the other half of Thurgood Marshall.” Papers quoted her as once telling reporters: “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change any part of it. I have wanted most, all these years, to help him make good.”
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Monroe Dowling arranged for the casket and family to occupy several cars of a train to Philadelphia, where Buster was to be buried. On the train Thurgood and Maude got into a loud argument over a set of pearls Thurgood had brought Buster from his trip to Japan. Maude had taken the pearls. The two would never speak again. After the casket was put in the ground, Thurgood literally turned his back on Buster’s family. He rode home to New York alone; in Harlem he found the apartment stripped of furniture. The sink was filled with dirty dishes Buster’s family had left behind.

“He was in a condition of very considerable depression,” Jack Greenberg later told an interviewer. “He was morose and unhappy for a long time after that.… He lost a lot of weight, in fact so much that he looked
like a skeleton, and he was really in very bad shape. So he really didn’t function for a period of maybe several years in his job.”
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Marshall took a long vacation for the first time. He went to Mexico for a few weeks. While he was there Roy Wilkins sent him a telegram informing him that Walter White had died. Marshall’s name immediately surfaced as a candidate to replace White. “There are many who would like to see attorney Marshall in the number one spot,” reported the
Pittsburgh Courier
.
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But Marshall, still depressed, had little desire for fund-raising and other bureaucratic tasks. And he trusted Roy Wilkins. He was confident that Wilkins, unlike White, would leave all legal issues in his hands. Consequently, Marshall did nothing to encourage people who wanted him to run the NAACP. Wilkins got the job.

There had been so many changes—Buster’s death, White’s death, and Wilkins’s promotion. And in the last few years, most of Marshall’s male mentors had gone, too. Uncle Fearless, Charles Houston, and Marshall’s father had all died in recent years. He was now struggling for balance. “He needed somebody definitely, because between Buster’s many miscarriages and losing Buster, he was just no good,” said Mildred Byrd.

He found solid footing by going back to work. Fortunately, there was a lot to do. Only two months after Buster’s death, on April 12, 1955, Marshall stood before the Supreme Court and accepted the gradualist approach. He offered local school districts up to two years to fully integrate.

The scene in the courtroom was also different. John W. Davis, who had argued against Marshall in the South Carolina case, had died a few weeks earlier. The new attorneys for South Carolina and the other southern states argued that school integration could not be done under deadline pressure. They contended that “there are forces at play in this situation over which the [school officials] have no control,” specifically the possibility of a violent white backlash.

Lindsay Almond, the attorney general of Virginia, rose to say that while Marshall had praised the people of the South as “law-abiding,” the NAACP lawyer had asked the Court to “press this crown of thorns upon our brow and hold the hemlock up to our lips.” Southern lawyers also cited the Prohibition era, when the government had unsuccessfully tried to ban liquor, as evidence of the federal government’s inability to force people to accept unpopular laws.

Marshall began his rebuttal with an emotional outburst: “I am
shocked that anyone would put the right of Negroes to equal participation in our system of education on a par with the right to take a drink of whiskey.” He continued, in high thunder, to rebuke southern lawyers for always speaking to the Court about the damage school integration would do to southern traditions. “You have heard references to one state’s ‘greatest and most cherished heritage,’ and when you look for it, you find that greatest and most cherished heritage is to segregate colored people.”

In defiant tones Marshall said that he was only asking for equality. Black children would be expected to compete with white children with no special consideration. Teachers would be free to put “dumb colored children with dumb white children and smart colored children with smart white children.” Marshall finished by challenging the Court to set a deadline of September 1956 for complete school integration.
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Behind the scenes there were stories circulating that Chief Justice Earl Warren was under pressure from the White House to give the southern schools all the time they wanted for desegregation. Eisenhower was up for reelection in 1956 and trying to avoid any crisis that could damage his political future. Marshall began hearing that Eisenhower was leaning on Warren. Ralph Bunche, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations and a black man, told Marshall that at a White House dinner he had seen Eisenhower corner Warren and begin an intense discussion. Bunche said he overheard Eisenhower use the words “school cases” and “segregated schools.” At that point the stout, gray-haired Warren pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and stared at the president. “I thought I would never have to say this to you, but now I find it necessary to say to you specifically—you mind your own business and I’ll mind mine.”

Marshall was incensed when he heard the story. He nursed his anger for years and later told an interviewer that he considered Eisenhower’s effort to lobby Warren “the most despicable job that any president has done.”
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However, less than two months after the oral arguments, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against setting any deadline for school boards to desegregate. The Court said local federal judges would hold school districts only to the requirement that they desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The ruling was right in line with Eisenhower’s proposal. Marshall suspected that the power of the presidency had unfairly prevailed.

Marshall was at the Court when the ruling was announced, and he immediately flew back to New York to attend a press conference with Roy Wilkins. His disappointment was evident in his long, tired face. The somber atmosphere in the NAACP’s office was a stark contrast to the laughter and joyful noise that had followed the 1954 decision. Marshall tried to make the best of the ruling. He emphasized that the Court remained committed to ending school segregation. There had been no change of mind or heart, he said. And the justices had made it clear that indefinite delays would not be tolerated. Finally, he said he personally would fight any school district that intentionally stalled: “It will not take a hundred years, that I can guarantee,” Marshall said.

At the news conference only one NAACP board member, Judge Hubert Delaney, openly expressed disappointment with the ruling. He made critical remarks about the decision, albeit mildly, but Wilkins quickly stepped in to tell reporters that the Court’s failure to set a deadline was offset by the justices’ unbending support for school integration.

Even as Wilkins put on a good face, the NAACP legal staff was in the background grousing. They had wanted a clear-cut victory of the sort they had won in 1954. “I think we had the view that by winning
Brown
we were going to end the whole era of discrimination,” Bob Carter later remembered. “We thought that the law would be obeyed and blacks would count.”
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When the reporters left, Marshall, Wilkins, and Delaney went into the privacy of Marshall’s office and let off steam. Marshall disparaged the phrase “deliberate speed.” He found it a dangerous euphemism, a nice name for delaying justice until it was convenient and comfortable for whites to accommodate the rights of black citizens. Some of the staff lawyers came in and began to discuss where that phrase had originated and what it meant. Finally, one of the secretaries brought in a dictionary. “I am looking at
Webster’s
,” she said, “and I’m looking at
deliberate
, and the first word of similarity for
deliberate
is
slow
. Which means ‘slow speed.’ ” The lawyers in the office nodded their heads, but hearing those words triggered something in Marshall’s mind—the phrase could have come from only one source—Justice Felix Frankfurter.

During the first round of arguments on school desegregation, Frankfurter had been one of Marshall’s toughest critics from the bench. He had grilled him on whether schools had the right to separate students, such as his hypothetical case of blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students,
when teachers felt separation was appropriate. Now Marshall’s intuition told him that it was Frankfurter, again, who was undermining his argument.

He called Paul Freund, a former Frankfurter student who was still very close to the justice. “He knew it—he said right away that it was Felix,” Marshall later recounted with a laugh. Then Marshall added: “Integration hasn’t happened yet, that’s how slow ‘deliberate speed’ is.”

After two days of privately griping about the decision, Marshall began to accept the setback. In a telephone conversation with Carl Murphy, he said on second thought maybe the decision wasn’t so bad: “You can say what you want,” he bellowed over the phone, “but those white crackers are going to get tired of having Negro lawyers beating ’em every day in court. They’re going to get tired of it.”
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To get the staff—and himself—out of a funk, Marshall began work on pressuring school boards throughout the South to desegregate. When any board dragged its feet, the NAACP was ready to take them to federal court and even back to the Supreme Court. “If there is a difficult situation,” Marshall told
Time
magazine, “and a school board says, ‘This will take us six years,’ we may well say, alright let’s take six years. But if the board says, ‘We’ll never sit down and talk our problems over with Nigras,’ then we’ll say, let’s go to court as soon as we can.”
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