Thurgood Marshall (44 page)

Marshall, however, did not enter into public jousting with King. During his own speech to the convention, Marshall praised the bus boycott and the “unblemished forthright Christian leadership of men like Rev. M. L. King, Rev. Abernathy and E. D. Nixon.” Even as he dismissed King’s protest tactics in private, Marshall told the delegates that the NAACP had to evaluate King’s nonviolent technique to see “to what extent it can be used in addition to our other means of protest.”
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Behind the scenes, however, the NAACP leadership had more serious problems with King. One official, Herbert Hill, remembered that Marshall and Wilkins saw King as taking money away from the NAACP. “The major resentment, and on this point I heard Roy many times, was that King would raise vast sums of money, and that there was never any accounting,” said Hill. When Wilkins asked King to account for his spending, King reacted as if he was being pestered about trivia. “Roy would be furious,” Hill said. “We heard about a meeting in Los Angeles where they collected something like $20,000. It was put in a suitcase. King leaves with a suitcase full of money. Never accounted for, never reported.”

While the NAACP was critical of King, his supporters were often highly critical of the NAACP. They called it an old, stuck-in-the-mud group for its ponderous, legal approach to every issue and its failure to
embrace the spirit of mass movement that was electrifying the nation. But King still asked the NAACP for legal advice, bail money, and funding. “While King’s people were shitting on the NAACP,” said Hill, “Roy and Thurgood took a very principled position—the struggle always came first.”
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So, despite the bad feelings, Marshall continued to handle the lawsuit demanding integration on Montgomery’s bus lines. He and Bob Carter wrote the petition to the Supreme Court asking that a lower court’s ruling striking down bus segregation be allowed to stand. The city’s appeal to the Supreme Court was based on a states’ rights argument; it was a matter of local custom for blacks and whites to sit separately.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s appeal and ruled in favor of the NAACP and King’s bus boycott. The court wrote no opinion in the case
[Gayle v. Browder]
but simply affirmed a lower court’s ruling in supporting King. In Montgomery, King told reporters: “The universe is on the side of justice.”
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The boycott’s goals had been achieved through the courts, although national attention had been focused on King and the people who stayed off the buses.

King became the first passenger to ride an integrated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The 382-day boycott was over, and King was the hero in the press. But Marshall felt that King had stolen his glory because the preacher would still have been marching and boycotting if not for Marshall’s victory in the high court.

Marshall’s troubles with King symbolized the growing distance between the NAACP lawyer and a burgeoning, activist, civil rights movement often focused on the energy of young people. This increasing alienation from the movement brought Marshall closer to his former nemesis, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Machiavellian Marshall

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T AGE FORTY-EIGHT
Thurgood Marshall had become a pure political player. His idealism had shrunk as he took steps to protect his turf and power within the NAACP as well as to nurture relationships that offered him entrée into mainstream politics and power. By 1956 he was juggling three potentially explosive political balls—his ties to the FBI, his fierce distaste for Communists, and battles within the NAACP, especially with his top assistant, Bob Carter.

The first intrigue began in early 1956. J. Edgar Hoover was growing increasingly worried that race relations in the United States were about to erupt in violence. In January, when Marshall became involved with Martin Luther King’s bus boycott, Hoover had sent a memo to President Eisenhower’s special assistant, Dillon Anderson, expressing concern over a possible war between the races. The FBI director told the White House official that his field agents were reporting dangerously high levels of friction between the NAACP and its opponents in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling and the start of the bus boycott.

“Tension is mounting to the point where the two forces may clash,” he wrote. “The potential for violence not only is present but is daily increasing in intensity.” Hoover specifically pointed to the growing number of White Citizens Councils, groups of segregationists who organized to use economic and political pressure against the NAACP’s drive for school integration. And on the other side, Hoover noted, there was a
strong black “cult” in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam—“a violently anti-white, anti–United States government group … [which has] embarked on a tour of the south to spread their teaching.”

The Communists were taking advantage of this racial strife, Hoover reported, to “propagandize” its efforts and advance its own cause. “The communist party has seized upon every possible incident,” he explained. “In addition the party has increased efforts to infiltrate and influence the NAACP.” He said the Communists had tried to exploit the Emmitt Till murder case to open doors with the Chicago branch of the NAACP and had held a secret conference in New York with unnamed “NAACP leaders.”
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Inside the national office Marshall was in fact worried that militants and Communists were making inroads into the branches and contributing to growing criticism of him. The Montgomery bus boycott caught Marshall off guard and increased his discomfort with the rising power of independent black activists. But he was also worried that the growing infatuation with mass movements among black Americans would open the door to more Communist activity. He had no doubt that was a deadly trap for Americans trying to gain their rights in the rabidly anti-Communist politics of the mid-1950s.

During this time Marshall began an intense, unpublicized political dance with the director of the FBI. The first short, awkward steps in the minuet occurred when Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a fearless black voice demanding equal rights in Mississippi, gave a spit and fury speech to an NAACP meeting at the Sharp Street Methodist Church in Baltimore. Howard harshly criticized J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI: “It’s getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killings of Negroes in the south.… ” FBI agents in Baltimore sent reports on the speech to Hoover, who wrote a long letter of complaint to Marshall—not the association’s head, Roy Wilkins.
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Almost from his first days at the NAACP, Marshall had been vocal about the FBI’s failure to protect black people in the South. In 1946 Marshall had taken his concerns to the Justice Department, writing to the attorney general that Hoover’s FBI was too cozy with white southern sheriffs. After Walter White’s death, however, Marshall became the NAACP official whom Hoover knew best. So when Dr. Howard criticized the FBI, Hoover chose to complain to Marshall. Since Howard had used the NAACP as “a forum” to criticize the bureau, Hoover said he was taking “the liberty of writing you to set the record straight.”
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Given the sometimes barbed comments that had passed between them, Hoover was pleased by Marshall’s response. The NAACP attorney wrote back that Howard had wrongly criticized the FBI with “misstatements of facts.” And in a real stunner Marshall said he knew the FBI had done a “thorough and complete job” in three recent cases where blacks were murdered in Mississippi. “We do feel a responsibility … during these very tense times … to try and keep the record straight,” he said.
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Marshall’s alliance with the FBI was as strategic as any of his courtroom maneuvers. He had disdain for the Communists, the radicals, even Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent tactics. Marshall viewed the Communists as a particularly strong threat to the NAACP, a harmful extension of the militants and loudmouths who were coming to the forefront of the movement. Marshall was also concerned that the FBI might mix him up with the radicals and make him a target for their wiretaps and investigations. His new alliance with Hoover was protection, Marshall hoped, against FBI interference with his ongoing legal work to defeat segregation.

The strategy worked. Hoover was so pleased that in a follow-up note he told Marshall to let him know whenever the NAACP had concerns about “improper actions” of FBI agents in the South. Marshall could be assured that such charges would “receive my urgent and vigorous personal attention.”
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Hoover also had an agenda. He desperately wanted inside information from the NAACP, and Marshall was now the key to Hoover’s access to the top ranks of the civil rights movement.

Marshall and Hoover continued to correspond. Meanwhile, Dr. Howard continued to charge the FBI with racist behavior. In January 1956 Marshall wrote, almost apologetically, to Hoover that the black Mississippi physician was a “rugged individualist” who could not be controlled by the NAACP. He emphasized that Dr. Howard had no official connection with the association.
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Two weeks later Marshall took advantage of his newly cooperative relationship with Hoover to gain unprecedented access to the FBI. Marshall had conversations with Lou Nichols, the assistant director of the bureau. Marshall said he wanted to meet with Hoover to find out which civil rights groups were Communist fronts. That information, he explained, could be used to keep communists out of an upcoming civil rights conference. Nichols later wrote in a memo to another FBI official that the NAACP lawyer confided to him that “the communist party’s effort to get in the NAACP was the single most worrisome issue.”
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While
Marshall was gravely concerned about the Communist influence on the civil rights group, he was also playing a role to put himself in the FBI’s confidence.

Hoover personally signed off on the meeting. Nichols was instructed to give Marshall information on Communist activities inside civil rights groups, but only from “public source material.” Marshall met with Nichols, with Hoover sticking his head in the door for a brief hello. Nichols gave Marshall the information he wanted, and the two talked generally about Howard and other agitators in the NAACP.

Afterward Marshall went to lunch at the Palace restaurant in downtown Washington and ran into an FBI agent and a Justice Department lawyer. He warned them to be prepared for a resolution at the upcoming conference that would criticize the FBI for failing to jail violent white racists. Marshall, according to an FBI memo on the lunch, said he was “not sympathetic” to people like Dr. Howard who were making such attacks.
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Marshall continued to use similar tactics to distance himself from NAACP members he viewed as radicals. In the spring of 1956, he placed another telephone call to ask Hoover about the latest FBI reports of Communist infiltration.

Lou Nichols wrote in a memo that Marshall wanted information he could use to disparage Communist sympathizers during his keynote speech to the NAACP’s 1956 convention. This was the same convention at which Marshall had aimed barbs at Martin Luther King after he claimed nonviolent protests and boycotts could have desegregated schools. “He stated that no one would know where he got the information and he wondered if I could be of any help to him,” Nichols wrote after his conversation with Marshall. “I think that it might be to our advantage to give him a little guidance if we can on the basis of public source and well-documented material.”
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Marshall recalled the meeting vividly years later: “I remember one time I had a conversation with Lou Nichols about something very important,” he said, still refusing to divulge exactly what they talked about. “In the FBI office, in some of these secure offices, I met him,” Marshall said. “I sat down. He tossed a yellow pad over to me. I said, ‘You must be kidding. I know you guys don’t allow copying.’ He said, ‘These are instructions from the boss. Make your copies and use ’em.’ And I did. But I still ain’t gonna tell ya what it was. We were helping each other. It was something he wanted and there was something I wanted.”

Marshall’s notes on the FBI’s yellow pad apparently focused on new tactics being used by Communists to infiltrate the NAACP. Those tactics included creating fronts—labor organizations that then approached the NAACP and its branches for help with fighting discrimination. On the basis of the notes he took at FBI headquarters, Marshall sounded the alarm at the 1956 convention:

“[Communists] are all sweetness and light these days, trying to persuade us to join their front organizations, the names of which are constantly changing,” he told the crowd at San Francisco. “For example, the National Negro Labor Council, which we exposed and condemned last year, has been disbanded and now they are working up other organizations such as the National Association of Trade Unionists. Whatever the name, whatever the avowed purpose, we know them for what they are. We know their master plan for Negroes is ‘self-determination,’ which simply means that all Negroes are to be set aside in a separate 49th state.… At this convention we must continue to keep our membership abreast of new tactics of infiltration. We must continue to make it clear that there is no place in this organization for communists or those who follow the communist line.”