An American Revolutionary

Last summer I had the time to read Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary by Juan Williams, almost 500 pages jam-packed with history, stories and critical information of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. This weekend we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. and his heroic struggle to right the wrongs of segregation, but today I choose to speak of Thurgood Marshall, the architect of the laws that brought some of King's struggles to fruition.

I learned about racism from my father when he praised and celebrated President Truman's order to desegregate the armed services. He was hard pressed to convince me that they were ever segregated. It was a different era, but I grew up in an integrated neighborhood, went to integrated schools and attended an integrated Unitarian church. Even so, my parents raised some eyebrows by taking care of foster children regardless of race. I was not naive; I knew about the racial divide.

I was in high school in 1954, the time of the Supreme Court's historic Brown vs Board of Education decision. I was elated and probably idealistic enough to believe that it would lead to the end of all racial inequities. However, two experiences while participating in Liberal Religious Youth Conferences in 1955-56 put me in touch with the realities. A group of us went to a public swimming pool in Indiana, the one black in our group was refused admission, so we all left. While at a similar conference at Guilford College, an integrated Quaker school in North Carolina, we were given an orientation by the president about the risks that might come our way if we left the campus. Any integrated group was seen by many townspeople as rabble rousers. I knew by then that the North was not free of racial hostilities, but we did not have laws that openly supported segregation. Of course by now I know that unwritten or unspoken laws can be equally unjust.

In writing about Thurgood Marshall, I realize I have chosen a subject worthy of more than one sermon. I urge you to read Juan Williams book for its stories, information and insights into a complex person who will remain an essential figure in American life.

Thurgood Marshall was born into a middle class Baltimore family in 1908. He was surrounded by a family who from the beginning taught him to treat everyone with respect, but never to let any insult go by without standing up for himself. His father told him, "If somebody calls you 'nigger,' take it up right then and there." One afternoon while delivering hats for the local hat and dress store, he went to board the trolley and accidentally pushed a white woman. He was pulled by the collar by a white man who called him a "nigger;" Marshall started swinging; the hats were trampled; Marshall was then arrested. He called the owner of the store from the precinct station to tell him about the fracas and the damage. The police believed Mr. Schaln, the owner, who vouched that Marshall had indeed been provoked. He said it was all worth it if you were right, telling Marshall, "You did the right thing." Juan Williams comments that "the fight was an early sign of a defiant streak that would be prominent throughout Marshall's life." It had its roots in his proud, politically active black middle class family that owned a successful business and lived in an integrated neighborhood. He was accustomed to living, playing and working with whites.

In 1933, fresh out of law school in the midst of the depression, he turned down an invitation to go to Harvard Law School for advanced studies. Instead he began his own practice in Baltimore. Slowly he began to make a name for himself as the NAACP began to be call on him to help with cases, often criss-crossing the U.S. By 1938, he held the lead chair at the NAACP's national legal office in New York. He began to view the idea of civil rights as theater and to see the possibilities of using dramatic situations to the NAACP's advantage and to make his mark in the public eye as the leader of their legal office. In 1944 he successfully argued before the Supreme Court that white-only elections were unconstitutional. Even at the end of his life, Marshall bubbled that "this victory stood as the greatest one of his career."

At this point in his career, Marshall was better known for his defense of criminals than for his attack on Jim Crow. "He stood as a living, breathing shield for black people against the lynch mob as well as the death sentence," writes Williams.

During the war years the NAACP received volumes of complaints from soldiers about unfair assignments, phoney charges that led to dishonorable discharges, and the military's failure to give honors and medals to black soldiers. During the war Marshall was called on time and time again to defend black military personnel against false accusations.

In 1946, Marshall called a meeting in Atlanta with lawyers from the South who had worked on local NAACP issues. The meetings stirred his conviction that the schools should be integrated. These lawyers argued to bombard eleven southern states and D.C. with simultaneous law suits demanding equal educational facilities for existing Jim Crow schools. There was disagreement among NAACP members, some siding with Marshall and others wanting to pursue separate but equal schools. The issue still divides!

Marshall was successful in 1950 when he argued before the Supreme Court and won the case granting a candidate, Mr. Sweat, a black, the right to attend The University of Texas Law School. This case was in the vanguard of the 1954 court decision, Brown vs The Board of Education.

By 1950, Thurgood Marshall had won ten victories before the Supreme Court. His reputation was golden.

The Sweat case even emboldened Marshall to call a conference of attorneys across the country to draw up plans to integrate all public schools.

The most radical idea coming out of this meeting was the decision to use a controversial sociological method to show the damage segregation did to black Americans. Marshall proposed to use Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist as an expert. Clark and his wife had conducted tests on black children using black and white dolls. The results, as we know, were powerful. Black children always said white dolls were prettier, smarter and better at everything they did. The planning of the revolt, as it was called, was long and tedious. Once during the ordeal Clark asked Marshall why he was so quiet. Marshall replied "I'm tired of trying to save the white man's soul."

As the time of the decision drew near, Marshall was confident he could win three of the five cases: South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware; he expected defeat for Kansas and D.C. In Kansas schools were almost equal and D.C. was a federal territory. William Rehnquist, now Chief Justice, was then a clerk at the Court and wrote, "To the argument for keeping schools segregated, that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional rights....while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are . . . I realize that it is unpopular and unhumanitarian . . . it is right and should be affirmed from the Plessy vs Ferguson case that enabled separate but equal to become law."

On the road in 1954, Marshall told an audience, "Come hell or high water we are going to be free by '63. On Freedom's 100th anniversary we will be free as we should have been in 1863. The soul of the white man is in the hands of the Negro, because we are the only ones who with blood, sweat and tears got the money to go to court to get the rights others enjoy as a matter of course."

Marshall was called to Washington on May 16, 1954. Chief Justice Warren read the opinion, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place." Marshall is quoted as saying "It is the greatest victory we ever had. The thing that is gratifying to me is that is was unanimous and on our side."

Called to help with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, he soon discovered that the boycott had a life of its own. The NAACP was running to catch a train that had already left the station. "Marshall made supportive comments about the boycott, but 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 legal end of segregation," writes Juan Williams.

Despite his private misgivings, he acted as if he were in full support. Marshall was torn between fighting the resurgent racist backlash by segregationists in court, and finding himself the target of an increasing militance among black Americans.

Marshall's transitions from the NAACP to being the first black American to serve the federal bench in 1961, to becoming the nation's first black solicitor general in 1965, to being named Supreme Court Justice in 1967 would be extremely difficult.

While serving on the high court he became more and more isolated but had some surprising victories when he championed a more expansive view of civil rights. In spite of some setbacks, Antonin Scalia would write "Marshall could be a pervasive force by just sitting there . . . He wouldn't have had to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race."

In Marshall's mind, the key to the courts future actions on cases dealing with race was the 14th amendment, requiring equal protection and due process. He argued vehemently against the death penalty as well.

He retired from the court in 1991 in poor health and dispirited. His close friend Justice Brennan had suffered a stroke. He felt that the younger generation did not value or appreciate the slow but steady legal gains he had championed.

On January 21, 1993, Thurgood Marshall died. Williams writes, "A line of mourners stretched down the white marble steps of the Supreme Court into the street and around the corner. It was bitterly cold, 20 degrees below zero and getting colder, but the mourners kept coming. Eventually, the Chief Justice ordered that the building be kept open all night. With 4000 in attendance, Marshall was eulogized. Chief Justice Rehnquist spoke and quoted the words above the entrance to the Court "Equal justice under the law." In slow tones he went on "Surely no one individual did more to make these works a reality than Thurgood Marshall." Vernon Jordan said "We thank you Thurgood . . . your voice is stilled but your message lives. You have altered America irrevocably forever." Justice O'Connor, who had become a close friend, said in a quivering voice, "At the end of his life Marshall had no idea that people would go out of their way to remember him." All the affection that poured out at his death was in sharp contrast to the indifferent public reception he had received for most of his time on the high court.

In his lifetime, Marshall saw a nation go from complete segregation through halting attempts at integration to occasional resegregation. When he died, two thirds of black children were back in mostly segregated schools.

Marshall believed that full integration is a necessary precondition for assuring equal rights. He saw integration as the only possible way to ensure equality. It protected the minorities and the poor from being isolated and left behind.

So here we are at the beginning of a new century. Have we kept the Brown vs Board of Education decision alive and well? The verdict is still out in my mind. So many other factors have entered the landscape, poverty, joblessness, family instability, insufficient recognition of the problem's depth that it is hard to assess where we are and where we are going. We are able to talk about justice, equity and compassion, but we are less able to take the walk to put them into action.

In 1992, Marshall accepted The American Bar Association's highest award. From his wheel chair in a raspy voice, he read from this poem of Langston Hughes, a classmate from his days at Lincoln University, an all black school in Pennsylvania.

O let America be America again --
The land that never has been yet --
And yet must be - the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine
The poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose flow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again . . .
O, yes,
I say it plain
America was never America to me,
And yet, I swear this oath --
America will be!

As Marshall himself then said, Amen.

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, by Juan Williams, Time books, Random House.

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