Information for this post is from Book 6 in my Making of America series, Thurgood Marshall.
Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His interest in law, and his awareness of racial injustice was awakened early (excerpts from my book)
Thurgood’s seat in one classroom was by a window giving him a view of the Baltimore police station. He watched as prisoners, mostly African American, were brought in by officers on the all-white police force. Thurgood knew from stories in the neighborhood that African American suspects who were questioned about crimes were often hit with a club or brass knuckles to get them to talk. Thurgood later explained that when the classroom windows were open, he could hear police officers beating people, saying, “Black boy, why don’t you just shut your mouth, you’re going to talk yourself into the electric chair.” One of Thurgood’s classmates later recalled that Thurgood was so riveted by what was happening at the police station that the teacher had to tell him to close the blinds.
After college, Marshall wanted to go to the University of Maryland Law School but was denied admission because of his race.
So he enrolled at Howard University just as Charles Houston took over as dean.
Burning inside Houston was pent-up rage at Jim Crow and the injustices suffered by African Americans. He trained his students to become social engineers:
Houston believed a lawyer was either a social engineer or a parasite. He told his students, “Men, you’ve got to be social engineers. We’ve got to turn this whole thing around. And the black man has got to do it; nobody’s going to do it for you.”Because everything a lawyer did was public, he demanded perfection. “The difference between law and other professions, like medicine,” Houston said, “is the doctors bury their mistakes, but the lawyer’s mistakes are made public. You’ve got to go out and compete with the other man, and you’ve got to be better than he is.”
Marshall graduated at the top of his law school class and became a civil rights lawyer. He successfully sued the University of Maryland, and forced them to admit black students. (He enjoyed that one).
One of his most harrowing experiences was an encounter with Tennessee police in 1946. He’d been summoned to Tennessee to defend 25 African Americans who had been wrongly charged with assault and attempted murder. He and a team of lawyers got the charges dropped for two of the defendants, and obtained not guilty verdicts for 21 of the 25
The two remaining were entitled to a new trial because of errors.
The amazing Professor Carol Anderson has a video about the incident.
The local police were enraged by the verdicts.
Marshall and his team left town the moment the court adjourned.
They were out of town on their way to Nashville when they realized they were being followed by a patrol car.
The police stopped them three times. The third time, Marshall was riding in the back seat. The police arrested him for drunk “driving.” They put him in the patrol car and took him back to Columbia.
The patrol car careened off the road toward a river. Marshall was sure they would kill him. His pals and the other lawyers, though, were following right behind the police car.
So the patrol car turned back to town and took Marshall to the magistrate.
“He doesn’t look drunk to me,” said the magistrate.
The Magistrate determined that Marshall wasn’t drunk and let him go. He met up with his buddies. A group of locals figured out how to smuggle the lawyers safely out of town.
Marshall is best known for being the “social engineer” behind Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that ended racial segregation in America and sparked the modern Civil Rights movement.
The women’s movement followed from (and by some accounts, arose from) the Civil Rights Movement, powered by black women (like Pauli Murray) who led the civil rights charge.
Marshall, jubilant with his success in Brown v Board, was unprepared for the backlash.
In August of 1957, Marshall was called to Little Rock for an emergency. Violence was about to erupt. The reason? Nine African American students planned to enroll in the all-white Central High School.
The Governor of Arkansas, Orval Eugene Faubus, said if any African American children tried to enter the school, “blood would run in the street.”
On the first day of class, when the first black student arrived, a mob surrounded her and shouted “Lynch her, lynch her!” She was saved by a white woman who shielded her until she could run away from the school for safety.
The mob attacked reporters and African Americans in the vicinity.
Journalists filmed the footage of the jeering crowds.
Nancy Maclean, in her book, Democracy In Chains, talks about how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education fueled a “libertarian” backlash. Today we are still riding the backlash from Brown v Board.
In 1967, LBJ appointed Marshall as the first African American Supreme Court justice.
Marshall lived long enough to watch the backlash gathering momentum. He watched as an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court unraveled much of his life’s work.
In memory of Thurgood Marshall, we must all become social engineers.