The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall

he closest Thurgood Marshall came to his own lynching was in Columbia, Tennessee, near the banks of the Duck River, a notorious repository of black bodies not far from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

On the night of Nov. 18, 1946, Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had just won the acquittal of “Rooster Bill” Pillow, a black man charged with rioting and attempted murder, and negotiated a lesser conviction for “Papa” Lloyd Kennedy, another black man charged with the same crimes. Months earlier, the first major post-World War II racial clash in the U.S. had broken out in Columbia after news spread of a fist fight between a white store clerk and a black veteran (who’d spoken up about the rude treatment his mother received after she complained of having to pay for a shoddy radio repair). Armed to protect themselves and the black section of town known as Mink Slide from white mob violence—the serviceman had been let out of jail and whisked out of Columbia for his own safety—Pillow and Kennedy were among more than 100 African-American men arrested following a standoff that left four white police officers with buckshot wounds.

Two of those arrested from Mink Slide were shot and killed by police while awaiting a bail hearing and, ultimately, 25 African-American men faced charges from rioting to attempted murder. For his safety and that of his small NAACP Legal Defense Fund team, Marshall had been driving the 50-plus miles back and forth from Nashville to the courthouse rather than staying in Columbia overnight. En route, they passed a typical “sundown town” warning sign each morning: N—GER READ AND RUN. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE. IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYWAY!

Marshall at the Supreme Court in 1955. —Getty Images

Amazingly, Marshall and his team would win acquittals in 23 of the 25 cases, some of which had been moved to a nearby county, from all-white juries. But they weren’t winning over everyone. By that evening in mid-November when Pillow was acquitted, some in the law-enforcement community, which often served as an extra-legal arm of the KKK—not to mention a lot of white Columbians—had had enough.

Just as the sedan Marshall was driving crossed over the Duck River Bridge on the return trip to Nashville, a car in the middle of the road blocked its path. Columbia police and highway patrol cars quickly surrounded Marshall’s vehicle with officers accusing Marshall of drunk driving. Marshall, who enjoyed a strong drink but was stone-cold sober at the time, was soon separated from the two attorneys and the journalist driving with him and ordered into the back seat of an unmarked vehicle.

Marshall was later saved only because fellow NAACP lawyer Alexander Looby whipped a U-turn after seeing the car carrying Marshall—supposedly headed to Columbia to face a judge for drunk driving—veer off the main road. Looby, with the other lawyer and journalist, both of whom were white, tracked the vehicle carrying Marshall down a dark dirt road and upset his abductor’s plans.

Marshall later recounted that he hadn’t been scared until the car he was in turned from the unpaved road toward the water, where, the NAACP lawyers had been told during the trials, they’d end up swinging from a tree. “The mob got me one night,” Marshall said in an interview years later, “and they were taking me down to the river where all of the white people were waiting to do a little bit of lynching.”

Eight years later, the Baltimore born-and-raised Marshall would become a household name—in white households—when he successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court and struck the death knell for the legal apartheid system of “separate but equal.” Marshall had long been a Joe Louis-type figure in black households by then. Across the Deep South, his arrival in town often marked the last, best hope for people of color in oppressed communities, many of whom would trek miles for a glimpse of the famous Negro lawyer in court. The answer to their prayers was recited with two words: “Thurgood’s coming.” And 21 years later—50 years ago this month—Marshall became the first African-American Supreme Court justice confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In the tumultuous 1960s, with cities erupting in police violence and riots, it was a moment akin to the election of President Barack Obama in the black community. “Every bit as important,” says Ben Jealous, the former head of the NAACP and current candidate for governor in Maryland, “because it came in 1967 in the midst of the civil-rights struggle and a lot of upheaval in this country.”

Today, Marshall’s legacy inevitably gets reduced to his victory in Brown v. Board of Education and his identification as the first black justice to serve on the Supreme Court. The Columbia, Tennessee, episode, and dozens of others like it, remain forgotten or unknown altogether. But in a legal career that spanned nearly sixty years, it was the two groundbreaking decades leading up to Brown v. Board of Education during which Marshall—as courageous, tenacious, and visionary an individual as this country has ever produced—changed America.

Traveling nearly 50,000 miles each year, mostly by train, often alone, his life threatened too many times to count, Marshall took Jim Crow apart plank by plank, state by state, federal ruling by federal ruling. Overseeing hundreds of cases as director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for 21 years, Marshall set precedent after precedent, not just in the arenas of education and criminal law, but across every sector of public life—voting, housing, transportation, equal pay, taxpayer-funded services, military justice, higher education, and the rights of minorities to serve on juries.

Three examples: Marshall helped establish that coerced confessions are not admissible in court; that states cannot legally enforce restrictions on the sale of homes to minorities; and that nonwhites cannot be barred from voting in primary elections, which, in many parts of the country, were the only votes that mattered.

Marshall finishing law school. —Afro-American Newspapers

“Before Thurgood Marshall, ‘All men are created equal’ were just [hollow] words,’” says Sherrilyn Ifill, who holds Marshall’s position today as the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “He gave them meaning.”

Thurgood Marshall grew up in historic West Baltimore, in the then-black middle-class neighborhood of Upton, in a red-brick, three-story Division Street rowhouse that still stands. Public School 103, the former “colored” elementary school he attended, stands, too, but has been long vacant and was badly damaged by fire last year. His family roots run deep here: Three of Marshall’s grandparents lived in Baltimore at the start of the Civil War. All were literate and became advocates for black equal rights.

One grandfather, Isaiah Olive Branch Williams, volunteered and served as a captain’s steward aboard the U.S.S. Santiago de Cuba during the Civil War, seeing combat against the Confederate navy. He later opened a Baltimore grocery store, which he operated as long as he lived, and joined with prominent local African Americans in a campaign against police brutality and discrimination in 1875.

Marshall’s other grandfather, Thorney Good Marshall, was the only one of his grandparents who was not free when the Civil War broke out. Not yet an adult, he escaped slavery in Virginia during the chaos and made his way to Baltimore, which had the largest population of free blacks in the country. Thorney Good Marshall joined the U.S. Cavalry after the war, heading west with one of the all-black regiments nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by Native Americans. He also later opened a successful grocery store in Baltimore. (Marshall’s name derives from a great-grandfather, “Thorough-good,” which he shortened to Thurgood in second grade, believing it too lengthy to write.)

Marshall’s father, Willie, worked as a B&O Railroad porter and as a waiter at the white-only country club on Gibson Island—and helped his son land work both as a porter and waiter, experiences that would leave an impression on the younger Marshall. His mother, Norma, graduated from what is now Coppin State University after her two sons were born and taught in a local “colored” elementary school.

It was from this lineage, and in the crucible of segregated West Baltimore—a Harlem-like mecca of political activism, achievement, and black culture (Marshall went to school with Cab Calloway)—that Marshall’s worldview took shape. For decades, national civil-rights leaders, including Marshall’s friend Clarence Mitchell Jr., the NAACP’s chief lobbyist in Washington during the 1960s, would rise from West Baltimore, which had been home to the forerunner of the NAACP, the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty, and then home to one of the strongest branches of the NAACP.

But as much as anything, it was the kitchen-table debates with his father about the Constitution, race relations, and current affairs that sparked Marshall’s interest in the law. His older brother Aubrey—not nearly as contentious—would go on to medical school and become a doctor. But Marshall, who liked to banter and enjoyed a good argument his whole life, engaged his father, a well-read, complicated, sometimes tough man without the benefit of a high-school education, for hours. Marshall later said his father, who demanded he prove every claim he made in heated discussions sometimes overheard by neighbors, “never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one.”

Marshall’s mother, it’s said, wanted him to become a dentist because it guaranteed a middle-class income. His grandmother, too, worried a black attorney was doomed to struggle in Baltimore—which Marshall did at first, unable to find someone who’d rent a downtown office to a “colored” professional. She taught him to cook before he left for college. “You can pick up all that other stuff later,” she told her grandson, “but I bet you never saw a jobless Negro cook.”

The lessons and concerns were not lost on Marshall. He loved good food, developed a capable touch in the kitchen, as well as in the courtroom, and never forgot where he came from. His mother also came around: She pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay his law-school entrance fees to Howard University. It proved a fortuitous landing place for Marshall, who had not bothered applying to the University of Maryland law school, located just a mile and a half from his home.

Maryland did not accept black students when Marshall graduated from Lincoln University in 1930 and it was with some rich irony that his first major civil rights victory—shortly after earning his law degree from Howard and passing the Maryland state bar—was putting an end to the school’s racist admission policy.

“Marshall could not have gone to a better school,” says Kurt Schmoke, the former Baltimore mayor, former Howard law dean, and current president of the University of Baltimore. “His dean, mentor, and teacher at Howard was Charles Hamilton Houston, who viewed the law school as the West Point of the civil-rights movement and he was training the foot soldiers.” Houston, notably, left Howard not long after Marshall’s graduation to become the first special counsel for the NAACP and soon hired Marshall. “If you asked Marshall, he’d tell you it was Houston’s strategy to defeat segregation by attacking ‘separate but equal,’” says Schmoke.