Authors: Juan Williams
S
HOUTING INTO A PAY PHONE
in a hallway at the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall announced the big victory to NAACP officials in New York. He had grabbed the golden ring, the prize that had been sought so long by Nathan Margold, by Charles Houston, by the people contributing their coins in the branches all over the country, and here it was—the end of school segregation. Elated by the unanimous ruling, he stopped only to allow reporters to snap pictures of him on the steps of the Court before hopping on the next flight to New York, racing the news that was spreading around the country like electricity. “We were ecstatic,” remembered Bob Carter. “It was a very heady day.”
At the NAACP’s office Marshall walked into a crowded press conference being held by Walter White. The NAACP executive secretary, prancing like a rooster, told the reporters that his next plan was to attack segregation in housing and transportation. Marshall shifted from elation to anger as he watched White taking all the credit for the Supreme Court’s ruling. He was literally being pushed to the rear as White stood up front to make pronouncements about the NAACP’s great victory over segregation. Toward the end of the press conference, in an uncharacteristic outburst, Marshall shouted, “What law school did you graduate from, Mr. White?” Despite the tension, everyone laughed it off as a joke.
“Walter was carrying on as if this was his achievement, this was his
victory, as if he prepared the case, got the plaintiffs, wrote the briefs, even went to court,” recalled Herbert Hill. “I watched Thurgood, and I said to myself, ‘How much longer is Thurgood going to take this stuff?’ I knew he was going to start to blow up.”
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Despite that ego battle, the sounds of popping champagne corks and loud laughter filled the rooms. Roy Wilkins, Marshall, and the entire staff, from the receptionists to the board members, were celebrating the decision with reporters and friends.
“We’d always had parties, drunken parties, after winning, but that was the best,” Marshall said later, a smile on his face. “Yeah, I thought I was going to win but not unanimously.” John W Davis was the first to get through on the telephone. He congratulated Marshall on the victory but threw in a word of caution: “I hope you realize that the only way you can win a case is somebody has to lose.” When Marshall got off the phone, several people pulled into a circle around him to find out what Davis had said.
As was typical, Marshall was empathetic with Davis. Sounding almost apologetic about Davis’s defeat, Marshall shook his head, a look of condolence washing over him, and said, “I did, I beat him, but you can’t name many people who did.”
As the party spun into the night, Marshall and several of the NAACP staff went to his favorite restaurant, the Blue Ribbon, for food and drinks. Ken Clark was in the group, and Marshall stopped the festivities at one point, less to honor Clark than to tease Clark’s critics. “Thurgood was his usual ebullient self,” Clark recalled. After toasting the psychologist’s work on the case, Marshall looked across the table at some of the lawyers who had fought his use of the social science data. “Now, apologize,” he told them,
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as the table broke into laughter.
People at the party began saying the NAACP’s work was done and it was just a matter of time before all the nation’s schools were integrated. Marshall, who shifted into a more pensive mood as the clock passed midnight, made a prophetic remark: “I don’t want any of you to fool yourselves, it’s just begun, the fight has just begun.”
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The party continued until after 1:00
A.M
. Buster was not in the group; she had been ill for months now, sometimes bedridden. She had visited doctors and been diagnosed with colds, flu, and even pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lungs. In her absence Marshall had begun to hang around with one of the NAACP’s secretaries, Cecelia [Cissy] Suyat, born in Hawaii of Filipino parents. It was at this dinner at
the Blue Ribbon that many of his colleagues first noticed what appeared to be a special relationship between the pair.
“Thurgood was very discreet about his affairs,” said John A. Davis, a Lincoln professor who had advised the NAACP on the school segregation suit. “There was never an example of it except at the victory celebration. He was leaving with Cissy.… That was the first time I’d ever seen any indication that she wasn’t just another worker there.”
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The next morning’s newspapers were filled with stories on the Supreme Court’s ruling. Marshall was on the front page of
The New York Times
, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, shaking hands with his fellow lawyers George Hayes and James Nabrit. The
Times
noted that the decision amounted to a death knell for separate but equal. But the court had delayed until the next term arguments on how to begin integrating the schools. In a second article on the front page, the
Times
wrote that southern leaders were incensed by the ruling, and their outrage was “tempered” only by the Court’s decision not to set forth “the time and terms for ending segregation in the schools.”
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Southern politicians uniformly blasted the Court’s decision. “The South will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court,” said Sen. James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi. Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia said the ruling “strikes down the rights of the states, as guaranteed by the constitution, to direct their most vital local affairs.” Georgia’s governor, Herman Talmadge, said, “There will never be mixed schools while I am governor.” He said if school integration became a reality, it would be “a step toward national suicide.”
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The backlash from the South intrigued Marshall. He did not think the southern politicians could stop school integration, but he was surprised by the psychological distress being expressed by some whites over the notion of racial equality.
He came into the office one day and told NAACP staffers that he had heard a revealing story: Three southern white guys got together, Marshall said, and began discussing the
Brown
decision. Two of them were upset over the call for school integration. But the third man said he didn’t agree. In a booming, theatrical voice, Marshall mimicked the shock of the two segregationists: “You mean you are for integration?” The lone dissenter shook his head and said no. “I’m not for integration—I’m for slavery.” Marshall looked around the room, an intense expression on his face, and said the story was a warning about what was to come. “There’s a whole lot to that story,” Marshall said. “A whole lot.”
But in black America there was little of Marshall’s foreboding of a coming backlash. Harlem’s
Amsterdam News
wrote, “The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” The ruling was far bigger than a decision about schools, the paper wrote, it was the end of all segregation. The day after the Supreme Court ruled, the
Chicago Defender
wrote that “neither the atomic bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy.”
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President Eisenhower, meanwhile, had little to say publicly about the ruling other than he expected all states to comply. Privately, however, he was fuming. “I personally think that the decision was wrong,” Eisenhower told a staffer a few weeks later.
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The president also told Herbert Brownell, his attorney general, that he strongly disagreed with the decision. At one point a temperamental Eisenhower told Brownell that since Chief Justice Warren and the Supreme Court had made the ruling, “let them enforce it.” Brownell sympathized with his president’s position. Eisenhower was caught between a decision he had not made and a public uproar that created political problems nationwide. “Any president would have the same reaction when they had a hot potato handed them by the judiciary,” Brownell later said. Nonetheless he pointedly told Eisenhower that it was his duty to uphold the decisions of the Supreme Court.
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Marshall, however, had no idea about the president’s private expressions. And despite angry statements from southern politicians who pledged to resist integration, he pressed ahead. By the Saturday following the Court’s Monday decision, he was meeting with his team of lawyers in Atlanta. At the end of the two-day conference, they issued instructions for black parents to petition local school boards for integration “without delay.” Marshall pledged the national NAACP’s help to battle recalcitrant school boards. “We know there has to be a reasonable time to adjust and the question is the definition of what constitutes reasonable time,” Marshall said to reporters. “Our people are ready to take part in conferences, but we are determined to attain this goal without compromise of principles.”
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Marshall continued celebrating the decision in speeches and appearances around the country. In one of the many laudatory profiles of Marshall after the May 17 ruling, the
Pittsburgh Courier
portrayed him as a man flying high above any complaints or criticism: “I’m in a hurry,” Marshall told the
Courier
. “I want to put myself out of business. I want to get
things to a point where there won’t be an NAACP—just a National Association for the Advancement of People.”
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Marshall also began to talk openly about his willingness to sacrifice the jobs black teachers had in segregated schools as well as the future of historically black colleges for his integrationist ideal. “What’s going to happen to the ‘Negro College’?” he asked in one of his many speeches around this time. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s going to cheerfully drop the word ‘Negro.’ ” But Marshall cautioned that if these schools did not quickly measure up to the white schools, they could die off. The impact of the
Brown
ruling, he told audiences, would be to force black people to compete with white schools and white students. “And you are going to have to measure up.” Black colleges and the United Negro College Fund, which raised money in the name of helping black students, “will have to find another sales talk.”
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Marshall’s unyielding integrationist worldview had few critics in the NAACP or the black press. At this point there were no Carter Wesleys or Marjorie McKenzies launching attacks at him for sacrificing black institutions for the promise of integration. He was universally celebrated by black Americans. At Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, the school’s president, called him the “greatest constitutional lawyer in history” and gave him an honorary degree. At the NAACP’s forty-fifth annual convention in June, he was honored before a jubilant crowd of 700. As he entered to speak, the
Afro-American
reported, “to add dignity to the occasion, the little people abandoned their comfortable shirt sleeves and … put on their coats” on a heavily humid Texas summer day.
Marshall electrified the crowd as he again outlined his view of a color-blind, fully integrated America. Every American should be judged on “individual merit rather than to be limited by such irrelevant considerations as race and color,” he said. And he optimistically added that schools should be desegregated “in no event, later than September of 1955.”
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* * *
By the fall of 1954, having articulated his dream of complete racial integration in the United States, Marshall was back in his New York office working on a brief for the Supreme Court on a timetable for beginning desegregation in the five cases under
Brown
. Normally, after establishing that a person’s rights were being violated, the Court would immediately order that the violation be stopped. In the schools cases that would have
meant immediate school integration. But the high court decided to allow local school districts to end segregation gradually.
Marshall was caught between his respect for the Court and his disagreement with its failure to order immediate desegregation. Bill Coleman, who had advised him during the first part of the case, sent him a letter suggesting that he not demand immediate integration. Instead, Coleman’s idea was to have Marshall propose to the high court that the school boards be allowed only a year to submit plans that “would permit the gradual effective transition” to integration.
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With that letter in the forefront of his thinking, Marshall made a strategic decision to go along with the gradualist approach. The NAACP’s brief, submitted in November 1954, asked only that integration plans go into effect by 1955—with complete school integration to be fully achieved no later than the fall of 1956.
The southern states, meanwhile, responded with briefs asking the Court to avoid
any
deadline. Their argument contended it was best to leave the process up to local school districts. The Eisenhower administration submitted a friend-of-the-court brief that proposed no delay be tolerated, but also asked that no firm date be set for integration. President Eisenhower personally read the brief and, treating it as a political document, took the unusual step of rewriting portions to reflect his go-slow approach.
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Even though Eisenhower failed to endorse the NAACP’s proposal for a strict deadline, Marshall made no objection. He did not want to risk publicly criticizing the president or the brief. But in a telephone conversation with
Afro
publisher Carl Murphy, Marshall said, “Between you and me, it stinks.” But Marshall told Murphy a fight between the NAACP and the Eisenhower administration would delight segregationists: “That’s just what the other boys would love.” Marshall’s solution was to “find and pick out a couple of paragraphs and say I agree with them.”
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Meanwhile, resistance to school integration was building among southern politicians to the point of petty vindictiveness. When Marshall appeared that fall as the featured guest on the NBC series
Youth Wants to Know
, the show was blacked out in Georgia; the NBC affiliate substituted a taped speech by the state’s segregationist governor, Herman Talmadge.