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When President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, the New York Times opined that "apart from the symbolism, Mr. Marshall brings to the Court a wealth of practical experience as a brilliant, forceful advocate." Unfortunately for Marshall, all we remember today is the symbolism—the Court's "first Negro." This is surprising given Marshall's near-quarter century on the high court. How did the symbol obscure the substance of the man Justice William J. Brennan called "the central figure in this nation's struggle to eliminate institutional racism"? Two well-researched biographies, plowing much of the same ground but for different readerships, attempt to recover Marshall's pre-Court reputation as "Jim Crow Buster."
Juan Williams, Washington Post correspondent and author of the critically acclaimed civil-rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, presents Marshall's life in almost bite-sized chapters. Written for a popular audience, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary will instruct while it fascinates even the casual reader. Williams devotes most of his biography to Marshall's 27-year association with the NAACP. Perhaps deservedly so, for what Americans know least about Marshall's legal career is precisely what needs most to be recovered.
Born July 2, 1908, Thoroughgood Marshall went on to live in every decade of the twentieth century. In Williams's account, Marshall's 84-year life span intersects with a veritable "Who's Who" of black America: one finds him carousing with Cab Calloway (of "Minnie the Moocher" fame) at Baltimore's Colored High and Training School; defending an all-white faculty at Lincoln University from the barbs of a worldly-wise "returning student" named Langston Hughes; flirting with the "angels" at Father Divine's peace mission during his Howard Law School days; playing late-night poker with Duke Ellington on the eve of his "first big case" (Smith v. Allwright, a Texas "white primary" case); helping Jackie Robinson sort through his financial problems; the list goes on. When he died on January 24, 1993, this great-grandson of a slave had not only helped secure the rights of blacks in the United States but had flown to Korea to defend them from discriminatory courts-martial, and even helped write a new constitution for postcolonial Kenya.
"Thurgood," as the second-grader shortened his name, was the second of two sons raised by fiercely independent parents: William, a Pullman dining car porter, and Norma, a Baltimore schoolteacher. Williams recounts that by the time Thurgood entered Douglass Colored High, he had a reputation "as a cut-up and prankster." Still, many a kitchen argument with his cantankerous father prepared him to captain the varsity debate team while only a freshman. When he later enrolled at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University, known as "the Black Princeton," Marshall would again make the varsity debate team as a fresh man and hone the rhetorical skills he would wield as the NAACP's legal barnstormer through segregated America.
Racism made its deepest impression upon Marshall when he chose the law over dentistry as his profession. After graduating from Lincoln University with honors in 1930, the recently wed Marshall returned to Baltimore with high hopes but little money. He planned on attending law school at the University of Maryland, where the tuition was cheap, but local lawyers in formed him that only two blacks had ever graduated from the law school, and none since segregation laws took hold across the South in the 1890s. To spare himself the indignity of a rejection, Marshall never applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but he re solved to learn the law in spite of Jim Crow's initial rebuff to his ambition.
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