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Marshall found his calling and eventually his revenge under the new vice dean at Howard University Law School, the legendary Charles Hamilton Houston. A Phi Beta Kappa student at Amherst College and the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Houston arrived at Howard in 1929 determined to revamp its struggling evening law program into a "West Point of Negro Leadership." Its primary purpose: to train a cadre of civil-rights lawyers who would act as "social engineers," paving the way for full integration of blacks into the mainstream of American life. In only his second year, the domineering and perfectionist Houston turned a "dummy's retreat" into a full-time law school ac credited by the "lily white" American Bar Association. As Marshall remembered it, "I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston." Williams writes that Marshall got the "horsin' around" out of his system and "dug deep" in his law books. In June 1933, he graduated first in his class—one of only six out of an original class of thirty-six.
A year out of law school and struggling as a "freebie lawyer" in Depression-era Baltimore, Marshall found an opportunity to "get even with Maryland for not letting me go to its law school." He persuaded Donald Gaines Murray, a Baltimore local and Amherst graduate, to apply to the University of Maryland Law School. As expected, the school rejected Murray's application, suggesting that he enroll in stead at Princess Anne Academy—Maryland's nominally "separate but equal" college for blacks. This added no small insult to injury, as Princess Anne did not even have a law school. So on April 20, 1935, Marshall filed an NAACP-funded lawsuit to force Murray's ad mission. With mentor Charlie Houston at his side, Marshall argued that the absence of a law school for blacks, where the state provided one for whites, violated the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause. To his surprise, he won the case (Pearson v. Murray) and soon be came the NAACP's point man in courtrooms across the country.
A key to Marshall's victory was the so-called Margold strategy, an ingenious plan to undermine the "separate but equal" doctrine handed down by the Supreme Court in the infamous 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. There the Supreme Court had voted 7 to 1 to legalize segregation by permitting states to separate citizens by race in public railway cars. (In his lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan declared, "Our Constitution is color-blind.") Based on re search conducted from 1931 to 1933 by Nathan Margold, an assistant U.S. attorney on hiatus working for the NAACP, the NAACP would sue for a strict enforcement of the nefarious "separate but equal" doctrine. "The South would go broke paying for truly equal, dual systems," Marshall explained, and therefore be forced to integrate their public institutions.
The strategy worked—most of the time. But in some cases, racial bigotry was so entrenched, state and local governments that could not afford to offer equivalent services for blacks simply shut down public parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, golf courses, even graduate schools in tended for "whites only" to avoid integrating them. Undaunted, Marshall continued to dismantle, brick by brick, the legal edifice of white supremacy in the South.
Marshall rose quickly through the ranks of the NAACP. Beginning with a "temporary" six-month appointment as assistant special counsel in 1936 (under Charlie Houston), he eventually directed the NAACP's Legal and Educational Defense Fund from 1940 to 1961. He would argue or assist in 43 cases before the Supreme Court, securing victories in 37 of them. Key issues included the admission of blacks to state law schools (Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, 1938), overturning "white primaries" (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), integrating interstate transportation (Morgan v. Virginia, 1946), prohibiting state enforcement of "restrictive covenants" in housing contracts (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), and voiding coerced confessions in racially charged cases (Watts v. Indiana, 1949). Of course, the case that truly made "separate but equal" a legal relic was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which a surprisingly unanimous Court desegregated public schools.
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