Thurgood Marshall chose the trousers—and spent the rest of his life seeing to it that others were spared far worse injustices. As he prepares to leave the Supreme Court, Marshall leaves behind a civil rights record that would have been extraordinary even if his legal career had ended without his rising to the nation's highest bench. Indeed, during his almost 24 years on the Court—he was appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967—he was its foremost crusader for social justice and the only Justice who had represented an accused murderer.
A 220-lb. hulk of a man, Marshall delighted in tweaking his most powerful opponents. In 1970, for instance, pneumonia landed him in the hospital. When President Richard M. Nixon, eager to tilt the Court to the right, asked for a health report. Marshall insisted the final words read: "Not yet." Even as his body weakened—over the years he suffered a heart attack, bronchitis, blood clots, hearing loss and, most recently, glaucoma—he declared last year, "I have a lifetime appointment, and I intend to serve it."
On June 27, he announced he'd changed his mind, and resigned. "I'm old," he said. "I'm falling apart." At a press conference he divulged, with typical curmudgeonly gruff-ness, his future plans: "[to] sit on my rear end."
His lack of decorum aside, Marshall deserves the rest. "He's done more than anyone could possibly expect of him," says his godchild and former clerk, attorney Karen Hastie Williams, 47. "He's devoted more than 50 years of his life to public service. I've no doubt this was the most difficult decision of his life." Four days later, President Bush nominated the conservative black federal appeals court judge Clarence Thomas to replace the retiring liberal.
Marshall began lift in the Jim Crow world of Baltimore. Born on July 2, 1908, to William, a steward in the whites-only Gibson Island Club on the Chesapeake Bay, and Norma, a teacher at an all-black elementary school, Marshall learned early the ways of the segregated Southland. His father used to tell him, "Son, if anyone calls you a nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him, you got my orders to fight him." Young Thurgood decided that his best offense was the law. Since the University of Maryland School of Law didn't accept blacks, in 1930 he began commuting to the Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. There, recalled Marshall, "I lost 30 lbs. solely from work, intellectual work. And that's how you get ahead of people."
In the years that followed, Marshall traveled the South as an attorney for the NAACP. Challenging segregation laws in court after court, Marshall became the target of racial hatred and was hidden in the homes of local black families. Often, says Williams, "there would be lynch mobs coming to get him, and he would have to go out the back door." Recalls friend and fellow NAACP attorney William Coleman: "In those days, Thurgood would be very 'courteous' and let you go through the door first"—just in case someone was outside ready to take a shot at him. "They were trying times," Coleman says. "He has a real nitty-gritty humor."
It was that same humor, sometimes dark, sometimes dry, sometimes mocking, that helped Marshall triumph. All told, he won 29 of the 32 cases that he argued as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, including the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which ended "separate but equal" school systems. "Marshall was our savior," says NAACP activist Juanita Mitchell. "Every case they said couldn't be won, he won."
His strength was his simple, often caustic common sense. The solicitor general in Brown, for instance, cited the failure of Prohibition, arguing, "You can't change the habits of human beings," recalls Coleman. Marshall, he says, responded, "Gee, I never thought one would equate the right to get educated with the right to get a drink of whiskey."
His biting humor is one of Marshall's most endearing qualities. "Even when he insults you, you have to laugh," says retired circuit court judge Robert B. Watts. Not that all his subjects understand when they're being toyed with. "He was once in the Supreme Court elevator, and some tourists got on, looked at him standing by the panel and said, 'Two, please,' " says Kevin Baine, Marshall's former clerk. Putting on his best drawl, Marshall said, " 'Yeeesss, sir' and pushed the button for them. They didn't have the slightest idea that they rode down with a Supreme Court Justice."
For all Marhsall's crusty eccentricities, his former clerks recall him as a man who pushed past the law to the human plight. "What you get with Justice Marshall is an uncanny knack for seeing through all the legal doctrines and technicalities and precedents and asking, 'Yes, but is it fair?' " says former clerk David Norrell.
Having forsaken the high court, Marshall is eager to take a seat on a kinder, gentler bench—his favorite living room chair in his Falls Church, Va., home. ("It's his chair," jokes son John William, 33, a sergeant with the Virginia State Police. Take his chair and "he'll probably sit on you.") There, deliberations with his wife, Cecilia, John and older son Thurgood Jr., 34, an attorney, are more likely to begin and end with a hug than a handshake. As John recalls, his father never ruled by fiat. "I've won 29 out of 32 Supreme Court cases," groused Marshall, continually thwarted in his attempts to get a word in edgewise, "and I can't win one in my own house." Now, at least, Mr. Justice Marshall has time to work on his appeals.
KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
MARILYN BALAMACI, KATY KELLY and DEBORAH PAPIER in Washington, D.C.
- Contributors:
- Marilyn Balamaci,
- Katy Kelly,
- Deborah Papier.
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