Thurgood Marshall (48 page)

Marshall and the Militants

I
T HAD BEEN MORE THAN TWO DECADES
since Thurgood Marshall had arrived in New York, and life on Harlem’s streets had taken on a new color. The jazz, the sparkling late-night clubs, and the loud, funny newcomers from the Old South were being replaced by the angry faces of a new generation. On the street corners in 1959, he could hear spokesmen for the Nation of Islam cursing the white man. In the barbershops there were mouths full of rhetoric, the troubled voices of young blacks frustrated with poor jobs, forced to make a buck in the spreading drug trade if not strung out themselves and contributing to the city’s rising crime rate.

Despite his shining civil rights credentials, Marshall knew the anger of the streets was also aimed at him as a middle-class lawyer with strong ties to the black elite and the white establishment. On several Saturday nights he had made brief talks between acts at the world-famous Apollo Theater. The place was packed for rock-and-roll shows with young, often more militant black people looking for a good time, full of laughter and drink. If a performer was boring or hit an off note, the Apollo crowd was infamous for loudly booing the offending act off the stage.

Marshall’s optimistic, flag-waving, up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric did not always go over well there. Several times the crowd booed, and threatened him by throwing bottles. The trouble at the Apollo followed him home, taking on a more harsh, threatening tone. Some nights, while in his apartment, he could hear Black Muslims denounce him as a “half-white
nigger” and a tool of the Man, working “hand in glove with the white folks.” Marshall ignored them for the most part, although the police would sometimes send him transcripts of speeches in which especially vicious language was used to attack him by name.

Listening to the Black Muslims’ intimidating words reminded him of his youthful encounters with Marcus Garvey’s followers. When he had visited Aunt Medi’s apartment in Harlem as a teenager, he had been pushed and shoved, as well as called half-white, by Garveyites who crowded Seventh Avenue for their Back-to-Africa parades. The experience left him with a bitter distaste for black radicals.

One street-corner voice Marshall easily identified from his apartment belonged to the famed Malcolm X. Now in his mid-thirties, the six-foot-three-inch Black Muslim minister, with reddish brown hair and a goatee, had been born to a poor Baptist preacher in Omaha. Malcolm Little’s father was killed by Klansmen, leading Malcolm to drop out of school and become a small-time hustler—pimping women, selling drugs, and running numbers.

During a prison stint he got his first exposure to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, a black cult that said white people were the devil’s children sent to oppress black and brown people. Working with black prisoners, the Nation of Islam encouraged education, black unity, and respect for family while condemning the use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Black people were viewed as Allah’s chosen. When he left prison in 1952, after a six-year stint, Malcolm X became a minister of the Nation and by the late 1950s was renowned in Harlem for the power of his cutting oratorical attacks on white America. He was equally hard on token blacks working in the white establishment, such as Thurgood Marshall.

Marshall was aware that Malcolm X regularly lampooned him as a “fool.” The Black Muslims advocated separatism, including having the government give blacks reparations for slavery and a separate state so they could govern themselves. Marshall let most of the Nation of Islam’s barbs and epithets, including Malcolm X’s name-calling, roll off him. But he could not ignore the threats when they were made to his face.

One evening as Marshall got off the subway, two men wearing bow ties, pressed white shirts, and long black coats approached him. When he tried to walk past them, they blocked his way. “Excuse me,” Marshall said. The men, glaring at him, replied: “Excuse me, you half-white son of a bitch. We ought to kick your ass.”

Marshall was tensed for trouble when a police car screeched to the curb and two white policemen got out. They had apparently been keeping an eye on the Black Muslims. One policeman asked the lawyer if he was having any trouble. “Not now,” said Marshall. With the two white detectives now shoulder to shoulder with the Black Muslims, Marshall quickly walked away.

Under pressure from the Black Muslims, including several other occasions where they jostled him in the street, Marshall found himself developing a closer relationship with New York’s police department and its commissioner, Stephen Kennedy. The two met when Kennedy sought Marshall’s advice on how to handle racial flare-ups between the mostly white police department and the city’s growing black population. Marshall, who took great pride in having done NAACP investigations into race riots in big northern cities such as Detroit, was pleased that the New York police commissioner would acknowledge his expertise.

Kennedy particularly needed Marshall on the night of July 15, 1959, after rumors spread that a white cop had brutally beaten a black woman. Malcolm X led a march of Black Muslims, who loudly condemned the police and talked up the beating. As it got late more and more bottles were thrown at police cars by crowds hanging out on hot, summertime streets. Commissioner Kennedy got the baseball players Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays to urge people to calm down, go home, and wait until all the facts were out.

Then Kennedy called Marshall and asked him to go to the hospital and interview the cop and the woman. “Number one, she wasn’t black,” Marshall later recalled. “She was a Puerto Rican, spoke practically no English, and was drunk as anybody you’d ever run across.”
¹
Shaking his head, Marshall later added, “Then we went up to Harlem Hospital to see Police Officer Gleason. He was white. He kept on telling us what she had done. Both of his legs, when he took the bandage off, there was no skin. She’d kicked all of it off his shins. I said, ‘I think the police are right.’ She should be arrested. Incidentally, they didn’t hit the woman, she didn’t have no bruises on her.… I sided with the policemen.”

Marshall was quoted in the newspapers as supporting the police and endorsing Commissioner Kennedy’s decision to send extra officers into black neighborhoods on the night of the incident. Several NAACP members openly questioned his embrace of the police. Nonetheless, Marshall stood by the law enforcement officials, claiming “they are crucifying that man [Commissioner Kennedy].”
²
The Black Muslims were outraged.

The next night Commissioner Kennedy showed up at Marshall’s apartment with a small package. When he handed it to Marshall, the lawyer asked, “What’s this?” Kennedy smiled while Marshall unwrapped it and found a snub-nosed gun, complete with a permit. Cissy had been watching and immediately grabbed the gun from her husband. “Uhn-uhn, don’t put your damn hands on it,” she said, worried about the possibility of the boys handling the weapon. Kennedy reluctantly took the gun back, but he put an officer outside Marshall’s apartment to keep an eye on him as he went around town.

Despite the criticism and threats he received from the Nation of Islam, Marshall did not back down. In October he made a speech at Princeton University in which he labeled the Nation a “bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails.” Elijah Muhammad responded in a newspaper column titled: “Muhammud
[sic]
Hits Thurgood Marshall.”

“The Negro leadership is in love with the Negroes’ enemies,” Muhammad began. “One would think that Mr. Marshall would be in sympathy with freedom, justice and equality for the so-called Negroes.… But the weight of his … false charges made indirectly against me and my followers proved otherwise.… We have not been opposed to the NAACP’s cause,” Muhammad continued, “only we feel … that they should not at this late date seek integration of the Negroes and the Whites, but rather separation.… Seeking closer relationship between the slaves and their masters only will provide total destruction of the Negroes by the wise, old slavemaster’s children.… Thurgood Marshall does not care for the recognition of his kind or for the Black Nation. He is in love with the white race. He hates the preaching of the uplifting of the Black Nation unless it is approved by the white race.”
³

Muhammad’s criticism, like Malcolm X’s street-corner jeremiad, had little impact on Marshall, who viewed Muhammad’s appeal for a separate black nation as lunacy. “I don’t know of any better way to sink the ship than that way,” Marshall said, scowling, when asked about the Black Muslim ideology. Muhammad’s ideas were a thorough repudiation of what Marshall stood for in arguing that the Constitution protected American citizens equally, without regard to race. And Muhammad’s talk of Black Nationalism was the exact opposite of Marshall’s lifelong advocacy of racial integration that required whites to accept blacks as equals.

While Muhammad and his followers continued to attack him in their speeches, an unbowed Marshall was drawing even closer to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover had been keeping tabs on Malcolm X and
the Nation for several years and was aware that Marshall was the target of Black Muslim fury. The bureau was also a target of criticism from Malcolm X and the Nation for its failure to go after the KKK and other white racists. In fact, the Black Muslim critique was very similar to the criticism that had come from Marshall and the NAACP more than ten years earlier, specifically that the FBI was cozy with white hate groups that violated the rights of black people.

In March 1959, Hoover had authorized an FBI visit to Malcolm’s mosque in New York. The agent reported that during a speech, Malcolm asked if there were any policemen in the room. When one stood, Malcolm said he wished more law enforcement agents would visit the mosque. The FBI agent later reported, “Malcolm also stated that the officer should report that they [members of the Nation] are law-abiding people [but] they do not teach their people to love ‘white folks.’ Malcolm further stated: ‘Man, you should arrest them [whites]. We were kidnapped. We were not brought here on the
Queen Mary
or the
Mayflower.’ ”
⁴

Hoover and Marshall now had a common enemy. Although Marshall had cooperated previously with the bureau, he was now totally free to work with Hoover. With funding from large foundations, he no longer needed the NAACP’s money. And since his takeover of the LDF, he didn’t have to respond to Roy Wilkins and the NAACP branches.

While the FBI continued to monitor Malcolm X’s speeches and travels closely, blacks in the South continued to complain about the FBI’s failure to investigate race crimes. When a
New York Post
reporter telephoned Marshall for a story on FBI misconduct, the lawyer got angry and immediately contacted the bureau. He spoke with one of Hoover’s top aides. According to an FBI memo on the telephone call: “[Marshall] wanted the Director to know that he planned to tell the reporter to either ‘put up or shut up’ and he would demand to know specific cases and not generalities if they wanted his opinion on things. He stated he had learned this from the Director many years ago and he thought this was the best way to handle the
New York Post. ”
⁵

Marshall did not want Hoover to think that he was feeding information to the reporter. He was acting to prevent a repeat of the events that had led to Hoover’s charge years before that the NAACP and Marshall were making unfounded complaints about racist FBI activity.

After Marshall did the interview with the
Post
, he called the FBI again, this time speaking with the New York office. In a 1959 memo titled
“Smear Campaign,” an agent wrote that Marshall said the reporter wanted his opinion of the FBI’s record in the South. Marshall said he was “satisfied” with the FBI’s investigations.

According to the agent’s memo, Marshall’s biggest concern was that the reporter would next visit NAACP branches in the South and hear rumors about FBI misconduct. Marshall told the agent that if he had evidence with “teeth” of FBI wrongdoing, he would contact the bureau. And Marshall confided to the agent that he did not like the newspaper’s attempt at muckraking and damaging the FBI.
⁶

* * *

A month later, in June 1959, Marshall was in touch with the FBI again about the black militant Robert Williams. As the NAACP branch president in Union County, North Carolina, Williams had been quoted in papers across the country urging blacks to “meet violence with violence.” Wilkins and the NAACP immediately suspended Williams for contradicting their stand against racial violence by whites or blacks. The suspension made national headlines, and Williams was portrayed as being disgraced. Days later, however, a Communist-backed group formed the Robert Williams Defense Committee to offer him legal and financial support. Their work was not widely publicized, but it came to Marshall’s attention, and he wanted to make sure the FBI knew about it.

Marshall, concerned by this mixture of black militants and Communists, asked for a face-to-face meeting with the FBI’s agent in charge of the New York office to discuss how the NAACP was responding to Williams’s call to arms. He also wanted the bureau to know that neither he nor the NAACP had anything to do with the Communist-led defense committee. At the start of the meeting, Marshall gave the agents three documents that linked the defense committee with Communists. But his greatest alarm was over Williams’s defiant call for self-defense.