Thurgood Marshall (5 page)

The true story of Thurgood Marshall’s other grandfather was as good as the one that was made up about Thorney. With the Civil War over and Baltimore filling with larger numbers of blacks, Isaiah Williams returned a victorious veteran. He used his navy pay to buy a house in Old West Baltimore, a thriving neighborhood filled with Irish, Russian, and German immigrants as well as free blacks. Isaiah saw himself as the equal of anyone, attending church with whites and standing up for the rights of
black people in the city. He was never afraid to argue, even with the white man who lived next door. When the neighbor, a recent German immigrant
⁷
who was known for being mean to everyone, unexpectedly asked Isaiah to work with him repairing a broken fence that separated their property, the proud Isaiah had no problem telling him to get lost. “I’d rather go to hell,” he snapped.
⁸

Hungry for adventure, Isaiah reenlisted in November 1866 and worked as the captain’s steward onboard the USS
Powhatan
, the flagship of the South Pacific squadron for the U.S. Navy. The ship sailed along the Pacific coast of South America, patrolling the waters from Chile to Panama.

The long stays in several exotic ports allowed Isaiah to get to know the people and their way of life. He saw carnivals, Shakespearean plays, and opera; for a black man born in the United States during slavery, this was extraordinary, and Isaiah had more than his share of good times. After shore leave during one stay in Payta, Peru, he was “confined in double irons, ‘per order of Captain,’ … for drunkenness.”
⁹

After three years of duty, Isaiah was honorably discharged on December 30, 1869, in Philadelphia. Back in Baltimore he began working as a baker and soon had enough money to open a successful grocery store in the basement of his house. Within a few years he opened a second store, which was even more successful, on Denmead Street.
¹⁰
It catered to some of the city’s rich white families.

His prominence in business and experience as a world traveler made Isaiah a respected black leader in the city. He was well known in local politics and the Republican Party. The party of Lincoln provided a base for black activists such as Isaiah, who were trying to win equal rights. He was known to battle with white city officials over police brutality and to argue for admitting black children to public schools.

In November 1872 he married Mary Fossett, then a teacher in one of the city’s black private schools. They had six children, including in 1885 Norma Arica Williams, the future mother of Thurgood Marshall. Isaiah named her after the opera
Norma
, which he had seen when his navy ship visited the town of Arica, near the border between Chile and Peru.

While Thurgood Marshall’s maternal grandfather was establishing his grocery business, the former slave Thorney Marshall was making good money working as a waiter at Baltimore’s popular Barnum Hotel. But the rambunctious twenty-one-year-old wanted more adventure than waiting tables.

With blacks in Congress and in southern state legislatures in the early 1870s, as part of the ballyhooed Reconstruction effort to allow newly freed slaves political power, Thorney wanted to get out of Baltimore and see the South. He signed up with the army to go out west with the allblack 24th Regiment of the U.S. Cavalry. They were called Buffalo Soldiers, a term coined by Native Americans in honor of their supposed buffalolike strength and because they wore thick buffalo hides in winter.
¹¹
Their job was to fend off Indian and Mexican attacks and keep peace among settlers on the western frontier. Marshall was immediately sent to the deepest, most southern point of Texas, Fort Brown.

The fort was renowned as “the most unhealthful” and unpleasant U.S. Army outpost in the nation. To the north was Brownsville, a town with no drainage system. A mosquito-laden marsh sat to the east, and temperatures stayed in the high nineties for much of the year. It was not uncommon for the soldiers to come down with fevers, dysentery, and diarrhea.
¹²
Thorney’s job was to ride shotgun for the army paymaster who traveled along the Rio Grande every other month. There was a constant threat of robbers—American, Mexican, and Indian—along the two-hundred-mile route between Fort Brown and Laredo. Thorney had to be brave and quick, with both his hands and a gun.

Thorney Marshall was described by his superior officers as a “cheerful, manly, neat soldier” for most of the assignment, but he began to suffer repeated illnesses, such as diarrhea.
¹³
Most of those illnesses seemed standard at Fort Brown, but then he got a puzzling ailment that army doctors called “Chronic Hepatitis.”
¹⁴

Thorney was discharged on November 30, 1874, for medical problems that had caused him to become “morose, untidy and careless, manifesting fears and melancholy,” according to Capt. H. C. Corbin, head of the 24th Cavalry.
¹⁵
After his discharge he rode a train back to Baltimore wrapped in blankets. When he arrived, his eyes inflamed and half of his face paralyzed, he had to be carried to the home of a friend with whom he had waited tables at the Barnum Hotel. A year later, the twenty-five-year-old was still ailing, and doctors operated, placing a drainage tube into his right lung to relieve what they diagnosed as emphysema.

After leaving the hospital, Thorney slowly recuperated; he eventually married his neighbor Annie Robinson in 1879. He went back to work as a waiter at the Barnum Hotel while Annie began having children, seven in all. Their first son, William Canfield Marshall, was the future father of Thurgood Marshall.

Despite his marriage and new family, Thorney’s long illness had damaged his spirit. There were bouts of drinking, and some remembered him as a loud, difficult, and bitter man. He was by all accounts a “tough customer.”

Nevertheless, Thorney used his army disability payments and wages from his job to open a small grocery store on the bottom floor of his house, just a few blocks away from Isaiah Williams’s house; it is likely that the two men knew each other. In addition, the Marshalls and Williamses were part of a tight-knit West Baltimore community with a strong focus on family and neighbors. It was in this community that Willie Marshall met his future wife, a brown-skinned, teenage girl with long, straight, jet black hair.

Norma Williams was destined to be a teacher. Her mother had taught at one of Baltimore’s private academies for black students in the early 1870s. Mary had stopped teaching only when she began raising a family. But her oldest daughter, Avonia, also went into teaching, using her father’s political connections to get one of the first jobs for black teachers in the black public schools. Both mother and older sister spent long hours nurturing young Norma’s ambition. Most of all they impressed on her the need to do well in school. Avonia, who was twelve years older, was a powerful role model for Norma. She was a living example of a young black woman making good money and being given respect because of her job.

While she admired her older sister’s academic excellence, the man Norma fell in love with was a wild boy who had dropped out after elementary school. When he did go to school, Willie was a troublemaker, quick to mouth off to teachers and principals. One day teachers complained to his father that Willie was acting up. The next day Thorney appeared in Willie’s classroom and, in front of the whole class, pulled off his leather belt and began beating his son. The humiliation was too much. Willie Marshall never went back to school.

Willie did know how to read and write, however. He also worked as an errand boy, and when his father opened the family-run grocery, Willie began working at the store full-time. By 1904 the blue-eyed, light-skinned Willie had saved up enough money to move out of the family home to 1410 Ward Street and begin working at the city’s big railroad station as a porter.

Somewhere in his comings and goings from the family store, his work at the railroad, and his wanderings around West Baltimore, Willie met Norma Williams. She was four years younger and still living with her
mother and siblings on West Biddle Street. Norma had graduated from the Colored High School in 1904 and immediately gone on to teachers college at Coppin State in Baltimore. But before the nineteen-year-old could graduate, she became pregnant. Norma’s father had died, and the family sacrificed to pay her tuition. She had been expected to finish school and begin earning income from her teaching job for the family.

But with Norma pregnant the plans had to change. Her mother insisted to Willie that Norma finish school no matter what. Willie agreed to pay the bills, and he supported the idea that Norma should be a college graduate. The couple got married on April 17, 1905,
¹⁶
and Norma Marshall graduated from teachers college a few weeks later. The couple’s first child, William Aubrey, was born September 15, 1905.
¹⁷
While Willie continued to work as a porter, Norma stayed home with the baby.

Three years later, on July 2, 1908, a second child, Thurgood, was born. The family had moved from an apartment at 1127 Argyle Avenue, where Aubrey was born, into a larger apartment in the same neighborhood, 543 McMechen Street, where Thurgood was delivered.

On his birth certificate the boy’s name was listed as Thoroughgood, Willie’s younger brother’s name. The older Thoroughgood had traveled the world as a seaman out of Baltimore’s ports since he was nineteen, and Willie envied his brother’s life. The brother’s name was also a variation on their father’s name, Thorney Good, which family lore claimed had come from prominent white slaveholders in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginia. On the large Virginia plantations where young Thorney Marshall lived as a slave, census records show that there were white families named Thorogood, Thoroughgood, and Thorowgood.

The infant “Thoroughgood” was born into a town going through a wave of racially divisive politics. In 1899 the Democrats had gained political control of Baltimore with the slogan “This Is a White Man’s City.”
¹⁸
But such rhetoric was simply the local reflection of a national movement toward rigid segregation. In 1896 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, enabling a pattern of “separate but equal” to become the law of the land. Jim Crow, already a fact of life for much of the country, was now legal precedent. In the early 1900s life in the city’s stores and workplaces became more racially divided. But even in the face of increased segregation and racism, Baltimore’s black community remained surprisingly well organized and was able to put up resistance.

Unlike in much of the South, blacks in the city had a long tradition of owning their own businesses and holding skilled jobs. The society of free
black people gave Baltimore’s black community reason to expect that they could respond to threats against their rights and defy the segregationist politics of the Democratic Party. In addition, the Republican Party in Maryland gave blacks a political home—a prominent organization in which they could be allied with powerful white politicians. Black activists teamed with Republicans to block enactment of laws to segregate black travelers on trains in the city during the early 1900s.

But by 1908, when Thoroughgood was born, the Maryland legislature had passed laws requiring “white” and “colored” toilets on ships and trains. Baltimore’s black community fought back, with a boycott of the rails and steamship companies, but they had little success. Even in defeat Baltimore’s black community won a measure of respect, however, when the big ship lines took out advertisements to apologize to black patrons and explain that they were simply obeying Maryland’s new law.
¹⁹

The passage of laws compelling racial segregation created a climate of violence throughout the nation, particularly in the South. White fears of black political power led to efforts to intimidate blacks, and the year Thoroughgood was born, eighty-nine blacks were lynched nationally.
²⁰
Lynchings in the South, race riots in Springfield, Illinois (the home of Abraham Lincoln), and the general increase in segregation laws across the nation prompted several prominent social reformers to start a movement to stop the abuse of blacks. Members of the Brotherhood of Liberty, a group of Baltimore activists for black rights, joined over a thousand people in New York on May 30, 1909, for a meeting of social reformers from around the nation. A year later the group took the name the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
²¹
While its headquarters were in New York, the second oldest branch of the NAACP opened in 1912 in Baltimore.
²²

Meanwhile, Willie continued to work as a sleeping-car porter while his wife took care of their two sons. They did their best to insulate the boys from the harsh hand of Jim Crow by keeping them in Old West Baltimore, among family and friends. For all the political and racial storms raging at the start of the century, Marshall’s large, extended family managed to give him a childhood full of warmth and loving comfort. The cocoon surrounding the Marshall boys gave them only passing glimpses of the Jim Crow segregation that chilled black life in most of America. But the boys were about to see more.

Educating Thurgood