Long before he was a controversial commentator on NPR and then FOX News, Juan Williams was a distinguished chronicler of the US Civil Rights era. “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” was published in 1998, a half-decade after the legendary civil rights lawyer (but rather forgettable Supreme Court justice, according to this book) passed away at age 84 in 1993. Thurgood Marshall’s place in US history is still unsettled; it may take another century or more to place him properly in the pantheon of twentieth century American leaders. Williams is wise enough not to hazard any final assessment on Marshall’s long-term legacy here, but he does deliver a remarkably fluid, candid and balanced life narrative of a complex man.
Although Williams does not break it down this way, it seems to me that there are three distinct storylines in this biography: Thurgood Marshall the man, the lawyer, and the justice.
Thurgood Marshall the man is a tough, sobering story. Tall, burly, self-confident, and light-skinned, Marshall grew up in the black Baltimore middle class in the early 1900s. Convivial and a natural prankster, he was well liked by everyone and notably maintained good relations with whites in the border state city, particularly the immigrant Jews in his neighborhood. Rejected by his home state law school on grounds of race (a snub he would never forget, nor forgive), Marshall enrolled at Howard University Law School in Washington DC and quickly became a protégé of the new dean, Charles Houston, a serious, Harvard-educated lawyer. Houston sought to improve the academic rigor at Howard and create a new generation of socially conscious black activist lawyers. Marshall’s storied career and incredible success in razing the citadel of segregation via the courts realized Houston’s most ambitious dream.
But Marshall the man, unlike his legal career in defense of black America, was not all unclouded glory, according to the author. During his lifetime Marshall was dogged by a reputation as a lazy, chain smoking, hard drinking (in all likelihood a clinical alcoholic), womanizing curmudgeon. There are certainly two sides to the story, and Williams presents them both equally without passing judgment. Marshall’s defenders, former law clerks mostly, claim that he was a very engaged justice who read every case closely and provided many meaningful edits to the first drafts of judicial opinions. Many others, however, claimed that Justice Marshall regularly showed up at the Supreme Court at 10am, watched TV in his chambers, had a three-martini lunch and then checked out at 3pm, a version strongly reinforced by Bob Woodward’s damning account in his 1979 bestseller, “The Brethren.” Indeed, none other than Archibald Cox, a famed Harvard Law School professor and Marshall’s predecessor as Solicitor General, provided a stinging assessment of Justice Marshall’s Supreme Court tenure: “Marshall may not be very bright or hard-working, but he deserves credit for picking the best law clerks in town.”
There is no question that Marshall was a chain-smoker; he smoked two-packs a day for most of his life and considered his walk from the parking lot into the Supreme Court as his daily exercise. His heavy drinking was likewise undisputed, not even by Marshall himself. As for philandering, his most devoted acolytes concede that they had to keep him in check around women, especially when he had been drinking a lot, which was often. Make no mistake: his aggressive, alcohol-fueled advances and wandering hands would be classified as felony sexual assault in today’s America. Likewise, few denied that he could be an abrasive grouch, “…a grand, frumpy old lion, a sage emperor who had earned the right to be gruff and indifferent to critics as well as friend,” according to one sympathizer during his final years on the bench in the late 1980s when he was isolated as the last liberal on an increasingly conservative court. As his health failed and his influence slid, he increasingly let his tongue wag. He made uncharitable (and unnecessary) comments about David Souter during his nomination process and then had the temerity to say this about President George H. W. Bush: “It’s said that if you can’t say something good about a dead person don’t say it. Well, I consider [Bush] dead.” Even Marshall’s most strident defenders blanched at the unprecedented breach of protocol and mean spiritedness of his comments.
A leitmotif of “Thurgood Marshall” is the ubiquitous friction in the subject’s personal and professional relationships. Williams describes a man with whom it was difficult, if not impossible, to develop a deep and lasting friendship with, particularly if one were talented and ambitious and sought to play a leading role in the civil rights movement.
One might argue that Marshall represented the first leg of the civil rights era, a primarily legal fight beginning in the 1930s to overturn segregation and racial discrimination in the court system. Williams describes Marshall as a man jealous of his standing as “The Greatest Negro of All Time,” as one black newspaper grandly hailed him in the 1940s; an overly proud upstart quick to knock anyone down a peg who dared challenged his role as the knight-in-shining-armor for black America, even including his boss, NAACP chief Walter White, who frequently rankled Marshall by claiming “his” legal victories for the NAACP (Marshall was known to ask facetiously, “Where did Walter get his law degree?”).
Just as Marshall’s reputation was at its zenith with black America in the mid-1950s, Martin Luther King, the second leg on the civil rights movement, emerged on the scene as the young leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, ushering in an era of grass roots, non-violent resistance to prejudice and injustice, a strategy that Marshall viewed as silly and ineffective. Indeed, when the Montgomery bus boycott was finally broken it was by the court case of Gayle v. Browder, which Marshall had argued, yet King was publicly viewed by as the victor. “Marshall felt that King had stolen his glory,” Williams writes. “I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his theory about disobeying the law,” Marshall said, “…I didn’t believe in that. I thought you did have a right to disobey the law, and you also had a right to go to jail for it, and he kept talking about Henry David Thoreau, and I told him that Thoreau wrote his book [“Civil Disobedience”] in jail. If you want to write a book, you go to jail and write it.” Not too surprisingly, Marshall had little positive to say about him behind closed doors.
Finally, by the 1960s, when Marshall was increasingly seen by black America as an establishment figure and King was reaching the high water mark of his career, Malcolm X entered the stage as the last leg of the civil rights stool, passionately fighting for Black Power and racial justice “by any means necessary.” Marshall was no fan of Martin Luther King’s, but he positively hated Malcolm X. “I still see no reason to say [Malcolm X] is a great person, a great Negro,” Marshall is quoted as bellowing. “And I just ask a simple question: What did he ever do? Name me one concrete thing he ever did? [He was] a bum, hell, he was a damned pimp – a convicted pimp, about as lowlife as you can get.” Marshall’s one-time, chance encounter with Malcolm X on the streets of Harlem ended in a volley of personal epithets. Williams argues that “Marshall was an integrationist who had never related to Malcolm’s hatred of whites…[and] Malcolm, unlike Marshall, believed that violence was a useful tool for dealing with white racism.” Never the twain shall meet, evidently.
Marshall’s dustups with his fellow travelers in the civil rights movement led to one strange bedfellow: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. “[Marshall] had disdain for the Communists, the radicals, even Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent tactics,” Williams writes. He quietly but assiduously cultivated a personal relationship with the powerful FBI boss as a means to weaken and wound those rivals. His unusual and largely surreptitious relationship with Hoover would pay big dividends when he was later nominated for the Supreme Court and was broadly endorsed as the “federal government’s walking symbol for a responsible, peaceful civil rights movement.”
But Marshall’s blow-ups extended beyond the major black figures in the civil rights movement. One of his most bitter personal enemies was Bob Carter, Marshall’s former protégé who took over the NAACP’s legal office once the Legal Defense Fund split off as a separate entity, a move principally engineered by Marshall to free himself from the influence of Walter White. And his family relations as described by Williams were hardly any better. He maintained cool and distant relationships with his alcoholic father and physician brother and was barely on speaking terms with his in-laws. Indeed, much of Marshall’s personal life is a pattern of broken relationships in the wake of his trailblazing career.
If much of Marshall’s personal life was tempestuous and unfortunate, his legal career was exhilarating and legendary. Unable to find consistent work and good pay in his Baltimore law practice, and deeply concerned about the plight of his fellow African-Americans, especially those suffering under Jim Crow in the South, Marshall joined the Legal Defense Fund, the legal arm of the New York City-based NAACP. Marshall forcefully led the “direct approach” against segregation rather than fighting for better facilities for blacks, a strategy that was at first resisted by many African-American leaders, especially in the South, where they believed that full-scale integration was unlikely and fraught with physical danger. By the 1940s, Marshall was “growing into a mythical figure, a crusader and a savior” for his harrowing trips to the Deep South in defense of black defendants and his unprecedented string of legal victories. His efforts culminated in a daring tactic that challenged school segregation head on with five cases drawn from across the South and border states that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, “the most important legal, political, social and moral event in twentieth-century American domestic history,” according to Duke Law professor and former solicitor general Walter Dellinger. Nevertheless, Williams writes that Marshall was stunned by the violent reaction in the South against de-segregation; he naively believed that the Brown decision was a complete and total victory, and never anticipated the ugly scenes in Little Rock and beyond.
If Marshall’s personal relations were turbulent and his career as a civil rights attorney epoch making, his time on the bench was disappointing, at least according to Williams’ narrative. In 1961 Marshall was named a federal judge at the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. It was an honor for a black man, but a job that Marshall more-or-less hated and frankly wasn’t very good at. When LBJ asked him to be the first black Solicitor General, Marshall jumped at the opportunity despite the pay cut and loss of life tenure and a generous pension (another theme of this book is Marshall’s lifelong issues with money); he was simply in love with the limelight.
After a rather unremarkable stint as Solicitor General, LBJ took the bold move of nominating him to the Supreme Court, the nation’s first ever African-American associate justice. It was a decision the president would later come to regret. “More and more, I’m sure I’m right,” LBJ said; nominating Marshall to the Court is what killed his presidency, not the Vietnam War.
Marshall was sworn in on September 1, 1967 by Justice Hugo Black, a former Klansman from Alabama, ironically enough. One of the great perks of the job for Marshall was the salary: $39,500 a year (about $275,000 in today’s dollars). The first thing Marshall did was to buy his-and-hers twenty-foot, crème-colored Cadillac’s for him and his second wife, Cissy. “See this,” Marshall said, “I haven’t gotten me my first paycheck yet, but that’s the n*gger in me.”
Marshall’s time on the Supreme Court was largely forgettable according to the author. If anything, it was damaging to his reputation. It is striking that only three of the book’s 33 chapters are dedicated to Marshall’s 24-year tenure on the high court. A large portion of that tenure Marshall was in seriously poor health and a marginalized liberal voice on an increasingly conservative court. The convivial, fun-loving Marshall of the 1930s gave way to a cantankerous, vindictive, thin-skinned and irreverent old man who almost everyone – from Carter liberals to Reagan conservatives – wanted off the court. Marshall obstinately refused and hung on for years, ever more detached, resentful and angry, making strong (and embarrassingly politically strident) statements in the few interviews he granted. He hung on until 1991, a forceful and lonely voice in defense of minority rights and against the death penalty.
In closing, this is an excellent biography and well worth your time. Despite Marshall’s flaws, he was undoubtedly a great man and did great things for his country. Although Williams is strikingly neutral throughout the narrative (a rarity for biographers of contemporary figures) he closes with strong words in defense of his subject, arguing that Marshall can “lay claim to the rare mantle of Americans who literally transformed their nation and defined not only their era but what would come after them.” He is spot on.
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