Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall

Behind the Mask, A Fine Storyteller

In the courtroom Justice Marshall's face was an inscrutable mask. He said little during the argument sessions, growling occasionally at lawyers who were struggling lamely through their arguments and sometimes training his sarcasm on his own colleagues. During a death penalty argument in 1981, William H. Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, suggested that the inmate's repeated appeals had cost the taxpayers too much money. Justice Marshall interrupted, saying, "It would have been cheaper to shoot him right after he was arrested, wouldn't it?"

But those who knew him well said that behind the mask was a man with an earthy sense of humor, a spellbinding storyteller with an anecdote from his own long life for every occasion.

Justice Brennan, in a tribute to his friend published in the Harvard Law Review, wrote about Justice Marshall's storytelling abilities. "The locales are varied -- from dusty courtrooms in the Deep South, to a confrontation with General MacArthur in the Far East, to the drafting sessions for the Kenyan Constitution," Justice Brennan wrote. "They are brought to life by all the tricks of the storyteller's art: the fluid voice, the mobile eyebrows, the sidelong glance, the pregnant pause and the wry smile."

The stories were meant not only to entertain but also to serve "a deeper purpose," Justice Brennan said.

"They are his way of preserving the past while purging it of its bleakest moments," he said. "They are also a form of education for the rest of us. Surely, Justice Marshall recognized that the stories made us -- his colleagues -- confront walks of life we had never known."

Many of his stories recalled the hostility, the harassment and, not infrequently, the danger he had faced as a civil rights lawyer, traveling some 50,000 miles a year throughout the South representing black clients and unpopular causes. One story he told was of being arrested on a trumped-up charge of drunken driving while leaving a Tennessee town in which he and a colleague had just won an acquittal for a black defendant.

As Justice Marshall recounted the incident in an interview, he was brought before a magistrate, who told him: "If you're not drunk, will you take my test? Will you blow in my face? I'm a teetotaler and I can smell the least bit of whisky."

"He was a short man," recalled Justice Marshall, who was himself 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. "I put my hands on his shoulders and breathed just as hard as I could into the man's face." The case was dismissed.

"We drove to Nashville," the Justice added. "And then, boy, I really wanted a drink!"

Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908. His mother, the former Norma Williams, was a teacher. His father, William Marshall, had once worked as a Pullman car waiter and later became a steward at the exclusive, all-white Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay. A great-grandfather had been taken as a slave from the Congo to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where the slaveholder eventually freed him.

Mr. Marshall was named for his paternal grandfather, who had chosen the name "Thoroughgood" when he enlisted as a private in the Union Army during the Civil War. His grandson later explained that he adopted the spelling "Thurgood" in grade school because he "got tired of spelling all that out."

He described himself as a "hell-raiser" in school, a circumstance that gave him exposure to the Constitution and lifelong respect for it. "Instead of making us copy out stuff on the blackboard after school when we misbehaved, our teacher sent us down into the basement to learn parts of the Constitution," he once recalled. "I made my way through every paragraph."

In high school years in Baltimore, he worked as a delivery boy for a women's clothing store after classes. He waited on tables to help pay the tuition at Lincoln University in Chester, Pa., where he said he "majored in hell-raising." He was expelled once for hazing freshmen, but after being readmitted he became a star debater and graduated with honors in 1930.

His mother wanted him to become a dentist, a safe and lucrative career for a black professional in those days, but he was determined to become a lawyer. Enrolling at Howard University Law School meant a long daily commute from Baltimore because he could not afford housing at the school. His mother pawned her wedding and engagement rings to pay the law school's entrance fees.

At Howard he met a man who would influence the course of his life, Charles Hamilton Houston, then the law school's vice dean. Mr. Houston, a Harvard Law School graduate who later served as chief counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and who became the first black lawyer to win a case before the Supreme Court, imbued his students with the goal of using the law to attack institutional racism.

"Charlie Houston insisted that we be social engineers rather than lawyers," Justice Marshall said in an interview published in the American Bar Association Journal in 1992.

The Justice often credited Mr. Houston, who died in 1950 at the age of 54, as his mentor. Referring to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he said in the bar association interview: "The school case was really Charlie's victory. He just never got a chance to see it."

A Basic Strategy To End Segregation

After earning his law degree Mr. Marshall opened a law office in Baltimore. The nation was in the fourth year of the Depression. He found himself handling civil rights cases for impoverished clients and was soon $1,000 in debt. But his courtroom victories, including his successful challenge to segregation at the University of Maryland Law School, began to be noticed. In 1936 Mr. Houston, by then the chief counsel of the N.A.A.C.P., recruited him for a $2,600-a-year job on the organization's legal staff in New York. Two years later, when Mr. Houston returned to Washington, Mr. Marshall succeeded to the chief counsel's title but continued to work closely with his mentor.

Pursuing a long-range strategy to eradicate segregation, the two men concentrated first on graduate and professional schools, believing that white judges were most likely to be offended by segregation in that setting and to sympathize with the ambitious young black college graduates who were the plaintiffs in the cases. As successes mounted, the two turned their attention to segregation in public high schools and elementary schools.

"Under Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.'s legal staff became the model for public interest law firms," Mark Tushnet, one of the Justice's biographers who was also one of his law clerks, wrote in the American Bar Association Journal. "Marshall was thus one of the first public interest lawyers. His commitment to racial justice led him and his staff to develop ways of thinking about constitutional litigation that have been enormously influential far beyond the areas of segregation and discrimination."

In its public school cases, the initial focus of the N.A.A.C.P., and later of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which became a separate entity in the 1940's, was to seek to equalize the resources available to the all-black schools in segregated systems. Mr. Marshall persuaded the organization's board to abandon that approach and to refuse to take on any cases that did not challenge the fact of segregation itself.

The new policy was controversial within the N.A.A.C.P. and prompted resignations by several black lawyers on whom the organization had relied to handle cases in the South. Mr. Marshall was not deterred, and took on many of the cases himself. He traveled constantly and was in charge of as many as 450 cases at a time. "I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a long time, but I never quite made the grade," he once said.

Robert L. Carter, an associate of Mr. Marshall's from those days who later became a Federal district judge in New York, recalled their travels through the South in an article published in The Harvard Law Review.

"Having grown up in Maryland, Marshall had a slight Southern accent," Mr. Carter wrote. "But when our opponents were Southern lawyers, which was virtually all the time, his accent would become much more pronounced. Before and after the case was called, Marshall would joke with the opposing counsel or exchange some pleasantry, all in a Southern accent so broad that he sounded as if he had lived all his life in the deep rural South. The practice irritated me at first. The very lawyers Marshall's Southern drawl would put at ease were defending a system we detested."

Mr. Carter wrote that he gradually understood that his friend "was attempting to communicate to these men that, although we were on opposite sides of an emotionally charged lawsuit, we were lawyers representing our clients and had no personal quarrel with each other."

'The Right Man And the Right Place'

By 1961, when President Kennedy named him to the Federal appeals court, Thurgood Marshall was the best known black lawyer in the United States. A group of Southern senators held up his confirmation for months, and he served initially under a special appointment made during a Congressional recess. Six years later, President Johnson said that placing Judge Marshall on the Supreme Court was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place."

Liberals still dominated the Court in the closing years of Chief Justice Earl Warren's tenure, and Justice Marshall fit in comfortably with such colleagues as Justices Brennan and William O. Douglas. In his early years on the Court, Justice Marshall cast only a handful of dissenting votes.

Inexorably, the ideological landscape changed. By the time Justice Marshall announced his retirement, on June 27, 1991, he had served longer than all but one of the sitting Justices -- Byron R. White, who was named by President Kennedy in 1962 -- and was more liberal than any of them. In his final term he dissented in 25 of 112 cases.

Among Justice Marshall's important majority opinions for the Court was Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza, in 1968, which held that a shopping center was a "public forum" much like an old downtown city street, from which the private owners could not exclude picketers.

His majority opinion in Stanley v. Georgia, in 1969, held that the private possession of pornography could not be subject to prosecution. "If the First Amendment means anything," he wrote in that case, "it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

He wrote the majority opinion in Bounds v. Smith, a 1977 case holding that state prison systems are constitutionally obliged to provide inmates with "adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law."

A Vigorous Dissent In a Schools Case

One of his best known dissents was a 63-page opinion in a 1973 case, San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez. The majority in that case held, by a 5-to-4 vote, that the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection was not violated by the property tax system used by Texas and most other states to finance public education. Under the system districts with generous tax bases can afford to provide better schools than less wealthy districts.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Marshall accused the majority of an "unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens."

He argued that the right to an education should be regarded as a "fundamental" constitutional right, and that state policies that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of wealth should be subject to especially searching judicial scrutiny.

"In my judgment," he wrote, "the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record."

Justice Marshall had often said that he did not plan to retire, so his decision at the end of the 1990-91 term took both the Court and the country by surprise.

One person familiar with the Court recalled that when Justice Marshall informed his colleagues of his plan, at the Justices' final private conference of the term, even the members of the Court who had clashed with him long and often on matters of law and policy were deeply moved. Exclaiming "Oh, Thurgood!" Chief Justice Rehnquist embraced Justice Marshall in a bear hug. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wept.

Justice Marshall, a few days shy of his 83d birthday, gave health as the reason for his retirement. At a news conference the next day he was asked, "What's wrong with you, sir?"

"What's wrong with me?" Justice Marshall replied. "I'm old. I'm getting old and coming apart."

Justice Marshall's first wife, the former Vivien Burey, whom he married in 1929, died of cancer in February 1955. In December of that year he married Cecilia Suyat, known as Cissy. They had two sons, Thurgood Jr., legislative-affairs coordinator for the Office of the Vice President and previously a lawyer on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John, a member of the Virginia state police.