Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King Read Free Book Online

too, how Julia Scott, the manager of the coffee shop, used to wait on Marshall “because she was afraid we’d spill coffee on him or cause some embarrassing accident because we were so nervous in his presence. ‘You girls stop staring at Mr. Marshall,’ she’d say when he came in.”
    Despite the difficulties at home, Marshall was riding high in 1946. In May the thirty-seven-year-old attorney became the thirty-first Spingarn medalist, joining the likes of Wright, Robeson, DuBois, author and activist James Weldon Johnson, and the American contralto Marian Anderson as recipients of the esteemed award. Next to Wright, Marshall was the youngest person to receive the Spingarn Medal, conferred in recognition of his “distinguished service as a lawyer before the Supreme Court of the United States . . . particularly in the Texas Primary Case which conceivably may have more far reaching influence than any other act in the ending of disenfranchisement based upon race or color in the country.” In this 1944 case, Smith v. Allwright , involving an all-white primary, the U.S. Supreme Court justices voted 8–1 in Marshall’s favor, ruling that blacks “cannot be legally barred from voting in the Texas Democratic primaries.” One Spingarn Medal Award Committee member noted that Marshall’s work in the case “brought about the most beneficial results for the Negro since Emancipation.” Marshall was also cited for his attack on the Jim Crow travel system and unequal educational opportunities as well as for his battle to win for blacks “basic human rights and justice in the courts.”
    In May 1946 Walter White wrote a note to Marshall, informing him that because the company making the Spingarn Medal would be unable to create a new die in time for the June ceremony in Cincinnati, the NAACP would instead be presenting him with a replica gold-plated medal. “Lest you think we are trying to pull a fast one on you,” White went on to explain, the company would be casting a solid gold medal that Marshall would receive “as soon as it is delivered.” Marshall returned the note after writing a two-word response: “Oh yeah.”

    T HURGOOD MARSHALL SMOKED three packs of cigarettes a day.
    By mid-June of 1946, however, Marshall’s body was failing him. He was drinking steadily and not getting much sleep, and his constant travel to Columbia, Tennessee, where temperatures soared over a hundred degrees, had left him exhausted, with no time for exercise—not that he’d ever shown any interest in exercise. Nor did his preferred diet of fried food and red meat do him any favors. He was laughing less, talking in muted tones, and to friends and associates, he was not himself. Sensing something might be amiss with his health, Marshall arranged NAACP staff participation in the Blue Cross Hospitalization Plan, which, he said, at “very reasonable rates” would relieve employees of “that mental worry of wondering where the money is coming from to meet the bills.”
    Two weeks later, more than seven hundred delegates joined thousands of members in Cincinnati for the NAACP’s thirty-seventh annual conference, at which, on the closing night, Marshall would receive the Spingarn Medal. Onstage, Marshall was seated beside Joe Louis and Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the famous Tuskegee airman. Next to Louis, Marshall looked gaunt and run-down in his dark pinstripe suit and spectator shoes: a stark contrast to the smiling, muscular fighter. Still, Marshall managed to rise to the occasion. Standing before his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, he made it clear that the medal was “an award coming to one person in recognition of the work of a large group of lawyers who have always worked together in a spirit of wholehearted co-operation and without any hope of reward other than that of seeing a job done.” After his acceptance speech Marshall introduced the lawyers he’d been working with on the Columbia case, Z. Alexander Looby and Maurice