Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Constance Baker Motley—were getting the education of a lifetime as they worked on briefs not just with Marshall but with academic consultants and top-flight lawyers who were, in Greenberg’s words, willing to use their “considerable talents at something other than getting rich”: men like Louis H. Pollak, the former law clerk to Supreme Court justice Wiley Rutledge. (His father, Walter Pollak, had worked on the Scottsboro Boys defense.) Space at the NAACP offices in the Willkie Building being limited, Marshall’s lawyers were able, by his arrangement with the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, to work at its library in a landmark building not far from the Willkie in midtown Manhattan. After work, Marshall and his LDF team would often gather at the Blue Ribbon, a German restaurant just down the street, to drink “great dark Munich beer on tap” and, in Marshall’s case, to eat pigs’ knuckles. After the knuckles and beer and conviviality, however, Marshall more often than not would lead them back to the office for another all-nighter.
    The work, though, was exciting for both Marshall and his young staff, who could see in the briefs they were filing for the Supreme Court real possibilities of changing the racial face of America. One such case was that of Heman Marion Sweatt, a black mail carrier in Houston, who had been denied admission to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 solely on the basis of his race. Under representation by the NAACP, Sweatt sued the University of Texas on the grounds that in the state of Texas there existed no law school for blacks. Marshall was clear in his intentions: “If we can force the University of Texas to admit Heman Sweatt,” he told one reporter, “we can knock down this whole theory of separate but equal accommodations, not only in schools, but in other public endeavors as well.” In response to the lawsuit, the University of Texas president, Theophilus Painter, had leased the basement of a petroleum building near the state capitol, dumped a few boxes of textbooks inside, and notified the NAACP that there was now a separate law school for blacks that was “equal to the University of Texas Law School.”
    When Thurgood Marshall arrived in Austin in May 1947, he was confident that he had found the perfect case to strike a critical blow to legalized segregation. Eager to hear how Marshall would argue his case that a pile of textbooks in a basement did not a law school make, dozens of white University of Texas law school students as well as local NAACP members crowded into the Travis County courtroom. The bailiffs’ commands that the white students not sit in the black section were met by recalcitrance, the students refusing to budge unless a black person requested them to move. After the first recess, with blacks and whites sitting shoulder to shoulder in the packed courtroom, the bailiffs gave up trying to enforce segregated seating.
    The University of Texas students booed when the dean of their own law school stated under oath that the two law schools were equal, and they booed when he defended segregation as a necessity in order to ensure quality education for whites. Marshall, though, won their applause when his witness, the dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, testified that it was absurd to call an institution with one student a law school. Half the show in Marshall’s courtroom performance was played to those white students outraged by their university’s institutionalized segregation and administrative hypocrisy. It was those same students who founded in Austin the nation’s first all-white chapter of the NAACP.
    To no one’s surprise, Judge Roy Archer—who had laughed out loud in court when he was shown photographs of the new Texas law school for blacks—ruled against Sweatt. So did the Texas Supreme Court on appeal. Marshall, however, had had the foresight to focus the legal debate not on the obvious physical differences between the two facilities, or on the paucity of books or absence of a law library, but rather on the intangible advantages that a “traditional” law school would offer as well as the social and psychological disadvantages of learning in a segregated environment: points that he would argue before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950.
    From the outset of Sweatt v . Painter, Marshall’s vision had extended beyond the case in the Travis County courtroom, by which he was essentially setting the juristic stage