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

opposing counsel and judges. So it didn’t matter how smart or how competent Marshall was. His race alone prohibited him access to the legal sphere where Baltimore’s higher socioeconomic class conducted business and forged relationships—a sphere that even the least competent of white lawyers could enjoy by virtue of their skin color.
    Charles Hamilton Houston had to ask only once for the young lawyer to join him in New York at the national headquarters of the NAACP.

    B Y THE MID-1940S, the NAACP had become overwhelmed with casework. For years Thurgood Marshall and the association had been planning an all-out attack on segregation, one they hoped would reverse the separate-but-equal doctrine established by Plessy . To get there, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) had been filing numerous lawsuits around the country to combat inequalities in teachers’ pay, housing, transportation, the armed forces, and higher education. Despite the relocation of the NAACP to more spacious offices in the Willkie Memorial Building in midtown Manhattan, a rash of recent hirings had left Thurgood Marshall’s LDF short on space.
    Since his arrival at the NAACP in 1938, Marshall had been forced to share an office, first with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and later with various LDF counsel over the years. He was, Marshall wrote in a 1947 memo to Walter White, “the only executive who shared offices.” That was after he’d been shuttled into a small fourth-floor office in Freedom House with two young females, attorney Constance Baker and sociologist Annette Peyser—the three of them shared the single phone. Marshall told White conditions had become unbearable; it was impossible to concentrate with three people in the same office working on different types of cases, “answering the telephone and/or dictating.” Marshall was, he wrote, “at the end of my rope.”
    Though sympathetic, White was not especially disposed to accommodate the less than punctilious Marshall. He had already made it clear to Marshall that he did not appreciate some patterns of behavior in the LDF offices, most notably an “overfamiliarity and casualness” and the use of first names between executives and secretaries or stenographers during office hours that Marshall permitted. W. E. B. DuBois, who had left the organization in 1934, was nevertheless around the office enough to observe Marshall’s “unbuttoned office manners to be outlandishly bad.” It was a charge the lawyer could not deny. Victories were celebrated, often on Friday afternoons, when Marshall would pull a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer and proceed to hold court. Imitating judges, opposing counsel, or dim Uncle Tom witnesses, he’d punctuate his tales from the civil rights battlefront with one of his famous deadpan grins or bawdy punch lines. He relished racial humor, like the story about the slave who stole a turkey from his master, then ate the whole bird—and just as the master was about to deliver a whipping, the slave pleaded, “You shouldn’t beat me, massuh. You got less turkey, but you sure got more nigger.”
    “He could tell some pretty off-color jokes which would be, if they were told by someone else, embarrassing,” recalled Mildred Roxborough, who began a long career with the NAACP as a secretary in the early 1950s. “But you would find yourself responding to them because of the way in which he told them.”
    In an office where the work was hard, usually depressing, and often tragic, Marshall was inclined to using sophomoric or gallows humor to alleviate tension. One associate recalled an occasion when Marshall, in the course of doing research, came across a story in a nineteenth-century newspaper about a black man who’d been doing railroad construction in the Midwest and had fallen into a ditch. The absurdity of the headline gripped Marshall, who kept reading it aloud from his desk, over and over, as if it summed up the black man’s condition then, and now: “Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . .”
    The letters from the South that arrived at the NAACP offices often brought cries for help or pleas for justice, and Marshall commonly read them to his staff, even if the LDF could not offer help. A letter, at once touching and humorous, that he received in May 1949 from Charles Jones in Hog Wallow, Georgia, was typical:
    Mr. Turgood.
    I see by the Courer [Pittsburgh Courier] that you ar the No. 1 negro of all