Wil Haygood - Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America

T HE HUNGER FOR NEGRO FREEDOM began as soon as the first slave ships from West Africa and Brazil landed on Americas shores. The desire to be free constituted a fierce, undying impulse. All through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the ships kept coming. While Great Britain ended its participation in the international slave trade in 1807, America, which relied on cheap labor for its cotton production, did not. In time, there would be uprisings and bloody insurrections, led by the likes of Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, John Brown in Kansas, and Nat Turner in Virginia. Abolitionists bolted from horse-driven carriages into statehouses, railing against slavery while displaying pictures of men, women, and children in chains. Slavery, the abolitionists were constantly reminded, was intertwined with American law. Let the Sout h have her negroes to her hearts content, and in her own wayand let us go on getting rich and powerful by feeding and clothing them, The Chicago Times advised.

President Abraham Lincolns threat to end slavery ignited the Civil War. On New Years Day 1863, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Three and a half million Negroes were to be set free. The bold decision stunned members of the presidents cabinet. As Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles would put it, the decision was fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate. Battered into submission in the intervening months, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Days laterApril 14, 1865Lincoln was assassinated by a lunatic gunman in a theater in Washington.

Beyond Reconstruction, and the dawning of the twentieth century, the question lingered: How free was the Negro? Not very. The answer was all too obvious: Racial murders haunted the land. White vigilante militias rose in power. There existed entire communities in the South where the Negro could not vote. The tenets drawn out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were beautiful and declarative, but in practice they often seemed beyond the reach of the Negro.

In 1909, to address disparity and inequality, an eclectic groupamong them James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Mary White Ovington, and Joel Spingarnorganized the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The groups aim was to protect Negroes from abuse while fighting for their rights and elevating their standing nationwide. Members paid dues; progressive whites joined up. With limited resources, it was expected that executives of the organization would, out of necessity, use their imaginations when it came to strategizing.

IN 1940, Thurgood Marshallwho had joined the NAACP as a lawyer four years earlier after working at a barely-making-it law practice in his native Baltimorecame up with an idea to form a permanent legal arm of the NAACP. It was known as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and its mission was clear: to assault discrimination and legal segregation in Americas courtrooms. Marshall was its architect; he utilized the services of plenty of other lawyers, but he quickly became its marquee performer. He roamed the countrywhen he wasnt in the courtroom, he packed lecture halls and churchesand amassed a stunning array of landmark court victories. There was Smith v. Allwright in 1944, a case that outlawed the all-white Democratic primary in Texas. Shelley v. Kraemer made front-page news in 1948, in which the high court ruled it was illegal to bar Negroes and other minorities from purchasing property even if the homeowner had written it into a clause of the deed. Two years laterin another case rooted in Texascame the Sweatt v. Painter victory, in which the high court ordered the University of Texas to admit a Negro it had previously barred from its law school. (It was while in Texas during the primary court battle that Thurgood Marshall first began hearing of a young U.S. Senate candidate by the name of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson did not win his 1941 Senate campaign, but Marshall was very much aware that as labor forces abandoned Johnsons candidacy, the Negro support stuck with him.) Then, in 1954, came the Marshall-led titanic achievement of