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emotions may,
without violence, be composed into a more or less successful image of
justice.
Thurgood Marshall's feeling of love and awe for the Constitution is
exceeded only by his love and awe toward his clients: the Negroes, and
especially the Negroes of the South and the border states, who, facing
threats of firing, or beating or even death, continue to sign the legal
petitions and complaints that must be the starting point of Marshall's
cases from the slum and the cotton field to the high and technical
levels of the Supreme Court.
Of these local N.A.A.C.P. leaders in the South, Marshall says: "There
isn't a threat known to men that they do not receive. They're never out
from under pressure. I don't think I could take it for a week. The
possibility of violent death for them and their families is something
they've learned to live with like a man learns to sleep with a sore
arm."
The Big Stretch. Marshall must stretch all the way from an understanding
of this simple horror to the labyrinthine subtleties and the well-yoked
ambiguities that form the mind of Mr. Justice Felix Frankfurter. He
must stretch from his hatred of inequality to a recognition that much
of the opposition to Negro equality is just as honestly felt as his own
convictions. ("Some of my best friends are Dixiecrats —but they're
honest Dixiecrats.") He must stretch all the way from an idealist's
demand for nothing less than justice ("On the racial issue, you can't
be a little bit wrong any more than you can be a little bit pregnant or
a little bit dead") to a practical lawyer's acceptance of what he can
get when he knows he can get no more.
So stretched, his tense personality reflects the tensions of his job and
his time and his nation. And somehow, also, his personality reflects
the symmetry of the Constitution he serves and expounds. "Thurgood,"
says a psychologist friend, "is a delicate balance of turmoils "
He is a big (6 ft. 2 in., 210 Ibs.), quick-footed man, with a voice that
can be soft or raucous, manners that can be rude or gentle or courtly,
and an emotional pattern that swings him like a pendulum from the
serious to the absurd. His dignity can slide easily into arrogance and
his humility into self-abasement, but not for long. Humor—his own
humor—brings him back toward center. Marshall will listen so avidly to
his colleagues' scholarship that he has been called a brain-picker, but
he trades jokes with no man. Around him, the ceaseless flow of
anecdotes is all outward. Buffoonery relaxes his tense spiritual
muscles. Buffoonery and work. After the long, argumentative
conferences, after the horseplay and the backslapping, when he goes
home to his lonely Harlem apartment, he becomes Thurgood Marshall the
scholar, reading, noting, thinking, remembering-late into the night
almost every night. He walks into a cheap Harlem bar and is greeted by
friendly smiles, not because of what he has done for his race (the
barflies probably don't know who he is), but because they know him as a
man who tells funny stories about cotton hands and baseball games and
"that little ol' boy down in Texas." He walks into the Supreme Court and
is greeted by respectful nods, not because he is a crusader, but
because the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court know they can speak to
Thurgood Marshall as lawyer to lawyer,
