(5 of 9)
The chip-on-the-shoulder tradition was shared by Thurgood's father, Will, a dining-car worker on the B. & O. and later steward of Baltimore clubs, including the Gibson Island club, a yachtsman's paradise with jellyfish for serpents. Will, light-skinned and blue-eyed, used to tell Thurgood and his brother Aubrey, "If anyone calls you nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him—you got my orders to fight him." Once, Thurgood followed orders. Delivery boy for a hat store, he was trying to board a trolley with a stack of hats so high he "couldn't see over or around them. I was climbing aboard when a white man yanked me backwards. 'Nigguh,' he said, 'don't you push in front of no white lady again.' I hadn't seen any white lady, so I tore into him. The hats scattered all over the street, and we both got arrested."
Scroonched Down. Will Marshall was always saying that he would "sleep in the streets" rather than betray his principles. Thurgood says it too. But Thurgood is no fanatic, and he has no martyr complex. He tells two stories to prove it.
When his father got him a summer dining-car job on the B. & O., lanky Thurgood Marshall complained to the chief steward that his white waiter's pants were too short. "Boy," said the steward, "we can get a man to fit the pants a lot easier than we can get pants to fit the man. Why don't you just kinda scroonch down in 'em a little more?" Says Thurgood: "I scroonched."
The other story happened years later when Lawyer Marshall was in a small Mississippi town, waiting for a train to Shreveport, La.
"I was out there on the platform, trying to look small, when this cold-eyed man with a gun on his hip conies up.
'Nigguh,' he said, 'I thought you ought to know the sun ain't nevuh set on a live nigguh in this town.' So I wrapped my constitutional rights in Cellophane, tucked 'em in my hip pocket and got out of sight. And, believe me, I caught the next train out of there."
Whence this caution, moderation and restraint? Thurgood's mother, Norma Arica, has been for 28 years a Baltimore schoolteacher and numbers six other schoolteachers among her own and her husbands close relatives. As a teacher, she was among the aristocrats of Negro Baltimore, and her feeling about white-Negro relationships is balanced and moderated by her sense of service and leadership among her own people.
Up from the Basement. In all-Negro Douglas High School, one of Marshall's uncles gave him an A in algebra, but in grammar school he was repeatedly punished for breaking rules. Day after day, the principal sentenced Marshall to the basement, and allowed him to leave only when he had learned a section of the U.S. Constitution. "Before I left that school" he says, "I knew the whole thing by heart." He does not contend that the seeds of his career sprouted in the basement, but such discipline did reinforce a respect for authority, which he retains in uneasy balance with the strongly rebellious elements in his makeup.