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He went off to Lincoln University, near Chester, Pa., an institution then with an all-Negro student body and an all-white faculty. The important event of his undergraduate years occurred at the Cherry street Memorial Church in Philadelphia:
"We went in there because we learned that's where all the cute chicks went." The one he met was Buster Burey. "First we decided to get married five years after I graduated, then three, then one, and we finally did just before I started my last semester." (Buster died of lung cancer last February. They had no children.)
Marshall decided to try law school. The University of Maryland was barred to him, so he commuted to Howard University in Washington. Within a week Marshall knew that "this was it. This was what I wanted to do for as long as I lived." Only a fair college student, he had to meet very tough standards at Howard. "I got through simply by overwhelming the job. I was at it 20 hours a day, seven days a week."
On to the N.A.A.C.P. Out of Howard he hopefully hung out a shingle in Baltimore (his mother took the rug off her living-room floor to put in his office). Nothing happened. It was 1933, and hardly anybody was worth suing. Marshall's practice lost him $1,000 the first year. The next year he did better, building up a well-to-do clientele and a reputation, but he was increasingly involved in low-fee hard-work cases on civil rights. In a Maryland court, he won separate-but-equal status for a client. Donald Murray at the University of Maryland School of Law, a right about which he felt strongly. To the N.A.A.C.P. leaders, this victory tagged him as a really effective attorney in the N.A.A.C.P.'s kind of case.
In 1936 he went to work for the N.A.A.C.P. "temporarily" under his old law-school mentor. Charles Houston, but by 1938 admitted it was a permanent double-time job. His salary then was $2,600 a year. (Present salary: $15,000.)
The N.A.A.C.P. was winning graduate-school cases in the courts, but the defenant states complied merely by setting separate "schools" for one or two students. "It was beginning to look as though every time we won a lawsuit we were working our way deeper into the separate-but equal hole. The fact was we just weren't ready to tackle segregation as an evil per se. We didn't know enough."
Before World War II Marshall had succeeded Houston as chief counsel of N.A.A.C.P. He won some key victories: against a union which had closed-shop contracts but discriminated against Negroes; against discrimination in the U.S Air Corps, a long step toward the present desegregation of the armed forces; against the Democratic Party of Texas, which claimed that it was a private organization and could make its own rules barring Negroes from voting in primary elections. The River Pilots. Toward the end of the war, N.A.A.C.P. leaders began to face the failure concealed in the success of if separate-but-equal victories. In 1943 group of 100 N.A.A.C.P. leaders, mostly lawyers, met in Manhattan. Marshall recalls: "Like somebody at the meeting said, while it was true a lot of us might die without ever seeing the goal realized we were going to have to change directions if our children weren't going to die as black bastards too. So we decided to make segregation itself our target."