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"Segregation itself" had long been a target of Negro spokesmen. But Thurgood Marshall is not primarily a Negro spokesman; he is a constitutional lawyer ihe problem facing him and his colleagues was how to attack segregation itself on legal grounds. The weight of the precedents ran against them. Where would they find evidence to turn the balance?
The answer was peculiarly contemporary and peculiarly American. Just as U.S military staffs swim—and sometimes drown—in rivers of expert reports, just as U.S. business turns more and more to specialized organizers of facts, so Marshall & Co. mobilized a small army of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists to prove what every Negro among them believed to be obvious: that segregated education could not be "equal."
The night before a Supreme Court school-segregation argument, Marshall & Co. went through an interesting exercise Howard University. Dean Houston years before had started moot courts with lawyers on the bench and students in the courtroom all trying to anticipate hard questions that the Supreme Court Justices might ask. A student threw the N.A.A.C.P. men into a nose dive by asking how they would get around an old Supreme Court decision upholding a Louisiana law which said nobody could be a Mississippi River pilot whose father hadn't been. Marshall & Co. worked far into the night on that one. Next day, it turned out to be one of the first questions Justice Frankfurter asked. Marshall took evasive action and Frankfurter, the record indicates, was diverted if not satisfied.
"I Was So Happy." In the Supreme Court arguments, Marshall was facing the man who for 30 years had been the most prestigious U.S. constitutional lawyer: John W. Davis. For weeks Marshall had been overworked, nervous, irritable. In court he was, as always, calm, polite, quick to grasp the inferences of a question, never loud, never oratorical. At one point he managed to get into a few potent sentences his analysis of the South's attitude:
"I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday," he said, "that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart or something. Everybody knows that is not true. Those same kids in Virginia and South Carolina—and I have seen them do it—they play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, they separate to go to school, they come out of school and play ball together. They have to be separated in school . . . Why, of all the multitudinous groups of people in this country, [do] you have to single out the Negroes and give them this separate treatment? It can't be because of slavery in the past, because there are very few groups in this country that haven't had slavery some place back in the history of their groups. It can't be color, because there are Negroes as white as the drifted snow, with blue eyes, and they are just as segregated as the colored men. The only thing it can be is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible. And now is the time, we submit, that this court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for."