(4 of 4)
While John W. Davis customarily goes almost uninterrupted in his arguments before the Supreme Court, enjoying the deference paid to the dean of the appellate bar, Marshall has generally been peppered with questions. He is as proud of these spirited exchanges as Davis should be of his immunity from them; Marshall rightly regards it as a personal tribute that the justices expect him to meet the frankest and most penetrating questions they can put. After his argument in Alston v. School Board, involving racial discrimination in salaries of public-school teachers in Norfolk, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit paid Marshall a rare compliment of another kind: still in their robes, the three judges stepped down off the bench to congratulate him on his masterly presentation. (He won.)
Finder's Rights. Thurgood (short for Thoroughgood) Marshall was born in Baltimore. His father was a country-club steward; his mother is a teacher in the segregated public schools there.
Young Marshall went to Jim Crow public schools himself, then to Pennsylvania's private, predominantly Negro, Lincoln University. On the side. he worked as grocery clerk, dining-car waiter, baker. His father wanted Thurgood to study law; no law school in Maryland would accept a Negro.
Marshall enrolled at Howard. "There," he says, "for the first time, I found out my rights." The late Charles Houston, then Howard's law dean and later N.A.A.C.P.'s counsel, looked on Howard as a self-destroying force: he wanted it to turn out a battery of able Negro lawyers who would one day accomplish the abolition of segregation, and so make Howard obsolete.* Star Student Marshall signed on, eventually (1938) succeeded Houston in the N.A.A.C.P. job. It has taken harddriving, easygoing Marshall to all 48 states, Japan and Korea, has several times put him in hot spots where mobs menaced his life. Inching along from precedent to precedent, Marshall is conscious of the distance still ahead, but also conscious and proud of the distance he and the N.A.A.C.P. have already traveled. Says he: "It's good to see the change, when you know you did it.':
* A decision that returned to plague Davis in the Steel Seizure case.
† Overruled 23 years later.
* Overruled 15 years later.
* There was a Howard lawyer in each of the five segregation cases.