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At 13 Marshall began hustling at a nearby pool hall, where men would bet on his games, then give him part of the winnings. Sometimes Marshall would place bets as well. "It's not something I am proud of, but it's not something I regret," he says. "I'd take that money home to my mother, and that's how we'd eat that night." While other boys in the project turned to drugs and crime, Marshall pursued better jobs: delivering newspapers, washing dishes, cooking in a local restaurant. All the while he maintained a 3.8 average in Savannah's newly desegregated schools, eventually earning the scholarships that would take him to Emory. There were triumphs--and put-downs. One year Marshall's middle-school Quiz Bowl team won a contest focusing on drugs and alcohol. Says he: "After we won--and believe me, it was sort of amazing we won--some city-council member made a snide remark that we should have won because we knew more about drugs than anyone. It was an attempt to belittle our accomplishment just because we were black."
After Emory, Marshall wants to go home to the coastal slums of Savannah to try to improve the lives of the city's foundering African Americans. He has no delusions that he can wipe out the hunger and poverty that haunted his own youth; his attempt last summer to initiate a modest on-the-job-training program for inner-city youths died in the local Chamber of Commerce. He feels scorn for blacks who flee poverty only to forget those they left behind. "[Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas talks about being from Pinpoint, a really rundown area of Savannah, but to my knowledge he has never been back," says Marshall. "Why doesn't he come back and help make things better?"
Nevertheless, Marshall also foresees attending law school--say, Harvard or Yale--then entering politics. And Marshall entertains one other vision after that--"living in a big, white house on Pennsylvania Avenue." Mother would be proud.
ARMY LIEUTENANT COLONEL, BURKE, VIRGINIA
AS AN ACTIVE-DUTY LIEUTENANT COLONEL who served with the Army in Korea and Germany and side by side with Colin Powell in the first squadron of the 10th U.S. Cavalry, Michael Nelson, 47, is accustomed to being surrounded by men. But the power of standing in the company of only black men moved him deeply. "I went there to support the event, but then I found I was part of the event," he says. "I was taken in, heart and mind and soul." Ever the military man, he was struck by the flags waving in the Mall: the American flag, the black-and-green African-American flag, the Nation of Islam flag. "And all these battlements were just waving and blowing in the wind as the men stood there, ready to do battle within their communities, ready to take back their sons and daughters from the ravages of drugs and alcohol, ready to act to save their women from being battered. And as far as the eye could see--these were black men."