Free Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

NAACP to more spacious offices in the Willkie Memorial Building in midtown Manhattan, a rash of recent hirings had left Thurgood Marshall’s LDF short on space.
    Since his arrival at the NAACP in 1938, Marshall had been forced to share an office, first with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and later with various LDF counsel over the years. He was, Marshall wrote in a 1947 memo to Walter White, “the only executive who shared offices.” That was after he’d been shuttled into a small fourth-floor office in Freedom House with two young females, attorney Constance Baker and sociologist Annette Peyser—the three of them shared the single phone. Marshall told White conditions had become unbearable; it was impossible to concentrate with three people in the same office working on different types of cases, “answering the telephone and/or dictating.” Marshall was, he wrote, “at the end of my rope.”
    Though sympathetic, White was not especially disposed to accommodate the less than punctilious Marshall. He had already made it clear to Marshall that he did not appreciate some patterns of behavior in the LDF offices, most notably an “overfamiliarity and casualness” and the use of first names between executives and secretaries or stenographers during office hours that Marshall permitted. W. E. B. DuBois, who had left the organization in 1934, was nevertheless around the office enough to observe Marshall’s “unbuttoned office manners to be outlandishly bad.” It was a charge the lawyer could not deny. Victories were celebrated, often on Friday afternoons, when Marshall would pull a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer and proceed to hold court. Imitating judges, opposing counsel, or dim Uncle Tom witnesses, he’d punctuate his tales from the civil rights battlefront with one of his famous deadpan grins or bawdy punch lines. He relished racial humor, like the story about the slave who stole a turkey from his master, then ate the whole bird—and just as the master was about to deliver a whipping, the slave pleaded, “You shouldn’t beat me, massuh. You got less turkey, but you sure got more nigger.”
    “He could tell some pretty off-color jokes which would be, if they were told by someone else, embarrassing,” recalled Mildred Roxborough, who began a long career with the NAACP as a secretary in the early 1950s. “But you would find yourself responding to them because of the way in which he told them.”
    In an office where the work was hard, usually depressing, and often tragic, Marshall was inclined to using sophomoric or gallows humor to alleviate tension. One associate recalled an occasion when Marshall, in the course of doing research, came across a story in a nineteenth-century newspaper about a black man who’d been doing railroad construction in the Midwest and had fallen into a ditch. The absurdity of the headline gripped Marshall, who kept reading it aloud from his desk, over and over, as if it summed up the black man’s condition then, and now: “Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . . Nigger in a Pit . . .”
    The letters from the South that arrived at the NAACP offices often brought cries for help or pleas for justice, and Marshall commonly read them to his staff, even if the LDF could not offer help. A letter, at once touching and humorous, that he received in May 1949 from Charles Jones in Hog Wallow, Georgia, was typical:
    Mr. Turgood.
    I see by the Courer [Pittsburgh Courier] that you ar the No. 1 negro of all Time, so I take my pen in han as you must be the man I have been lookin for all these yers.
    You see Mr. Turgood I has great trouble an goin to church don’t seem to make it better. The Courer say you has scared the white folks down hear in the South and has them on the run. Well, maybe so but you has them runnin after me and I am ritin to try to get you to make them run in the other road away from me. They is shootin and beating and tarfeatherin all around here getten