Thurgood Marshall Read Online Free PDF

as a dining-car waiter on the B & O in February 1925. He had a problem with his uniform, however; it was too small. After he complained to his boss, the chief waiter told Thurgood, “Boy, we can get a man to fit the pants a lot easier than we can get pants to fit the man. Why don’t you just kinda scroonch down in ’em a little more?” Marshall later said he had no choice: “I scroonched.” 3
    Thurgood’s work also taught him a lesson about the control the company held over its black workers. The white engineers, conductors, and mechanics were unionized, but the black waiters were forbidden to organize even though they earned just fifty-five dollars a month and were not given overtime pay. One day while he was working on the train, a group of waiters began talking about the need for a union. When the train arrived back in Baltimore, the white inspector of dining cars boarded and went directly to the waiter who had led the discussion. “He tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Get your clothes. You’re fired,’ ” recounted Marshall. “Now how did that word get to Baltimore? … There was nobody on there but us. It was one of the crew … each one looking at the other one like this,” he recalled, giving the accusatory glare of a betrayed co-worker.
    Thurgood kept his mouth shut and in six months he had saved enough to pay Lincoln’s tuition for a year. In September 1925 he packed for the fifty-five-mile car ride up Route One to the small farm town of Oxford, Pennsylvania. Lincoln University, founded by Presbyterians in 1854 (and renamed in honor of President Lincoln after he was assassinated), was known as the Black Princeton, because Presbyterians also ran the famous New Jersey school for young white men and many Princeton graduates taught at Lincoln.
    Thurgood traveled to Lincoln with Aubrey, who was then starting his senior year. There were 285 men at Lincoln that year. Aubrey had pledged a fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, but he was not well established at the school. According to his first roommate, Franz (Jazz) Byrd, Aubrey was a remote person, “kind of irritable.… He just felt that he was superior.” Byrd, a star football player, described Aubrey as a very serious person who did not get along with his jocular younger brother. “The dislikebetween Thurgood and Aubrey was so intense,” Byrd recalled. “I’ve never seen it in any two brothers that I know who came from the same parents, same background and everything else.” 4
    Thurgood spent little time with his brother and almost never talked about him. But they did have regular arguments. Much of Thurgood’s loud, crude behavior in his early years at Lincoln may have been an effort to set himself apart from the reserved Aubrey.
    In Thurgood’s first year at Lincoln, Aubrey was on the senior honor roll. Thurgood, by contrast, was having a great time and hardly ever studying. His inventive use of curse words, his love of storytelling, and his joy in card games made him a good fit for the young, all-male social scene.
    Thurgood had no problem playing along with the Lincoln custom of freshmen wearing little blue beanies on their heads and short pants with garters to hold up their socks. Upperclassmen called the freshmen dogs and tried to steal their beanies, sometimes starting small fights, known as pushing knuckles. Freshmen were also required to know the names of all the buildings on campus, the history of the university, and the alma mater. And they could only enter buildings through the back door.
    In this boys’ paradise the only thing that slowed Thurgood was his campus job. He was in charge of baking bread for the school cafeteria. “We would cook it and then put it in a closet and serve it the second day,” Marshall recalled. “We’d take a loaf of bread right out of the oven. And slice it open like this and lay a quart of butter right there and griddle it. That’s a meal right there, and a good meal, too.”
    Most of the time