Thurgood Marshall Read Online Free PDF Page B

Thurgood lived as a boy without a complicated thought in his head. His friends thought he never studied and he became known as a great pinochle player, a fan of cowboy movies, and a connoisseur of comic books. He was always bumming cigarettes. Thurgood roomed with James Murphy, a friend from Baltimore whose family ran the
Afro-American
newspaper. They kept a party going in their room on most nights. On their door was a sign welcoming visitors to the “Land of the Disinherited.” 5
    One friend later wrote that during their years at Lincoln, Thurgood was a “harum-scarum youth, the loudest individual in the dormitory and apparently the least likely to succeed.” 6
    Norma Marshall, aware that Thurgood was not as studious as Aubrey, urged her younger son to become a dentist despite his ambition to practice law. Black dentists were in demand because many whites refused towork on black patients. Also, black people generally did not trust white dentists, who were known in the South for yanking the teeth out of any black person with a toothache. To please his mother Thurgood took some pre-medical classes. But he had little taste for basic science. Even more of a problem, he had a run-in with a professor who saw him as a less than serious student.
    The hardest work he put in was going to the debate team’s get-togethers to show off his talent for argument. Thurgood’s debating skills got him on Lincoln’s varsity team as a freshman. It would be great training for a future lawyer. That year Lincoln’s team debated Oxford University at Bethel AME Church in Baltimore before over a thousand people. Thurgood was not one of the four Lincoln men who debated, but he trained for the event and traveled to it with the team, which thrilled black Baltimore by winning. Later in his Lincoln career, Thurgood was one of the principal debaters when the university’s team traveled to Boston to debate Harvard and later the British Union team (students from Cambridge, the University of London, and Edinburgh).
    After the Harvard debate Thurgood attended a dinner where he was seated next to a white female student. He had dealt with white women while working in Baltimore, but there was always the danger, as the hat-box incident in his youth had demonstrated, of sudden violence when a black man got too close to a white woman socially. To sit next to a white woman of his age in a social setting made him nervous. “I never felt good around them,” he said later. “[At the Harvard Club dinner] I was the most uncomfortable son of a bitch in the world. But I managed to just grin and bear it.”
    Traveling with the debate team wasn’t the only occasion for Thurgood to get off campus. On weekends he often went to Philadelphia, about an hour north, or traveled south for an hour and a half to Baltimore. Lincoln men would show off by leaving campus every weekend, claiming to be visiting beautiful women. Thurgood bragged to classmates of being engaged ten times during college. “I went away every weekend—Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington,” he recalled. “Wherever there was some pussy to chase, I was there.”
    His freshman year of college turned out to be a joyride for Thurgood. He had friends all over campus who delighted in the pranks and card games he loved so much. And though he didn’t have great grades, he wasn’t flunking out. His biggest worry, over money for tuition, had faded. Not only was he working on campus but his father had recoveredhis health and found a good-paying job as the head steward at the Gibson Island Club. The club, on the Chesapeake Bay, was eighteen miles from Baltimore and a golf and sailing haven for Baltimore’s white, upper-class Protestants. Teddy Stewart, who washed dishes there, described it as “one of the best gentile clubs in the state of Maryland if not the best.” Sam Daniels, who worked as a busboy on the island, remembered a sign on the causeway that read: “No Niggers and Dogs Allowed.”
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