The Symbolic Justice.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Review

Thurgood Marshall was a great litigator, but not a great Justice

THURGOOD MARSHALL:

American Revolutionary

By Juan Williams

Times Books, $30

Thurgood Marshall ought to be remembered more for his twenty-three years of work as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (1938-1961) than for his twenty-four years of service as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court (1967-1991). During his time as the NAACP's top lawyer, Marshall won a long list of landmark Supreme Court cases and had great fun doing so. Badly miscast as an appellate judge, Marshall's record as a justice was highly disappointing, and the reclusive strictures of judicial life transformed the once happy lawyer into a depressed and eventually angry jurist.

Marshall grew up in the racially mixed world of Baltimore, Maryland, influenced more by his mother, who taught in an all-black public school for discriminatorily low wages, than by his alcoholic father. Juan Williams, in his informative and perceptive new biography, attributes Marshall's optimistically integrationist legal vision to his early life experiences in Baltimore. Williams likewise ascribes Marshall's early courtroom agenda of challenging discriminatory teachers' salaries and whites-only state-supported law schools to the home state practices that had disadvantaged his mother and kept him from applying to the University of Maryland rather than to Howard University's School of Law.

Marshall graduated from Howard Law in 1933, and within four years Marshall's Howard mentor, Charles H. Houston, brought his 28 year-old protege up to New York City as his only aide in the NAACP's nascent legal office. Two years later Marshall succeeded Houston in the top job and began litigating the long string of constitutional challenges to southern segregation that culminated ia Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Along the way Marshall won other notable victories--such as Smith v. Allwright (1944), abolishing "white primaries," and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), voiding racially restrictive housing covenants--which nowadays are no longer as famous as Brown. For Marshall those years were a nonstop bout of "frantic activity," not only because of the dozens of anti-segregation cases Marshall helped prepare but also on account of the endless requests for legal aid that poured into NAACP headquarters from individual black citizens who were suffering abuse in one or another corner of America's criminal justice system.

His workload notwithstanding, Marshall had tremendous fun during the '40s and early '50s, Williams explains, because "he liked people, and he liked to travel. He enjoyed going out drinking ... until the small hours of the morning" in whatever locale his NAACP work had taken him to. Marshall also fared well even in the rigidly racist worlds of southern jails and courtrooms, for "he was a charmer who...