Deborah Amos: From Minnesota Public Radio, this is an American RadioWorks documentary, Thurgood Marshall Before the Court. I'm Deborah Amos.

Marshall: Education is not the teaching of three R's. Education is teaching to live together with fellow citizens.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American named to the United States Supreme Court; but his most significant legal victory came when Marshall was on the other side of the bench, arguing the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in American schools. The ruling was the high point of a long campaign Marshall led to tear down the walls of segregation. Marshall died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Smith: When Thurgood Marshall was born, times were as bad as they'd ever been for African Americans since slavery. It was 1908. That year there were 89 reported lynchings of black people from Oxford, Georgia to Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois. One Southern state after another had passed an extensive series of Jim Crow laws to fence off African Americans from the rest of society.

Litwack: That meant really rigid segregation of blacks and whites in almost every conceivable situation in which they might come into social contact.

Historian, Leon Litwack:

Litwack: That is from public transportation, from the workplace, hospitals, the public parks and schools. From separate textbooks, to Jim Crow bibles for black witnesses in court.

Marshall: In the department stores downtown, the Negro was not allowed to buy anything off the counter. We were told to get the hell out. Another thing I remember very well was there were no toilet facilities available to Negroes in the downtown area. And one day I had to go. The only thing I could do was get on a trolley car and try to get home. And I did get almost in the house when I ruined the front doorsteps.

Thurgood Marshall never forgot the bitter humiliations of growing up in Jim Crow Baltimore. But he also thrived there. Marshall and his older brother Aubrey had educated, determined parents. Their mother Norma was strong and protective. She worked as a schoolteacher. Their brash, outgoing father Willie was a waiter and a railroad porter who taught his boys to be proud of their race.

Marshall: He was blonde and blue-eyed and he could have passed for white. Lot of times he would get in a big fight because somebody would think he was white. Say I would do something good and my father would say, "Well that's right black of you." You'd always heard, "That's very white of you." Well you understand what he was saying.

In 1930, Thurgood Marshall graduated from Lincoln University, a prestigious black college in Pennsylvania. While at Lincoln, Marshall married Vivian Burey. He wanted to go to law school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, but African Americans were not allowed. So Marshall commuted by train to all-black Howard University, an hour away in Washington D.C.. There, Marshall met a man who would change his life: law professor Charles Hamilton Houston.

Marshall: He was a graduate of Amherst and Harvard. Very brilliant, very decent person but a very hard man.

Wilkins: He was unyielding on these students learning how to do it exactly right.

Law professor, David Wilkins:

Wilkins: He brooked no quarter with any mistake of punctuation, of procedural regularity, of form, because he knew that if you were to give white judges the slightest excuse for dismissing your case or dismissing you as being incompetent, they would do so.

There were few black lawyers in the 1930s and most of them handled routine legal matters like wills and real estate. Charles Houston used his classroom like an anvil, pounding out a generation of exceptional black attorneys for a courtroom crusade against segregation. Marshall was his top student.

Wilkins: I think anybody who ever met Thurgood Marshall would say he was a born leader. First of all he was just a physically imposing man. He was probably six foot three, drop-dead gorgeous, with a booming voice, a towering intellect and a fierce determination to pursue and succeed at whatever task was before him.

In the late 1930s, the NAACP was still a tiny organization with huge plans. The group had been founded in 1909 by W. E. B. DuBois and a group of liberal whites. Their cause to fight segregation, lynchings and other violence against African Americans. Southern courts and policemen offered little protection for black people. In the 1940s, white journalist, Ray Sprigle of Pittsburgh, posed as a light-skinned Negro for a month of travel to learn what life was like on the other side of the color line.

Sprigle: In the Deep South any Negro can be and all too frequently is murdered by any white man for any or no reason, with the almost inevitable certainty that the white murderer will go scot free. Quite frequently they're hanged for killing white men, never for killing Negroes.

On the other hand, historians say Southern blacks were frequently tried for crimes they didn't commit, if they weren't lynched first. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston traveled the South in the 30s and 40s demanding equal rights in local courtrooms. Marshall always kept a pamphlet of the US Constitution in his suit pocket -the way another man might carry a Bible. His aim was to use the Constitution to strike down every Jim Crow law. But Marshall also knew when to leave it tucked away.

Sound: Typewriter

Marshall/Actor: Memo to the office from Thurgood Marshall. Hugo, Oklahoma. Trial of W.D. Lyons.

In 1941, Marshall went to rural Oklahoma to defend a black farmhand accused of shooting a white couple and their little boy, then setting their house on fire.

Marshall/Actor: Several officers took turns beating him that night but he refused to admit to anything. He was taken to the court prosecutors office where 10 or more officers took turns beating him with a special type of blackjack known as a "nigger beater." Defendant made the confession the next morning.

Sound: Typewriter

Marshall/Actor: When we walked into court, word went around that "a nigger lawyer from New York" was on the case. We put on evidence to show that the confessions were secured by force and violence.

Klarman: He could cross-examine white sheriffs on a footing of equality and trap them in lies. And the people in the audience had never seen anything like this because they had no occasions in their life where a black person could accuse a white person of lying, and it was a risky enterprise.

Marshall/Actor: I did all of the cross-examining of the officers because we figured they would resent being questioned by a Negro and would get angry and this would help us. It worked perfect. They all became angry at the idea of a Negro pushing them into tight corners and making their lies so obvious. Boy did I like that, and so did the Negroes in the courtroom. Law enforcement officers now know that when they beat a Negro up, they might have to answer for it on the witness stand.

The jury found W. D. Lyons guilty, but only imposed a life sentence instead of the death penalty. For an innocent black man, tried in a southern court for killing whites, life in jail was still a victory. For Marshall it was an excellent case to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and one that could raise money for the cash-strapped NAACP.

Thurgood Marshall combined the high-profile criminal cases with a lengthening string of court victories against segregation laws themselves. He and his legal team won case after case at the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1950, Thurgood Marshall was the most famous black leader in America. People started calling him "Mister Civil Rights."

For more than half of the twentieth century, the American South was a rigidly segregated society. Blacks were barred from many public places.

Reporter: Listen now to results of a hidden recording machine and a Negro's experience. First, in a restaurant:

Waitress: You know we don't serve colored people in here.

Reporter: In a bus:

Bus Driver: Get back there in the back. Man: What do I have to do? Do you want me to get off? Bus Driver: Get back there where I told ya' or get off this bus! Don't give me no more lip boy!

Reporter: In a filling station:

Gas Attendant: Fill it up boy? Man: Give me 5 gallons please. Gas Attendant: All right, where you going boy? Man: I am going to the restroom. Gas Attendant: I am sorry we don't have restrooms here for coloreds. Man: Well I don't care about a colored restroom; I just want to go to one. Gas Attendant: Well you won't use the one here; you know there's a law in this state.

Nowhere were segregation laws more entrenched than the public schools. To fight those laws, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took on a notorious 1896 Supreme Court decision called Plessy v. Ferguson. An African American named Homer Plessy had challenged a Louisiana law requiring separate train cars for blacks and whites. The Supreme Court ruled against Plessy and cemented the devastating "separate but equal" doctrine. That allowed states to exclude black people from public places as long as they had access to equal, segregated facilities. But as American RadioWorks producer, Stephen Smith explains, separate was rarely equal.

Smith: In the first half of the twentieth century, caricatures of African Americans were an everyday part of the nation's culture.

Radio program: Aunt Jemima! {music fades under}

Many whites believed that black people were somehow inferior and didn't really mind being treated as second-class citizens.

Radio program: Smiling happy Aunt Jemima. Famous for secret recipe pancakes, waffles and buckwheat. Let's have a Down South saying Aunt Jemima.

Aunt Jemima: Well folks says that the mo' happiness you gives other folks, the mo' happiness you gets. {music fades under}

But times were slowly changing. After World War Two, nearly a million black soldiers returned from the fight against Nazi racism. Civil rights activism surged. African Americans increasingly spoke out on the radio against bigotry at home.

Walter White: There will never be complete equality until the courts and America abandon the myth of separate but equal accommodations.

Announcer: Mr Marshall.

Marshall: The biggest job to end race and caste as determining factors in this country is to do as a friend of mine says, cross the river between the white and black sections of town. The best way to cross the river and to bring people together of different racial groups would be in the public school system. That would be the best way to do it.

Beginning in 1950, the NAACP sued in 10 states and the District of Columbia, challenging the constitutionality of school segregation. Five of those cases arrived at the Supreme Court two years later. They were collectively called Brown v. Board of Education, named after plaintiff Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas. In a radio interview, Thurgood Marshall explained that segregation was unlawful not only because black schools were inferior to white ones, but because segregation itself injured black children.

Marshall: It's impossible to give equal educational facilities within a segregated school system for this reason: that reputable scientists, child psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, without exception, are completely agreed that where we have imposed racial segregation, there is definite harm to the minds of the segregated group. This is not theory. This is actually proven, accepted scientific knowledge.

Actually, the science was not so widely accepted, even within the NAACP. Some of Marshall's most trusted colleagues doubted that social science would help their legal argument. The studies had been done by psychologist Kenneth Clark, who tried to measure the effect of segregation on African American schoolchildren using black and white dolls. Author Richard Kluger:

Kluger: He asked black kids particularly to pick out the doll that they liked best. One that they thought was the good doll and one they thought was the bad doll, and the black children would invariably reach for the white doll as the good doll and the black doll would be the bad one. Pretty moving and shocking, and Marshall was persuaded that this would affect the Court.

Marshall: And when these tests were made, to me they proved what I knew all along that the average Negro had this complex that was built in as a result solely of segregation.

The doll studies were part of a vast, legal, historical and psychological body of research the NAACP lawyers toiled over.

The Supreme Court arguments for Brown took place in December 1952 and again, one year later. The chief lawyer for the Southern states was the formidable John W. Davis, a former democratic congressman and presidential nominee. At 79 years old, Davis had taken part in 250 Supreme Court cases, more than anyone else in the twentieth century. The 44-year old Thurgood Marshall had been in on 15 Supreme Court cases, and won 13 of them. There are no tape recordings of the Brown arguments, but Supreme Court transcripts show Marshall was firm and plainspoken.

Marshall/Actor: I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart or something. Everybody knows that is not true. Those same kids in Virginia and South Carolina-and I have seen them do it-they play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, they separate to go to school, they come out of school and play ball together. They have to be separated in school?

When the stately, silver-haired John W. Davis took the lectern, he dismissed the doll studies as weak and trivial. He also claimed that Southerners, white and black, preferred segregation.

In his closing argument, Marshall reminded the justices of all the laws separating blacks and whites the court had already struck down.

Marshall/Actor: You can have them voting together, you can have them not restricted because of law in the houses they live in. You can have them going to the same state university and the same college; but if they go to elementary and high school, the world will fall apart? And we submit the only way to arrive at that decision is to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.

The only thing it can be is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible; and now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.

The justices gave their answer five months later, on May 17, 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion, which suggested that the doll studies had some effect in persuading the Court that segregation was psychologically harmful to black children. Warren read from the bench, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision was unanimous, a surprise to many in the courtroom. When the session was over, Thurgood Marshall turned to his colleagues and said, "We hit the jackpot."

On May 31,1955, the Court ordered schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed," but the ruling set no firm date for segregation to end. Some states began passing laws to sidestep the Supreme Court's command. Others vowed to close their public schools entirely rather than desegregate. Time and again, Marshall said he expected common sense to prevail.

Marshall: I just do not believe that the citizens of any state are of such bigoted minds that they would be willing to abolish the school system that they've spent, in some instances 70 - 80 years to build up.

Marshall was wrong. White segregationists would take a very long time to tire. In fact, they were just getting started.

Music:

Across the South whites, led by politicians and school boards, defied the Supreme Court's 1954 order to desegregate America's schools "with all deliberate speed."

Man: We do not intend to have integration under any circumstances in Mississippi. Period.

Man: Let's show the nigger he's in the sunny South. Come on boys! {Sound: mob}

Violent mobs and an ambivalent President Eisenhower tested Thurgood Marshall's deep faith in the American justice system.

Reporter: Do you think the Negro students ever will get in here?

Man: I think they'll get in here but I don't know how long they'll live after they do get in here...

The lead crusader for school desegregation remained calm and confident.

Marshall: Every social step that has been made in this country to better conditions of minority groups, there have been people who have threatened violence, the beautiful part about our country in every such instance, is that violence has not taken place...

In 1957 Massive Resistance reached its peak in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the final part of our program, Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks describes Marshall's last big fight for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Reporter: This is Little Rock Central High School approximately two hours before the school is scheduled to open its doors for the fall semester.

Smith: Little Rock, Arkansas seemed an unlikely place for a racial showdown. By September 1957, the school board had carefully selected nine black students to integrate the all-white Central High School. Local officials expected a smooth start. But the night before school opened, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus suddenly announced he would block what he called "forcible integration." Faubus claimed that whites and blacks were arming for a battle.

Faubus: One store reported that a gang of Negro youth purchased knives, while another group waited outside...

News: Arkansas governor Orval Faubus moved in national guardsmen to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

Reporter: In front of the school there, you can see a couple hundred students waiting to see if the colored students show up.

Girl: The minute they walk in, we walk out.

Sound: Mob mayhem

Man: Suddenly there was a shout. They're here! They're here. The Niggers are coming!

Announcer: Elizabeth Anne Eckford missed the rendezvous with the other eight and so had to go it alone.

Woman: They didn't touch her. But they crowded all around her screaming, "Nigger! She's trying to get into our school."

After several harrowing moments a white woman stepped in to help 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford escape. Arkansas guardsmen used bayonets to block the other black students from entering Central High. Thurgood Marshall, the man who had won the 1954 Brown ruling outlawing segregation, flew to Little Rock. He found a black community under siege, but determined and organized. Lois Pattillo's daughter Melba was one of the nine. Mrs. Patillo told an interviewer about threatening phone calls they often got.

Patillo: They'd call me and say, "We're going to come and get her and hang her." I said, "Come right on I'm waiting for you." Sometimes I would hang up the phone trembling but told them to come right on because I'm waiting for you. Reporter: Did you have something to protect yourself with? Patillo: My mother was there. She knew which gun she was supposed to man. My son knew which one he was supposed to man, and I knew which one I was supposed to man. Meanwhile, we had a planned escape for Melba.

For two weeks Melba Patillo, and the other black students, waited to get into Central High as Marshall fought for them in a federal district court, and as the white mob surrounding the high school grew.

The crowd at Central High School, men in work shirts, gray-haired churchwomen and girls in checkered dresses, erupted in violence. Local police hustled the black students out of the school. The mayor of Little Rock telegrammed Eisenhower for help. The president was still reluctant to endorse integration but saw the crisis as a challenge to federal authority. On September 24, 1957, President Eisenhower spoke from the White House.

Eisenhower: I have today issued an Executive Order directing the use of troops under federal authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock, Arkansas. Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Announcer: We have the latest word from Little Rock at the moment. The army has escorted nine Negro students in Central High School {Sound: fade under}

Announcer: For several weeks the nine Negroes were shepherded through crowds of demonstrators by bayonet wielding troops, finally the situation calmed somewhat, but it was not normal. It was not until the end of the year that President Eisenhower was finally able to withdraw the troops.

Citing fears of another year of racial upheaval, the Little Rock school board tried to suspend integration at Central High School. Thurgood Marshall fought back, asking the US Supreme Court to convene a special session to settle the crisis. The court agreed. Lawyers for the Little Rock school board said they were unsure whether the Supreme Court's Brown ruling applied to Arkansas schools. On September 11, 1958, Marshall appeared before the nine justices and his argument was recorded on tape.

Marshall: Education is not the teaching of the three R's. Education is the teaching of the overall citizenship, to learn to live together with fellow citizens, and above all to learn to obey the law.

Marshall: I don't know of any more horrible destruction of principle of citizenship than to tell young children that those of you who withdrew, rather than to go to school with Negroes, "Come back, all is forgiven, you win." Therefore, I am not worried about Negro children at this stage. I worry about the white children in Little Rock who are told, as young people, that the way to get your rights is to violate the law and defy the lawful authorities. I am worried about their future. I don't worry about the Negro kids' future. They have been struggling with democracy long enough. They know about it.

With unusual speed, the Justices issued a brief, unanimous opinion: Little Rock schools had to obey the Supreme Court and integrate immediately.

Arkansas Governor, Orval Faubus, responded to the Supreme Court ruling on September 15, 1958.

Faubus: I have ordered closed the senior high schools of Little Rock in order to avoid the impending violence and disorder which would occur.

Two weeks later the citizens of Little Rock voted to close all their schools rather than integrate. It took a year of court battles and political turbulence before the schools reopened. Historian Adam Fairclough:

Fairclough: The Little Rock crisis sent a very mixed message. Overall I think it was a very discouraging message.

Marshall: I had thought, we had all thought that once we got the Brown case the thing was gonna be over. That's when we should have sat down and planned. The other side did. The other side planned all the delaying tactics they could think of.

School districts across the South spent years delaying integration. Southern states also tried to crush the NAACP, firing government employees who belonged to the organization, and publicizing membership lists to intimidate local activists.

Thurgood Marshall never witnessed the full integration of America's public schools. Today, racial segregation in schools is commonplace, but no longer by law.

The 30-year courtroom crusade against segregation Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues fought, was the first of its kind in the US. No one before had made such comprehensive use of the courts, and the Constitution, to secure the rights of a group of citizens. Later campaigns for the rights of women, minorities and other groups have been modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Music:

Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991, nearly four decades since the Supreme Court's Brown ruling

Brown could not solve all the problems created by a hundred years of legal restriction and societal separation. Indeed, it could not even solve the problem of segregation in schools. But it is there as a first, necessary step that we should celebrate on its fiftieth anniversary.