A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America

Book by Ball Howard

From Chapter 1

Born into Racism and Segregation in America

Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908. That year an African American named Jack Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns, the then world heavyweight champion. This was the first time a black man had taken the title away from a white man. As soon as Johnson won, the search was on for the "great white hope" who would take the crown away from him. For African Americans, Johnson's victory may have been the only joy they had that year.

On July 2, Thurgood Marshall's birthday, there were stories in the newspapers about race riots, accompanied by crude racial jokes, reminders of the inferiority of the African American in a world dominated by whites. The sociology of the day, as exemplified by the work of Herbert Spencer, U.S. Supreme Court decisions of that era, and Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's treatise on world power, all argued scientifically and legally for the racial inferiority of Thurgood's people.

Although vastly outnumbered by the colored peoples of the world, whites used their power and technology ruthlessly to dominate the lives of nonwhites, particularly in America, where African Americans were worse off than impoverished serfs of some feudal kingdom. Since the end of the Civil War, they had been seen as a societal problem that called for a final resolution. By the turn of the century, that solution was state-ordered Jim Crow segregation of white and black, America's version of white South Africa's policy of apartheid. This was the America into which Thurgood Marshall was born.

Slavery, Race, and Racism: The Historic Context
In August 1619, the first shipment of Negro slaves, comprising about twenty persons, arrived at Point Comfort, near Jamestown, Virginia. In 1640, a Virginia judge set the tone for America's history of racial discrimination when he sentenced three indentured servants who had run away and had been captured by local authorities. He punished the two white indentured servants by adding one year apiece to their indenture. The third indentured servant, an African American, was punished for his failed escape "by [being] sentenced . . . to a lifetime of service."

During the early seventeenth century and continuing up to 1865, slavery was legally recognized in law and politics. African Americans were seen as chattel property, much like oxen and wagons, to be bought and sold at the whim of the slave owner. From the earliest days of British colonialization of North America, African American slaves had no legal or civil rights. By the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1787--almost two centuries after slavery had come to America--every Southern state constitution contained clauses that perpetuated slavery by forbidding state legislators from emancipating slaves.

The U.S. Constitution referred to the slaves only in property and electoral enumeration terms. Despite the new nation's commitment to equality, pronounced in the Declaration of Independence, slavery was sanctioned. Slaves were not citizens, but merely properties valued, for purposes of determining each state's electoral representation, as three-fifths of a human being. The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act further extended the property rights of slave owners to all the states. When the nation's capital was established in 1801, only "free white inhabitants" could elect members of the Washington, D.C., city council.

In 1842, in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a slave owner's property rights took precedence over a state's right to protect African Americans. The 1850 amendment to the Fugitive Slave Act reaffirmed that slaves were chattel property. It appointed and authorized U.S. marshals to hold hearings and return slaves to their masters.

The ultimate sanction was the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, confirming that slavery was the law of the land. Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom in federal court in a non-slave state. By a seven-to-two vote (five of the seven justices were born and raised in the South), the Supreme Court said, in part, that Scott was property and had "no rights a white man has to respect." Scott, because he was black, did not have legal "standing" to bring a suit in any federal court, even if he were a free black. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in blunt terms: "It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race. . . . They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Hooded Terror and the Civil War Amendments
After the Civil War's end and Lincoln's assassination, the radical Republican Reconstruction Congress succeeded in introducing and getting ratified, between 1865 and 1870, the thirteenth through fifteenth Amendments to the Consti-tution, the so-called Civil War Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment,
ratified in 1865, ended slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was a direct response to Black Codes enacted in localities across the South after 1865 to control and limit the legal and political status--and conduct--of their recently freed slaves. In some cases, these codes "amounted to a virtual re-enslavement of blacks." They deprived African Americans of their basic individual rights. Louisiana's code, for example, starkly stated that "the people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States."
From the Hardcover edition.