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a schoolteachers among her own and her husband's close relatives, As 2 leacher, she was among Ure aristocrats of Negro Rullimore, and her tceling about white- Negro relationships is balanced and mod- eraled by her sense of service and leader- ship among her own people. Up from the Basement. In all-Negro Douglas High School, ane of Marshall's uncles gave him an A in algebra, but in yrainmar school he was repeatedly pun- ished for breaking rules. Day after day, the principal sentenced Marshall to the basement, dnd allowed him to leave only when he had learned a section of the US. Constitution. “Before 1 left that school,” he says. “L knew the whole thing by heart.” Ele does not contend that the secs of his etreer sprouted in the base- ment, but such discipline did reinforce a respect for autherity., which he retains mo ouneasy balance with the strongly re- bvtligus elements in his makeup. He went off to Lincoly Caiversity. near Chester, Pa., an institudion then with an all-Negro student body and an all-white lacully. The imporkut event of his under- eraduate vears occurred at the Cherry Street Memorial Church in) Philadelphia: “Wrowenl in there because we learned that’s where all the cute chicks went.” The one be met was Buster Bures. “first we decided to get married five years after 1 yraduated. then three, hen ane, and we “ot || Over 50% 25% to 50% 6. _ WE 10% 10 25% — all Under |O% Kansas City St.Louis? (* MO. 26 PATTERNS OF COLG Percent of Negroes to Total Population by Counties ~ 1950 Census “ Idlewild a” (Negro resort) ne Wis, Chica hica NEB. MLL. IND. finally did just before I started my last semester.” (Buster died of lung cancer last February. Phey had no children.) Marshall decided to try law school. The University of Maryland was barred to him, so he commuted to Howard Uni- versity in Washington. Within a week Marshall knew that “this was it, This was what [ wanted to do for as long as T lived,” Only a fair college student, he had to mect very tough slandards at Howard. “1 got through simply by overwhelming the job. L was at it zo hours a day, seven days a week.” On to the N.A.A.C.P. Out of Howard, he hopefully hung out a shingle in Balti- more (his mother took the rug off her living-room Hoor to put in his office). Nothing happened. It was 1933. and hard- ly anybody was worth suing. Marshall's practice lost him $1.000 the first year. The next year he did better, building up a well-Lo-do clientele and a reputation, but he was increasingly involved in low-fee, hard-work cases on civil rights. In a Maryland court, he won separatle-but- equal status for a chent, Donald Murriy, at the University of Maryland School of Law, a right about which he felt strongly. To the N.A.A.C.P. Jeaders, this victory tagged him as a really effective attorney in the NAA. CLP.'s kind of case. In 1936 he went Lo work for the NAACP “temporarily” under his old Af MIGH. . oe 92. “ Philadelphia OHIO Washinglon,D.C a -Miaeni R,M. Chapin, Jr. law-schvol mentor. Charles Houston, but by 1938 admitted it was a permanent, double-time job. His salary then was $2,600 a year. (Present salary: $15,000. } The N.A.A.C.P. was winning graduate- school cases in the courts, but the defend- ank states complied merely by selting separate “schools” for one or two students. “It was beginning to look as though every time we won a lawsuit we were working our way deeper into the separate-but- equal hole. The fact was we just weren't ready to tackle segregation as an evil per se. We didn't know enough.” Before World War 1] Marshal! had succeeded Houston as chief counsel of N.A.A.C.P. He won some key victories: againsL a union which had closed-shop contracts but discriminated against Ne- groes; against discrimination in the U.S, Air Corps, a long slep toward the present clesegregation of the armed forces; against ihe Democratic Party of Texas, which claimed that it was a private organization and could make its own rules barring Negroes from voling in primary elections. The River Pilots. Toward the end of the war, N.A-A.C.P. leaders began to face the failure concealed in the success of its s¢parate-but-equal victories. In rogg a group of 100 N.A.A.C,1". leaders, mostly lawyers. met in Manhattan, Marshall re- calls: “Like somebody at the meeting said, while it was true a lot of us might die withoul ever seeing the goal realized, we were going lo have lo change directions if our children weren’l coing to die as black hasiards Loo. Sv we decided Lo make segre- gation itself our target,” “Segregation itself? had long been a target of Negra spokesmen. Tut Thur- good Marshall is not primarily a Negro spokesman; he isa constitutional lawyer. ‘Che problem facing him and his colleagues was how to attack segregation itself on legal grounds. The weight of the prece- dents ran against them, Where would they find evidence to turn the balance? The answer was peculiarly conlempo- rary and peculiarly American. Just as U.S, military staffs swim—and sometimes drown--in rivers of expert reports, just as U.S. business Lurns more and more to spectilized organizers of facts, s0 Marshall & Co. mobilized 2 small army of psycholo- fists, psychiatrists. sociologists and an- thropologists Lo prave what every Nero among them believed to be obvious: thitt sexregaled education could nat be equal.” The night before a Supreme Court school-segremation argumeol, Marshall & Co. went Ubreugh an interesting exercise at Lloward University, Dear Houston vears before had started muot courts, with Jawyers an the beneh ane students in the courtroonr all trying to anticipate tard questions thal the Supreme Court Justices nught ask, A student threw the NLALALCLPS men inta a nose dive by asking how they would get around an old Supreme Court decision upholding a Louisiana law which said nobody could he a Mississippi River pilot whose father hadn't been. Mitrshall & Co. worked far tnta the ntght on that TIME, SEPTEMBER 19, 1955