Marshall's complex relationship with Baltimore

Critical Eye

By Mary Carole McCauley | Sun theater critic

May 11, 2008

New York - From a second-floor classroom in the Baltimore school called Colored High, a teenage Thurgood Marshall watched white officers beat up black prisoners. But that's also the place where the budding civil rights activist first memorized the U.S. Constitution.

It was on a Baltimore trolley car that the youth was called a racial slur, took a swing at the white man who had insulted him, and was arrested.

And, it was in a Baltimore police station that he found help from a surprising source.

In later decades, Marshall made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the first African-American appointed to that august position. Baltimore was his point of departure, but like all such leave-takings, he never entirely got away. Eventually, he learned that he didn't want to.

The great man's fraught feelings about his hometown run throughout Thurgood, a biographical new play that recently opened on Broadway. Actor Laurence Fishburne stars in the title role, and he infuses the lines with a wry ambivalence.

"People call Baltimore 'up south,'" Marshall says in the play, "just below what we used to call the Smith and Wesson line. Baltimore was where slaves ran to when they escaped from plantations ... which may have something to do with why I was born there."

Marshall's early experiences are important because they shaped the man, who, in his turn, had a profound effect on U.S. history. Before his own appointment to the Supreme Court, he successfully argued landmark cases as chief counsel for the NAACP, most notably Brown vs. Board of Education. That's the 1954 ruling that prohibited separate schools for black and white pupils.

"Thurgood Marshall was the architect of race relations in the United States in the 20th century," says George Stevens Jr., who wrote the script for the Broadway play. "What he did influenced and made possible the work of everyone who came after him."

Some anecdotes recounted in Thurgood have been told in other forums. In particular, Marshall's role in the civil rights struggle has been well documented, both in books and in films made for the large and small screens.

But taken together, the vignettes have a cumulative power. Stevens' play might not be the first full-length biography of the justice, and it might not be the first project about Marshall to boast national exposure and a marquee star. But it is the first to combine these attributes.

"Thurgood led a life of such importance and color and humanity," Stevens said. "Too little is known about it."

It's complicated

Over the years, the perception has arisen that Marshall, who was born in 1908, had an aversion to Baltimore. Partly, that's because of the justice's own comments.

In a 1966 interview with The Sun, Marshall said he left Baltimore in the 1930s, "glad to be rid of it forever." But, he later bragged about how quickly public schools in his hometown were integrated after the Brown decision.

The impression calcified in 2005, after the state comptroller, William Donald Schaefer -- a former Maryland governor and a former Baltimore mayor -- opined at a public meeting that Marshall "didn't like Baltimore." Schaefer claimed that the great man had to be persuaded to attend a 1980 ceremony in which a statue of Marshall was dedicated in front of the federal courthouse on Pratt Street.

"I know personally that he was induced by [fellow Justice William J.] Brennan to come," Schaefer said during a 2005 telephone interview. "Thurgood Marshall didn't want to be honored by Baltimore."

But, according to those who knew Marshall best, the reality is more complicated than Schaefer's pronouncement suggests.

"My father had so many formative experiences in and around Baltimore," said the justice's son, Thurgood Marshall Jr., a prominent Washington attorney. "I never heard him speak ill of the place. In his later years, if he was going to leave home and go anywhere, it was going to be to Baltimore."

How could Marshall not love the city that was home to his formidable relatives, the people who taught him to stick up for himself?

For instance, Marshall talked proudly about his grandmother, Annie, who has been credited with conducting the first sit-down strike in Maryland.