The New Yorker:

Thurgood Marshall’s effect.

By Bernard Taper 

There are few people in this country today, white or black, who have not become seriously concerned about the school-segregation controversy and the turmoil it has aroused. Like just about everyone else, I have been trying to understand, from stories I have read in the papers and from people I have talked with, what is happening and what is at stake. Early last month, on hearing that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was about to hold a regional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, to assess the turbulent situation, I decided to ask permission to attend it, and I was very glad when, presently, my request was granted. I did not, of course, expect to come back from the meeting with the whole story of race relations in the South. Necessarily, what I heard and saw down there would be one-sided. Even so, the N.A.A.C.P. is the organization that had the most to do, directly, with starting all this; its staff pressed cases involving segregation through the inevitable years of litigation, and argued them before the Supreme Court, and won. What I wanted to find out at first hand was how some of its leaders were taking their victory and what they would make of it. This was to be the first Southern regional meeting since the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s order of last May requiring local school boards to desegregate had made itself widely felt. A great deal had happened since then.

My travelling companion on the flight to Atlanta, I was pleased to learn, would be Thurgood Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.’s Special Counsel and the man who pleaded the segregation cases before the Supreme Court. He is a tall, vigorous man of forty-seven, with a long face, a long, hooked nose above a black mustache, and heavy-lidded but very watchful eyes. He is about as swarthy as a Sikh, and, in fact, rather resembles one when he is in a fierce mood. His mother is a retired schoolteacher; his father, who died eight years ago, was a waiter in Baltimore. In the last fifteen years, Marshall has attained the stature of a semi-legendary folk hero among his people. At the same time, he has earned the deepest respect of sophisticated jurists and students of the law. Since 1938, as the N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel, he has appeared before the United States Supreme Court to argue sixteen cases. He has won fourteen of them. 

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