travel through Baltimore County, charting a map for the NAACP showing the condition of black elementary schools and comparing them with the nearest white schools. Marshall figured that McGuinn could get into the white school buildings because “he look[ed] enough like our white brethren.” Carl Murphy’s
Afro
published the results of Marshall and McGuinn’s trip, reporting that the two found black schools “falling down, [with] tottering roofs, rotten floors.” 9
Houston had taken a leave of absence from Howard Law School to become the NAACP’s lawyer at its headquarters. With prompting from Carl Murphy, who was a member of the national NAACP’s board, Houston used his new position to get the NAACP to finance a suit against Baltimore County schools. The law school dean successfully argued that the legal work being done in Maryland was a laboratory for developing techniques the NAACP could later use to fight segregation laws across the nation.
In March 1936, Marshall filed a suit that hit Catonsville High School like buckshot. He sued the principal, David W. Zimmerman, and the county superintendent as well as the entire Baltimore County School Board. Even though the suit asked that Margaret Williams, thirteen, be admitted to all-white Catonsville High, the real goal was to get thecounty to build a high school for black children. By threatening to force black students into the all-white school, Marshall hoped to give the county no choice but to do what Carl Murphy and the NAACP had been pressing for—construction of a separate, equal black high school. Trying to win support from white parents, Houston suggested to Marshall that black parents contact white newspapers to stress that they had no interest in integration but only better schools for black kids.
The case went to trial in September with Marshall as the lead attorney, supported by one of his former law professors, Leon Andrew Ransom. Edward Lovett, a lawyer in Houston’s Washington law firm, and Oliver Hill, Marshall’s classmate from Howard, rounded out the team.
In court the school board’s lawyers treated Marshall with no respect. He wrote to Houston that his adversaries were “exceptionally mean, nasty and arrogant.” 10 But Marshall kept to his style of always being the helpful black man in the courtroom, never threatening in his manner to a judge or opposing lawyers. At one critical moment in the trial he stood up to lend a hand to his rude legal opponents: “They did not cite a single case other than the
Gong Lum
case, and we had to tell them the citation of that case.”
Even with Marshall helping them, the board’s lawyers “injected prejudice” into the case by arguing that admitting a black girl to a white high school would “break down the traits of the state of Maryland.” 11 This was the first time Marshall had seen lawyers argue that the essence of southern tradition was to keep blacks on the bottom of the social caste system. He was genuinely hurt. At heart he wanted to be a part of the Maryland establishment. Yet here were educated white people arguing before him in a court of law that all of southern life boiled down to making sure that black people never got above their desperate slave past.
Judge Frank Duncan refused even to consider Marshall’s argument that the county’s schools were separate but unequal in quality at the elementary level. And he would not consider the absence of a high school for blacks as evidence of racial inequality. The judge limited his rulings to a simple review of whether the plaintiff, Margaret Williams, had passed a qualifying test to get into Douglass High, which she had not. The narrow ruling left little on the record for an appellate court to consider. There was no ruling on the issue of whether schools for black children were inadequate or the wider issue of school segregation. Marshall and Houston decided that an appeal was futile.
Despite the defeat in the Williams case, the NAACP’s
Afro
published the results of Marshall and McGuinn’s trip, reporting that the two found black schools “falling down, [with] tottering roofs, rotten floors.” 9
Houston had taken a leave of absence from Howard Law School to become the NAACP’s lawyer at its headquarters. With prompting from Carl Murphy, who was a member of the national NAACP’s board, Houston used his new position to get the NAACP to finance a suit against Baltimore County schools. The law school dean successfully argued that the legal work being done in Maryland was a laboratory for developing techniques the NAACP could later use to fight segregation laws across the nation.
In March 1936, Marshall filed a suit that hit Catonsville High School like buckshot. He sued the principal, David W. Zimmerman, and the county superintendent as well as the entire Baltimore County School Board. Even though the suit asked that Margaret Williams, thirteen, be admitted to all-white Catonsville High, the real goal was to get thecounty to build a high school for black children. By threatening to force black students into the all-white school, Marshall hoped to give the county no choice but to do what Carl Murphy and the NAACP had been pressing for—construction of a separate, equal black high school. Trying to win support from white parents, Houston suggested to Marshall that black parents contact white newspapers to stress that they had no interest in integration but only better schools for black kids.
The case went to trial in September with Marshall as the lead attorney, supported by one of his former law professors, Leon Andrew Ransom. Edward Lovett, a lawyer in Houston’s Washington law firm, and Oliver Hill, Marshall’s classmate from Howard, rounded out the team.
In court the school board’s lawyers treated Marshall with no respect. He wrote to Houston that his adversaries were “exceptionally mean, nasty and arrogant.” 10 But Marshall kept to his style of always being the helpful black man in the courtroom, never threatening in his manner to a judge or opposing lawyers. At one critical moment in the trial he stood up to lend a hand to his rude legal opponents: “They did not cite a single case other than the
Gong Lum
case, and we had to tell them the citation of that case.”
Even with Marshall helping them, the board’s lawyers “injected prejudice” into the case by arguing that admitting a black girl to a white high school would “break down the traits of the state of Maryland.” 11 This was the first time Marshall had seen lawyers argue that the essence of southern tradition was to keep blacks on the bottom of the social caste system. He was genuinely hurt. At heart he wanted to be a part of the Maryland establishment. Yet here were educated white people arguing before him in a court of law that all of southern life boiled down to making sure that black people never got above their desperate slave past.
Judge Frank Duncan refused even to consider Marshall’s argument that the county’s schools were separate but unequal in quality at the elementary level. And he would not consider the absence of a high school for blacks as evidence of racial inequality. The judge limited his rulings to a simple review of whether the plaintiff, Margaret Williams, had passed a qualifying test to get into Douglass High, which she had not. The narrow ruling left little on the record for an appellate court to consider. There was no ruling on the issue of whether schools for black children were inadequate or the wider issue of school segregation. Marshall and Houston decided that an appeal was futile.
Despite the defeat in the Williams case, the NAACP’s
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