NY Theater:
“Thurgood” is riveting history and often a thriller

by Lucy Komisar

This chronicle of the American civil rights movement through the eyes of one man, a giant of the law and of American society, is riveting and often a thriller.

Playwright George Stevens, Jr., director Leonard Foglia, and actor Laurence Fishburne bring life to the musings of Thurgood Marshall, who was the first black member of the US Supreme Court. He was a man who had fears and doubts, but braved life-threatening encounters with Southern racists as he dedicated himself to overturning the legal structures of segregation in America.

The play is in the form of a talk to students at Howard University where Marshall had studied law fifty years earlier, in the class of 1933.

Moving back through time, you experience the incidents that seared his conscience. Young Thurgood, who lived in Baltimore –the northern edge of the segregated South -- was working after school for Mr. Schoen, who ran a fancy dress shop. One afternoon delivering a big pile of hats during the rush hour, he was trying to get on the trolley when a woman pushed past him. “I feel a hand grab my collar and this white man pulled me off the trolley. ‘Sir, I’m just trying to get on the damned car.’

He says, ‘Nigger, don’t you push in front of white people!’ I started swinging. The man smacks me to the ground and tramples all over the hats. A policeman hauls me off to the station. I call Mr. Schoen and he comes over to the jail. I’m crying by that time and I apologize for the damage to the hats. Schoen says, ‘That man really call you a nigger?’ Yes, sir, he sure did. ‘Thurgood, you forget about the damn hats, you did the right thing.’”

From his second story classroom window, Thurgood could look down on the Northwest Baltimore Police Station. He says, “To this day, I can’t lose the sound of those cops beating the hell out of those Negro prisoners.”

The young man Thurgood started out wanting a diverting, easy life. He liked the ladies and enjoyed a drink. He says, “I was pinned to seven co-eds, all at the same time. I’d already decided to become a dentist and never lift anything heavier than a poker chip.”

But reality intervened. He recalls, “One day we go in to town to see a movie and after we buy our tickets, they tell us we have to go around to the back and up the stairs to sit in the colored balcony – the crow’s nest. I’ll tell you something. If enforcement hadn’t been such a problem there would have been a rule that said, ‘white folks get to laugh first.’ We asked for our quarters back and they refused. We got angry and pulled down a bunch of curtains and broke a door and ran like hell.”

That night he thought, “Am I going to go through life being humiliated because of the color of my skin?” He stopped playing pinochle, started reading history and joined the debate team.

Thurgood became Marshall, the man, serious and dedicated. He worked with the head of Howard Law School to challenge segregated schools, using the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision – that facilities could be separate but had to be equal - to insist that the states provide truly equal schools for Negro students. He joked, “We call that Jim Crow Deluxe.” Since states lacked the money to truly duplicate everything, that would force desegregation. The tactic worked on the University of Maryland Law School, which had denied him entrance.

Another case came even closer to home. He recalls, “I would get so goddamned mad that my mother – unlike white teachers – was required to scrub the floors of her classroom every night. And she was paid forty percent less than white teachers. So we decided to take it to court.” The court ruled that the difference in salary was discrimination on account of race. The state of Maryland passed a law that gave equal salaries to Negro teachers – including his mother.

When Marshall worked at the legal department of the NAACP, the focus was Southern voting rights -- fighting poll taxes, ‘literacy’ tests and physical intimidation.

He had the courage and fortitude to go into the belly of the beast, in the dangerous deep South. He remembers, “I got to Louisiana the day after a sheriff had shot and killed a Negro just for registering to vote.”  And, “Every time I got on a train down South I wasn’t sure if I was coming back….I’d take the Capitol Limited from New York to Washington D.C., then I’d change to a ‘colored’ car for the rest of the trip. In southern cities I’d sit in the back of streetcars – quiet as a mouse; and eat in colored cafes. They had me sleeping in a different house every night. I’d always try to get the bed farthest from the window.”

He tells a chilling story, Fishburne recounting it as if it were almost commonplace, as indeed it was at the time. “One time we’re defending two Negroes charged with murder in a race riot in Columbia, Tennessee, near the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Word was out they’d kill us if we tried to sleep in that town, so we drive forty-five miles to Nashville every night. We’re leaving town just after sunset. I spot three or four state police cars — and we’re pulled over. I’m at the wheel. They say they have a warrant to search our car.

“The Sheriff says, ‘Okay boys, check out the trunk.’

“I say to my friends, ‘Don’t let ‘em plant something on us.’ Well, it was a dry county and they knew that lawyers are gonna drink. Now believe it or not we didn’t have any whiskey in the car.  

The sheriff says, ‘Search this Nigger lawyer.’

I say, ‘You got a warrant to search me?’

‘No.’

‘Well, the answer is no.’

He says, ‘This is the one. You get out the car.’

‘What for?’

‘Drunken driving.’

‘I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four hours.’

“They shove me in a police car between two beefy deputies holding shotguns and drive off. Suddenly the car turns off the road and heads through the woods toward the river. We get to a place where a bunch of men are waiting under a big tree with a rope hanging over it – fixin’ to do a little bit of lynching. Then the car with my friends catches up – so I guess these deputies get cold feet. They turn around and drive me to town.”

“The streets are empty. Hell, everybody’s down by the river.

The sheriff says, ‘Alright nigger, the magistrate’s in that building over yonder – you go ahead on.’

I say, ‘You’re not gonna shoot me in the back while I’m escaping, are you?’

He says, ‘Oh, smart ass nigger.’ And he takes me over.

The little magistrate is five foot nothing. He says, ‘What’s up?’

‘We got this boy for drunken driving.’

‘I’m not drunk.’

“‘Do you want to take my test?’

‘What’s your test?’

‘I’m a teetotaler – never had a drink in my life. I can smell liquor a mile off. Wanna’ take a chance? Blow your breath on me.’

I blew my breath so hard I rocked him!

‘Hell, what are you boys talking about? Get out of here! This man hasn’t had a drink.’”

He says, “I got myself on the fastest goddamn train out of there. And I had a drink. I sat with a bottle of Wild Turkey and thanked the lord. And I thought about the Negroes who stayed behind. They were the heroes.”

The most important race case of the era started because Clarendon County, South Carolina, refused to provide a bus for the one-room Scotts Branch School and the seven-year-old son of Harry Briggs, a garage mechanic who fought in World War Two, had to walk five miles to school. Briggs signed a complaint, got fired the same day, and the NAACP took the case. It ended up at a three-judge court in Charleston. And that’s where the argument of social psychologist Kenneth Clark made history.

Dr. Clark went to the Scotts Branch School with a court order, a white doll and a black doll. He would testify that when the Negro children were asked to choose between the white doll and the brown doll and to say which doll was nice, sixty-five percent said the white doll was the nice doll. Seventy percent thought the brown doll was ‘bad.’

Marshall said to the judge, “This overwhelmingly suggests that segregation has a detrimental effect on the personality development of these Negro children. They, like other human beings who are subjected to an inferior status, are irreparably harmed.”

The court ruled 2 to 1 for South Carolina – citing Plessy v. Ferguson. But the Supreme Court took that case and other school cases together as Brown versus the Board of Education.

One of the conservative justices died, and President Eisenhower appointed California’s governor, Earl Warren. During World War Two, Warren had sent eighty thousand Japanese living in California to internment camps.

Marshall says, “I found out later that during the court’s deliberations, Chief Justice Warren made a trip to the Civil War battlefields. His chauffeur, a Negro who’d fought in World War Two, drove him to Gettysburg, and Warren contemplated the graves and looked at the monument with Lincoln’s simple words.

On the way home Warren stopped at a Virginia inn for the night. The next morning he comes out and sees his car parked under a tree. He sees the chauffeur asleep in the back seat. He woke him. ‘Why are you sleeping in the car?’ ‘Mr. Justice, there’s no place within twenty miles of here where I can get a room.’”

On May 17, 1954, the decision was unanimous that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Marshall would be appointed appeals court judge by President John F. Kennedy and then to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. Suddenly, as he tells the story, you notice that Marshall’s hair has turned grey and his walk has become a hesitant. He needs a cane. He had spent nearly twenty-five years on the Supreme Court. This play is a worthy and moving testament to his achievements.

“Thurgood.” Written by George Stevens, Jr. Directed by Leonard Foglia. Starring Laurence Fishburne. Sets by Allen Moyer. Lighting by Brian Nason. Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Projections by Elaine McCarthy.

Booth Theatre, 22 West 45th Street. Tue - Sat at 8pm; Wed & Sat at 2pm; Sun at 3pm. Running time 1:35. Through August 3, 2008. $71.50 - $96.50. 212-239-6200. http://www.thurgoodbroadway.com/

by Carol Rosegg.