August 21, 2012
TOWARD FULLER DISCLOSURE
When
you read such autobiographical writing as W. E. B. DuBois’ Dusk of Dawn (1940), Ja A. Jahannes’ WordSong Poet: A Memoir Anthology (2011),an innovative variant, or Thelma V. Reed’s Black Girl from Tannery Flats (2003), you accept an invitation. On
the other hand, you and the biographers are collaborating intruders when you
navigate the pages of Seeds of Southern
Change: The Life of Will Alexander (1962) by Wilma Dykeman and James
Stokely or John Oliver Killens: A Life of
Black Literary Activism (2010) by Keith Gilyard. What, however, do you say about the act of
reading
Long, Michael G., ed. Marshalling
Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall. New York:
HarperCollins, 2011.
The mediated invitation to intrude
is somewhat different in this case. Not only does the book bear Derrick Bell’s
authenticating Foreword, but it incorporates necessary orchestration by Michael
Long. Your option is to read through
Bell and Long, to go to the heart of Thurgood Marshall’s letters from 1934 to
1957 and to discover overlooked portions of civil rights history.
It
is often not noticed that African American writing
encompasses more than African American literature. Formal literary study valorizes a limited
body of canonical works on aesthetic grounds, but cultural studies which attend
to both writing and literature recognize the importance of letters as
autobiographical acts. Reading
correspondence between Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes or between John A.
Williams and Chester Himes enlarges our sense of literary politics and
ideological contradictions. Reading
Thurgood Marshall’s letters expands our sense of the history of legal action
and cultural practices in the United States.
As “texts,” his letters make new knowledge and unusual reading pleasures
available to us. Attention to African
American writing enables us to discern why one of Michael Long’s potentially
divisive rhetorical gestures is especially important.
In
his introduction to Marshalling Justice,
Long compares Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., compares a
graduate of Lincoln University (PA) with a graduate of Morehouse College.
Commentators
often state that the time was right for King to emerge as forcefully as he did,
and King himself talked about the zeitgeist of history being far more important
than his own role in galvanizing the civil rights movement. But what many of us
fail to note is that the time was right exactly because Marshall had already
pushed the clock ahead, sometimes single-handedly. For twenty long years before King assumed
leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Thurgood Marshall, the young
NAACP attorney known to everyday blacks as “Mr. Civil Rights,” struggled day
and night against racial discrimination and segregation in schools,
transportation, the military, businesses, voting booths, courtrooms, and
neighborhoods. (xvii)
Long, an everyday white, could not
know, without having read Charles H. Wesley’s The History of Alpha Phi
Alpha : A Development in College Life (Chicago: Foundation Publishers,
1959), that Marshall and King were Alpha men.
Everyday whites seldom know what a certain class of everyday blacks
takes to be common knowledge. Marshall and King had taken a sacred vow to be
first of all, servants of all, and to transcend all. Their transcendence brings to the surface
many things that the zeitgeist of America’s penchant for forgetting would have
us leave buried. Being myself an Alpha,
I exhume what memory ought not allow us to forget.
Marshall’s
letters are models of good writing and of grace under extreme pressures, and
his grace is not the self-serving kind famously broadcast by Ernest
Hemingway. These letters remind us of
what human character is or can be; Marshall and King were brave men not
saints. My deliberately biased reading
of Marshall’s letters enables me to see more clearly the human dimensions of
America’s ongoing battles with race and civil rights. In 1956, it was very appropriate that King
received the Alpha Award of Honor in recognition of “Christian leadership in
the cause of first-class citizenship for all mankind” and that Marshall got the
Alpha Founder’s Award “for his contributions to constitutional law and
citizenship” (Wesley 556-557). But brave men because they are men have feet
of clay. Marshall exposes some of his
imperfections in his correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Investigation
between 1955 and 1957. Reading toward
fuller disclosure is not always pleasant. It is always a matter of brutal discipline.
When
I need respite from this brutality, I find pleasure in what is absent in
Marshall’s letters: commentary on his relations with his Alpha brothers. Marshall had no need to comment. The fraternal bonds were always already there
in his work with Charles H. Houston (his most important mentor), Walter White,
A. P. Tureaud, Frank DeCosta, Herman M. Sweatt, Arthur Shores, and Channing
Tobias. When Marshall wrote to his wife in May 1940 that A. Maceo Smith (a
figure of great importance in Texas civil rights history) “drove us over 400
miles yesterday in eight and a half hours,” he was commenting on services
rendered by his Alpha brother.
My
pride in having fraternal association with Thurgood Marshall is innocent
trivia. What really counts are his letters
as examples of literary excellence in African American writing and our gaining
fuller disclosure from reading them;
Marshall’s bravery in the face of danger and his legacy to America; the
splendid record of his life’s work in
civil and human rights, and his lifelong ability to “rabble.” Thurgood Marshall was a righteous rebel and a
king of the rabble at Lincoln University (PA). As Ja A. Jahannes wrote in WordSong Poets ----
Perhaps
the rabble is what prepared Thurgood Marshall (Class of 1930) with the
argumentative skills to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to victory against
segregation in Brown vs. The Board of Education, or enabled him to become
Solicitor General of the United States, and eventually Associate Justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps, too, it is
in this milieu of verbal gymnastics of the rabble that the rich tradition of
literary excellence sprang forth at Lincoln like truth-filled thunderstorms and
ice-cold rain revelations, volcanic and whispered truths, and pulsating distillations
of a world needing defining and refining (11-12)
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
