Word: thurgood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Congo. Thurgood Marshall says: "American Negroes have no ties with Africa. Their history begins right here." Nevertheless, like a Virginia gentleman recalling the ancestral manor in Gloucestershire, Marshall begins his family history in the old country with a great-grandfather on his mother's side. "Way back before the Civil War, this rich man from Maryland went to the Congo on a hunting expedition or something. The whole time he was there, this little black boy trailed him around. So when they got ready to come back to this country, they just picked him up and brought him along...
...chip-on-the-shoulder tradition was shared by Thurgood's father, Will, a dining-car worker on the B. & O. and later steward of Baltimore clubs, including the Gibson Island club, a yachtsman's paradise with jellyfish for serpents. Will, light-skinned and blue-eyed, used to tell Thurgood and his brother Aubrey, "If anyone calls you nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him-you got my orders to fight him." Once, Thurgood followed orders. Delivery boy for a hat store, he was trying to board a trolley with a stack of hats so high...
Scroonched Down. Will Marshall was always saying that he would "sleep in the streets" rather than betray his principles. Thurgood says it too. But Thurgood is no fanatic, and he has no martyr complex. He tells two stories to prove...
When his father got him a summer dining-car job on the B. & O., lanky Thurgood Marshall complained to the chief steward that his white waiter's pants were too short. "Boy," said the steward, "we can get a man to fit the pants a lot easier than we can get pants to fit the man. Why don't you just kinda scroonch down in 'em a little more?" Says Thurgood: "I scroonched...
Whence this caution, moderation and restraint? Thurgood's mother, Norma Arica, has been for 28 years a Baltimore schoolteacher and numbers six other schoolteachers among her own and her husbands close relatives. As a teacher, she was among the aristocrats of Negro Baltimore, and her feeling about white-Negro relationships is balanced and moderated by her sense of service and leadership among her own people...