Their funerals were separated by the distance between Washington National Cathedral, in whose hushed vastness the very president must sit in silent contemplation of a power greater than his own, and Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, where the humblest cabdriver may make the earth tremble with the volume of his faith. Marshall marched into history under the banner of Amos 5:24-“Let judgment run down like waters …"-which his eulogists almost unanimously selected as the appropriate verse to commemorate his time on earth; 10 hours later Dorsey was blasted heavenward by the T.A. Dorsey Gospel Chorus belting out “I’ll Tell It Wherever I Go.” History does not record whether the two men ever met, although it’s certainly possible; Dorsey actively supported the NAACP during the years Marshall was counsel to the organization’s Legal Defense Fund. But as they made their separate ways through this world of pain, their lives surely touched one another’s many times-at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., for one, where Marshall would have heard King’s favorite hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” written by Dorsey 36 years earlier out of grief for the death in childbirth of his young wife.
What they shared, mostly, was membership in that extraordinary generation born around the turn of the century, a dismal time when Jim Crow laws, abetted by a singularly obtuse Supreme Court, were spreading across a third of the nation. They could look back, in other words, to their parents’ generation, when the brief hope of Reconstruction glimmered, and ahead to a century whose burgeoning promise meant for them only more places (buses, movie houses … ) to sit in the back. It was a fantastic leap of imagination in those years to envision a better life for the people politely called Negroes, and an act of cold courage to take concrete steps to bring it about. Yet from this generation came Kenneth Clark (born in 1914), the brilliant psychologist whose research helped Marshall prove his case against segregated schools; the novelists Zora Neal Hurston (1903) and Richard Wright (1908); Louis Armstrong (1900), Count Basie (1904) and Duke Ellington (1899). “They knew who they were,” says John Hope Franklin, the black historian who was born in 1915, of Marshall and his contemporaries. “They had no insecurity, which made it possible to look beyond America’s sick society.”
Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His family was, for that time and place, on the verge of aristocracy; his mother was a schoolteacher and his father a Pullman porter and later head steward at a wealthy country club on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. He attended Lincoln University, a small all-black school in Pennsylvania, and graduated first in his class from the law school at Howard University in 1933. But in the eyes of the law, from Maryland south, that made him exactly equal to a black sharecropper, which is to say, nothing compared with a white who hadn’t finished grade school. Plessy v. Ferguson, the seminal case authorizing separate-but-equal public accommodations for blacks and whites, had been decided in 1896; in the year of Marshall’s birth the Supreme Court ruled in Berea v. Kentucky that a state could outlaw even voluntary integration at a private college. Decades later, that was one of the precedents Marshall fought as he constructed the chain of cases leading to the monumental triumph of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
It was on those cases-32 appearances before the Supreme Court, of which he won 29-that history judges Marshall as one of the greatest Americans of this century. He went on to other achievements, as federal judge, U.S. solicitor general, and in 1967 the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court, where he was a leading spokesman for civil liberties (including the right to abortion) and against the death penalty. And the civil-rights movement went on to other battles, with other tactics. But as Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, says, “A lot of folks don’t appreciate that Thurgood Marshall and his band of lawyers were the only civil-rights movement there was until the late 1950s.”
It was vital to overturn segregation, but almost as significant that the victory go to a black man, so that no one could ever assert that equality was a gift extended to blacks by whites. And Marshall used the forms and institutions that were the traditional tools of his oppressors; his triumphs were of cold legal logic, which is why they have stood up so well. To establish the absurdity of separate-but-equal education, he began with the seemingly minor question of law schools. A judge, he once explained, might believe that a segregated elementary school could be as good as an integrated one, but he would undoubtedly esteem legal education too highly to accept any such nonsense about law school. And his arguments were flawlessly understated (although he was a witty, sometimes ribald, storyteller in private); no one could ever suggest that Marshall had swayed the court by playing on its sympathies. He coined no great legal phrases, except one that is distinguished only for its utter simplicity: asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter to define “equal,” Marshall replied: “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place”-and when he put it that way, who could any longer deny it?
On the surface, Dorsey, the son of a Georgia preacher, lived a very different sort of life. Unlike Marshall, he rarely had much contact with white society, and devoted himself to a different and incomparably harder fight, the struggle for his own soul. By his own account it might have gone either way. In his youth Dorsey was “Georgia Tom,” a well-known blues musician who played piano for Ma Rainey, and a composer of “hokum,” blues numbers filled with ribald double-entendre. (His most famous work, still played, was called “It’s Tight Like That.”) Around 1926, moved by the death of a friend, he essentially invented gospel with the song “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me.” “I was doing all right for myself,” he once recalled, “but the voice of God whispered and said you need to change.” Evidently God didn’t express a preference for any particular kind of music. “His promise to God was, ‘I’ll change the words’,” says Michael W. Harris, Dorsey’s biographer. “Blues was the only music he knew.”
But if God didn’t mind praise that happened to come in a 16-bar blues, Dorsey’s fellow parishioners in Chicago, where he came to live in 1916, were less tolerant. Blacks who had escaped the rural South had no desire to be reminded of their roots. By the time of World War I most big-city black churches, says Harris, “were basically white churches with black members,” complete with a classical orchestra devoted to playing the most somnolently decorous hymns in the canon. When Dorsey appeared, “people would say, ‘You can’t bring that music in here. That’s what we danced to last night.’ And he would turn around and say, ‘It’s our music’.” In effect, Dorsey helped preserve a vital part of African-American culture that might otherwise have succumbed to assimilation; among his inheritors were a generation of soul singers from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.
Out of deepest despair, comes transcendence: that was the message of Dorsey’s life, as also, mutatis mutandis, of Marshall’s. In 1932, a telegram about his wife’s death summoned Dorsey home; by the time he arrived, his newborn son had died also. “Now, what should I do then and there?” he recalled decades later for the documentary film “Say Amen, Somebody.” “People tried to tell me things that were soothing to me … but none of which have ever been soothing to me from that day to this.” Yet of that experience came the transforming hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”:
… Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.
In a sense, time passed both men by eventually, as it must for anyone who lives into his ninth decade. Gospel music is no longer as central to African-American culture as it was in the early 1940s, when Mahalia Jackson and Dorsey toured together. Marshall ended his career as a lonely and sometimes bitter dissenter on an increasingly conservative court, and lived to see his seat taken by a man of much smaller accomplishment, Clarence Thomas. And of course it was only a few years after Brown that the civil-rights movement moved from the courts to the legislatures and the streets, where other leaders came to prominence. Cultural fashions of recent years left him unmoved. “Marshall wasn’t interested in collard greens and African history, he was interested in the rights of Americans,” says essayist Albert Murray, 76. Sylvia Drew Ivie, who attended Howard’s law school in the late 1960s, recalls Marshall coming to accept an award and being bearded by a militant student who called him an Uncle Tom. “It was one of the most humiliating moments I can remember,” she says. “He was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Boy, I was litigating civil-rights lawsuits before you were born. Don’t you ever use that name with me’.”
Marshall, says his law-school classmate Oliver Hill, “never lost hope that things would get better.” And he never lost sight of how much room there was for improvement. When asked in 1991 whether he felt “free at last,” his response was tart: “Well, I’m not free. All I know is that years ago … a Pullman porter told me that he had been in every city in this country … and he had never had to put his hand up in front of his face to find out he was a Negro. I agree with him.” He is free at last now, even as Dorsey has gone on to be with his Lord; but we are still only half free, still struggling to be saved. From their lives let us take courage, as we reach … for transcendence.
