We Face the Dawn by Margaret Edds

Author:Margaret Edds [Edds, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780813940458
Google: mrs-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2018-02-06T04:12:53+00:00

TWELVE

Segregation on Trial

Spot Robinson filed Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County at Richmond’s federal courthouse around midday. By nighttime he was aboard a train slicing through the Carolinas toward Charleston’s sultry clime and the mannered remains of its plantation caste system. His travel companions—Marshall, Carter, and a little-known psychologist named Kenneth B. Clark—had boarded the train in New York. The addition of Robinson in Richmond reflected Marshall’s growing reliance on the brain power and scrupulousness of a man who at first blush did not seem a natural soul mate. The old friends Hill and Marshall shared a boisterous love of life blended with a seriousness of purpose. Robinson seemed cut from different cloth—inexhaustible, less social, and more exacting. Preparing for a case, Robinson rarely diverted his gaze from the grindstone. Once ready, however, he could assume an air of composure that calmed Marshall. “Thurgood’s got his peculiarities like I have mine. In time I got to understand him,” Robinson explained the relationship, one that deepened during the 1950s. “I am trying to get as close to absolute perfection as I can. Thurgood has always kidded me. He says, ‘That’s the biggest trouble you have. You’re a perfectionist.’” In contrast, Marshall “makes himself appear from the outside very jovial, not exactly happy-go-lucky, but he takes everything in stride easily,” Robinson said. Over time, he came to realize that appearances were deceptive. Underneath, “Thurgood is a very intense person. He could get himself all knotted up sometimes in cases, and I occasionally used to tell him, ‘Look man. Loosen up. We’re going to win this case, I think.’ He’s a worrier from way back.”1 In such moments, Marshall relished having at his side a man he could trust to stay steady and give his all.

In many ways the trial that opened five days after the travelers arrived in Charleston proved to be a dress rehearsal for the one that followed nine months later in Virginia. Attorney General Almond acknowledged as much by sending his deputy, Henry T. Wickham Jr., to South Carolina to monitor the proceedings. Robinson’s presence during the trial and his participation in the high-spirited preliminary strategy sessions also helped shape the Virginia effort.2 Briggs v. Elliott had been four years in the making. Its genesis dated to 1947, when the Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, of Clarendon County, attended an NAACP meeting in Columbia and came away incensed that white officials were so indifferent to his people. He resolved to seek a plaintiff to attack what he saw as the most blatant of the injustices, the failure to provide a single school bus for the county’s black children. The lawsuit that ensued met an unfortunate demise when the property of the plaintiff turned out to straddle the line between two districts. Levi Pearson paid taxes in one, while his children went to school in the other. That was the end of that, except for the part of the story where Pearson lost his store credit and the bulk of his crops for 1948.

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