Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 146. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 1

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Welcome to the first episode of our new special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s. Today, Sharon introduces us to a few key people who became the driving force behind early Civil Rights activism. We meet a young man named Thuroughgood–a bit of a troublemaker who put his curiosity and sense of justice to work and sought incremental change through the legal system. Joining him in the fight against the longstanding legality of “separate but equal” was the McLaurin family. Together, they sued the University of Oklahoma, which gave George McLaurin admission to the graduate program alongside white students… but the journey to true equal learning had only just begun. Sharon also introduces us to another important person–arguably America’s most powerful man in the mid-20th century–who was both a help and hindrance to the Civil Rights Movement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. Hello, friends. Welcome. So excited that you're joining me today because this is the first episode in a special series that we're kicking off. And this series is called Momentum. This series is months in the making, and I hope you are really going to enjoy it. The concept behind Momentum is that it was a series of sometimes very small events that have changed

America. A series of ordinary people who went on to do extraordinary things. And it was those people and events that created the momentum that propelled a civil rights movement, that propelled people in their struggle for freedom. So with that said, let's dive in. I'm Sharon McBann, and welcome to the Sharon Says So We cannot start talking about momentum without first introducing you to a couple of people. And the first person I need to introduce you to was a man born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. eight in Baltimore, Maryland. And his name at birth was Thorogood. And he got tired of spelling out the word Thorogood. And so in second grade, he was like, you know what, I'm done. I am done with spelling out Thorogood. And he shortened his own name in second grade to Thurgood. His name was Thurgood Marshall. And I bet that name rings a bell to you. I bet at some point, if you have not spent a lot of time learning about the civil rights movement, that name

somewhere deep in the recesses of your brain makes you go like, ding, I've heard that name before. During Thurgood Marshall's childhood, he and his family lived in a very racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore. He attended segregated schools because those were the schools available to him. A previous Supreme Court decision created this doctrine of separate but equal, that it was perfectly acceptable for schools to segregate themselves racially, as long as they were providing, quote unquote, equal accommodations. And so Thurgood attended segregated schools, and he graduated from his city's Colored High School. That's what it was called, Colored High School in 1924, when he was 16 years old. And Thurgood's father, William, was very interested in court

trials and as a hobby, would take Thurgood with him to observe court trials. And then they would come home and talk about it. Thurgood Marshall would go on to tell the story about how when he was growing up, his father would ask him to retell everything that happened at the trial that they had just watched. And then he would argue with him about everything. And Thurgood Marshall said, his dad was not an attorney, but he made me into one. And Thurgood described himself as a hell raiser. He was constantly in trouble for his poor behavior in school. One of his teacher's punishments for if you were not behaving yourself was to go to the basement of the school and copy down portions of the constitution. He said, instead of making us

copy out stuff on the blackboard after school when we misbehaved, our teacher sent us down into the basement to learn parts of the Constitution. And I made my way through every paragraph. So here we have Thurgood Marshall, his dad taking him to see trials for fun, making him argue every case with him at the dinner table, making him argue every case with him at the dinner table, misbehaving in school, and a teacher who is giving him the punishment of copying down the Constitution. In 1925, Thurgood decided to attend the all-Black Lincoln University in Philadelphia. And he had a number of classmates who would later go on to be famous like Langston Hughes and Cab Calloway, the future president of Ghana, attended his school and was a classmate of his.

While he was there, he met a lovely young woman named Vivian. Her nickname actually was Buster, and she was a student at a nearby university at the University of Pennsylvania. And Vivian is often said to be one of his biggest motivators. They never had any children together, but we will come back to his life with Vivian in a few moments. Before they got married, however, Thurgood was not that great of a student in college. He was kind of disinterested. He got suspended a couple of times. He was in a fraternity. He was in trouble for doing things like pranking people, hazing people. Langston Hughes, in fact, described Thurgood Marshall as, quote, rough and ready, loud and wrong. And finally, by his senior year, he started getting it together. And he ended up graduating with honors with a degree in American literature and philosophy.

So after Thurgood graduated from school, he wanted to go to the University of Maryland, because remember, he is from Baltimore. But because he was Black, he knew he was going to be denied admission because Maryland was a segregated school. And this fact, this one fact that he had wanted to attend but decided not to apply because he knew he would be denied admission was one of the major catalysts for his future work. Instead of going to the University of Maryland, he attended a historically black college in Washington, D.C., Howard University, which was an hour's train ride away. And he graduated from Howard at the top of his class in 1930. And then he began his law practice in Baltimore. A few years into his law practice, he won his first major civil rights

case, which was Murray versus Pearson. And it was about the University of Maryland's law school. There was a man named David Gaines Murray who wanted to get into their law school, and he was rejected. The University of Maryland sent him a letter that said, the University of Maryland does not admit Negro students, and your application is accordingly rejected. And it went on to talk about the university's quote-unquote duty under the Plessy versus Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal. And then they said, hey, we can help you try to find an equal school somewhere else. We could help you find an equal school out of state. And Murray decided, no, I'm not interested in that. And he decided to file a lawsuit.

And one of the things that Thurgood Marshall was able to demonstrate was that Maryland failed to provide a separate but equal education for him because attending a law school out of state would not prepare him to be an attorney in Maryland because laws differ from state to state. And a law school located in Virginia couldn't prepare Murray for a career as an attorney in Maryland. And so Thurgood Marshall was able to successfully demonstrate in court that since the state of Maryland had. It's the moral commitment stated in our country's creed. So eventually, Murray was admitted to the University of Maryland. And buoyed by that success, Thurgood Marshall went to New York, and he began doing even more work with the NAACP. If you're not familiar, the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

And it was a civil rights organization, one of America's oldest civil rights organizations that was started in 1909. And it was formed by both Black and white activists. One of the big catalysts for forming the NAACP was violence. Violence that Black Americans were experiencing around the country. They did a lot of work with anti-lynching. They did a lot of work with suffrage. This organization still exists today, but it was founded many, many years prior. And Thurgood Marshall began to work with the NAACP. Over the next few years, he was appointed Assistant Special Counsel. And then he won his very first Supreme Court victory, Chambers v. Florida, if you're curious. Thurgood Marshall, by the way, would later go on to win

29 Supreme Court cases. Eventually, he was promoted to being the executive director of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. As the executive director, he argued many civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. Just a few of them, for your own reference, are things like Smith v. Allwright, which was in 1944. It had to do with voting rights. Shelley v. Kramer in 1948. It had to do with voting rights. Shelley versus Kramer in 1948. It had to do with housing restrictions. Sweatt versus Painter in 1950, talking about separate but equal education. And McLaurin versus Oklahoma State Regents in 1950. One other thing I have to tell you about Thurgood Marshall

is that his mother was a teacher. And one of his proudest victories was a case in which he helped Black teachers get the same equal pay as their white counterparts. And he viewed that as a personal victory, not just for Black teachers everywhere, but for his own mother. So I mentioned a few moments ago that one of the big cases that he argued was McLaurin versus the Oklahoma State Regents. And that was argued in 1950. And that happens to set the stage for a lot of what we are going to be discussing in this series of Momentum. So I need to tell you a little bit about McLaurin versus Oklahoma. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast

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get your podcasts. The McLaurins were a married couple. It was George and his wife, Penina. And I'm not entirely certain how to say her name, but I'm going to go with Penina. It's spelled P-E-N-I-N-A-H. There are no records of when George and Penina McLaurin were born. They were born sometime in the mid to late 1880s in Oklahoma. Oklahoma didn't achieve statehood until 1907. And like many of the other states in the South, it adopted Jim Crow laws, and it had institutionalized segregation written into its state constitution. And in the state constitution, it said that separate schools for white and colored children must be provided by the state legislature. And in Oklahoma at that time, Black Americans were completely segregated from white Americans in all, separate phone booths, separate Black

medical care institutions, separate hospitals. Even Black marching bands were prohibited from marching with white marching bands during Oklahoma City parades. Despite all of those significant obstacles, George McLaurin earned his bachelor's degree in science from Langston University, which is an HBCU in Oklahoma. And then he moved out of state to earn his master's degree in education from the University of Kansas. And the University of Kansas actually had been admitting black students since 1876. And the University of Kansas actually had been admitting Black students since 1876. So he went on to go back to Oklahoma around 1910, and he taught at his alma mater for more than 30 years until 1948. George married Penina, as I mentioned, who was also an educator. She had earned a bachelor's degree at Langston, and she taught as well for over three decades.

And before George, Penina was actually the first McLaurin to spearhead the move to overcome segregation in Oklahoma's higher education. In 1923, she actually applied for admission to the University of Oklahoma, but was denied. And she wrote later, I wrote the University of Oklahoma asking if I could enroll. They wrote back and said, my credits were acceptable, but state law prohibited my attending the white school. I wrote back and asked, could I take extension courses? school. I wrote back and asked, could I take extension courses? And they gave me the same answer. And so while she was refused this opportunity to attend in the 1920s, she was the guiding force behind her husband's eventual push for equality at Oklahoma University. They had three children together while they were both working as university teachers.

Ebony Magazine, in fact, once referred to the McLorens as the most educated family in Oklahoma. One of their children had a doctorate in economics, and their other two children both had master's degrees. And all three of the McLoren children went on to teach at Langston University at different points in their career. But because Oklahoma still prohibited Black students from obtaining degrees of higher education, they had to send their children out of state to bypass those discrimination barriers. In fact, all three of the McLaurin children were sent out of state at age 13. In fact, all three of the McLaurin children were sent out of state at age 13. In the summer of 1948, George McLaurin was in his early 60s, and he decided to apply to the graduate school of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma.

He had retired from teaching at that point, and he just wanted to continue his education just because he loved learning. He wanted to get a doctorate in education. And Oklahoma at this point still had absolutely no opportunities for graduate school for Black students. And the college he had been teaching at, Langston, only provided bachelor's degrees. In fact, the state constitution made it a penal offense for Black students to attend white colleges. So George sued the school. And guess who was his attorney? A man from Baltimore whose name used to be Thorogood, but he got tired of writing it out, so he shortened it to Thurgood Marshall.

And in 1948, a three-judge federal court ruled that the University of Oklahoma had acted unconstitutionally in denying George McLaurin admission to the grad program. Twelve days later, the Board of Regents at the University of Oklahoma held a secret meeting to pass a resolution that cleared the way for George McLaurin to be admitted to the graduate program, but on a segregated basis. The resolution said, and I quote, that the Board of Regents at the University of Oklahoma authorize and direct the president of the university to grant the application of admission to the graduate college of G.W. McLaurin in time for Mr. McLaurin to enroll at the beginning of the term. It goes on to talk about basically this resolution was only good for George McLaurin. It did not change their admission policies overall. And so while they admitted him, they instituted rules that kept George McLaurin

segregated from other students. For example, this is a 60 plus year old man who has been a college professor his entire adult life. He's pursuing a doctorate in education for his own edification. And here are some of the rules that he was subjected to. He had to sit by himself in a separate alcove of the classroom. It's kind of like, almost like it would be a closet, but it didn't have a door on it. And it had a little sign that said, reserved for colored. He had to sit at a separate desk in the library behind a stack of newspapers where white students could not see him. And he had to eat at different times than other students in the cafeteria. The president of OU at that point, his name was George Lynn Cross.

He was actually an ally to the NAACP. He supported desegregation, but Oklahoma law penalized any school that wanted to desegregate. Administrators who were trying to desegregate schools could get fined up to $100 per day and charged with a separate crime each day they allowed the desegregation to continue. So a separate crime on Monday, another one Tuesday, another one Wednesday, and an additional $100 for each of those days. Teachers who participated in permitting desegregation also faced fines between $20 and $50 a day. Other Black students who wanted to access programs at the college were going to face the same segregation discrimination. So they began to organize.

And you are going to see this theme echoed over and over. And you are going to see this theme echoed over and over. People were selected to be test cases because they had certain criteria that made the case more likely to be successful. The fact that George McLaurin was in his 60s, he was well-educated, he was married. He had this sort of, quote unquote, dignified way about him. He always wore a suit and tie. And so those aspects of George McLaurin made him more, quote unquote, palatable to perhaps juries and judges. So McLaurin tried to sue, and Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP wanted McLaurin's case to make clear that although OU might claim to provide separate but equal accommodations for Black students, education under segregation would never be truly equal because the physical, mental, and social restraints of segregation would always hold Black students back. And they put together this basic argument that

McLaurin was not being treated equally under the segregation rules, and they wanted the Supreme Court to rule that segregation as a whole, even when facilities are substantially equal, segregation as a whole was unconstitutional. I need to introduce you to one other person today, and that is a man named J. Edgar Hoover. And that is a man named J. Edgar Hoover. He was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. Interestingly enough, he did not actually get a birth certificate until he was 43, but his siblings did. A few interesting things about J. Edgar Hoover. He had a stutter and he cultivated a very distinct and fast manner of talking to compensate. He had a very, very unique way of speaking.

And during his long career, which you are going to hear a lot about in this series, court stenographers would often say they had difficulty keeping up with him. And so people referred to him by his nickname of Speed. He was on the debate team, where speed also is useful. And when J. Edgar was 18, he got an entry-level position as a messenger in the orders department of the Library of Congress, which was less than a mile from his house. You can see here how certain aspects of Thurgood Marshall's childhood and certain aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's childhood

absolutely shaped who they became as adults. That job at the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover later said, this job trained me in the value of collating material. That means assembling material. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI, where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence. He later went on to go to law school, and he was hired by the Justice Department right after he graduated. He became a clerk in the War Emergency Division. And so in 1924, President Coolidge appointed J. Edgar Hoover the head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position that Hoover had wanted for a long time. The Bureau of Investigation

before J. Edgar Hoover got there had been tainted by scandal. And so because of that, J. Edgar Hoover set out to remake the Bureau of Investigation in a radical way. He wanted it to be completely different. He wanted it to be completely separate from the federal government politics. And he demanded and got that the position of director be answerable only to the attorney general. And in future episodes, we're going to talk about J. Edgar Hoover's relationship with Thurgood Marshall. We're going to talk about J. Edgar Hoover's relationship with Thurgood Marshall. We're going to talk about how Thurgood Marshall both hated J. Edgar Hoover and was an FBI informant. We're going to talk about what happened to George and Penina McLaurin.

So that's it for this episode. And I hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather

Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.