Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall is a historical icon whose work symbolized the successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. An elder at 409 remembers him as her kind neighbor who helped her push her cello up the steep hill on 155th St on her way to her music lessons when she was a girl.

To some Black, radical revolutionaries of the late 1960s, through the early 70s, organizations such as the NAACP and individuals such as Marshall were considered too “accommodationist.” During that era, it would have been interesting to find out how many Black revolutionaries knew that Marshall possessed an outsized bravery and legal commitment to gain equality for African Americans.

All by himself, Marshall would get on the railroad from New York’s Penn Station, heading south, unarmed, to the scary, brutal hinterlands of America, where the Ku Klux Klan ruled. Marshall went to defend innocent Black people in towns where the judge was the Klan, the prosecutors were the Klan, the jury was the Klan, and darn near everybody else was the Klan.

In lesser-noted cases, he frequently traveled alone, but for trials that were public spectacles— Groveland Florida’s case, for one—he had a team of attorneys. One of his colleagues, a Jewish attorney from New York, Jack Greenberg, saved Marshall from the noose and the torture he would have experienced at the hands of the lynch mob assembled in the backwoods of Florida. For many attorneys, a near lynching would have been enough to scare them away from continuing such dangerous work, but that didn’t stop Marshall. His team went on to win the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, outlawing segregation. Marshall used the famous Doll Test, developed by Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark, who lived at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, in his arguments. He retired from the United States Supreme Court in 1991, where he served for twenty-four years.

How did this woman, a Caribbean immigrant, become so successful in the numbers racket that the most notorious gangsters in New York City wanted to see her dead? For most Black women of that era, menial work was the only option. Obviously, St. Clair’s aspirations and attitude made a career as a servant an impossibility. Not much is known about her early life or even where in the Caribbean she was from, but the lasting legend of Madam Stephanie St. Clair says a lot about her time on Planet Harlem, where she controlled a large part of the uptown numbers action. And like many Black folk, regardless of their “profession,” St. Clair had clear political positions on the struggles for equality, and, frequently, wrote letters decrying oppression and police brutality. Through her pluck, savvy, and entrepreneurial genius, she became a millionaire and lived among the elite class of Harlem, some of whom were housed at 409 Edgecombe Avenue.

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She was also a literary figure whose Vanguard Salon offered writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston a forum to share their works under development. She and Hughes enjoyed a decades-long friendship and were political comrades. Together, they founded the Suitcase Theater.

Thompson was in the Movement for the long haul, and forty years after risking her life organizing in Alabama, she worked for the freedom of Angela Davis. Driven by her credo, “No one is free until all are free,” as a Communist, Patterson devoted her entire life to struggling for world liberation from economic, racial, and gender-based inequities. For a time, she was married to William Patterson, an attorney for the Scottsboro Boys.

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Attorney William Patterson defended Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. He was also at the forefront of the Scottsboro Boys case and publicized their plight internationally. Patterson led the Civil Rights Congress and was a victim of the McCarthy-era with hunts. He was imprisoned for taking the principled stance to not name names. He authored We Charge Genocide, the document that he and Paul Robeson presented to the United Nations, regarding the inhumane treatment that Black Americans had to endure. This treatise inspired Malcolm X. Patterson was also a long-haul revolutionary, who represented Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party. For a time, he was married to Louise Thompson-Patterson.

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Though he was a missionary, he was not paternalistic, looking down on the African souls to whom he ministered. He felt that African Christians should be full partners in the Presbyterian Church that he was so deeply a part of. As the pastor of the Church of the Master, through his international travels to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, Robinson was aware that the people of Harlem had the same issues that plagued many so-called Third World nations. He developed various community programs in Harlem, including a mental health clinic with trained psychologists, through the Morningside Community Center.

He was a supporter of the NAACP and the Urban League, and, because of his association with the NAACP, during the McCarthy with hunts, he was persecuted and had his passport temporarily revoked because of his association with the NAACP. He was not a Communist and did not support communism. When Reverend James Robinson began Operation Crossroads Africa, in 1958, one of his goals was to introduce Americans to the rich culture and histories of the nations on that vast continent. The organization the he founded is still in existence.

His work inspired the creation of the Peace Corps for whom he served as vice president and advisor.

https://operationcrossroadsafrica.org/founder

Before his fifty+ year career as the executive secretary of the NAACP, Walter White was a journalist, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He had blonde hair and blue eyes and looked like a white man. In spying on the KKK, White took his life into his own hands. He was, eventually, found out, but escaped before the mob could find him. As a spy, however, he learned of the Klan’s inner workings and of the murders of forty Black people. Under his leadership, the NAACP became the most prominent civil rights organization in the country.

As a youth, Walter White stood at the window, beside his father, fearing that their home was going to attacked by a pack of whites with murder on their minds. White’s father said to him, “Don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn—and then don’t you miss.”

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Pura Belpré was the first Puerto Rican librarian at the NYPL who started her career at the 135th St. branch, now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She was pivotal in shaping bilingual initiatives. She was also a puppeteer and writer who authored several books, including The Tiger and the Rabbit and Other Tales (1946), the first English collection of Puerto Rican folk tales published in the U.S. 

Roy Wilkins’s tenure as executive secretary began in 1955 and ended in 1977, but he previously held positions with the NAACP, as assistant secretary, under Walter White. Wilkins helmed the organization during notable events such as the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s victory in overturning school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. The legal team included Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and Jack Greenberg whose arguments included the research of Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark.

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Julius Bledsoe, a world-famous singer, composer, and actor, defied racial barriers in the mid-1920s by being one of the first African Americans to ever perform on Broadway. 

As an opera singer, he performed with leading companies globally, including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the BBC Symphony in London, the Royal-Dutch Italian Opera Company, and the Cosmopolitan Opera Association in New York. 

William Stanley Brathwaite was a self-educated author, publisher, educator, and anthologist who published several collections of poetry and essays. Braithwaite founded and headed a publishing firm, B.J. Brimmer, in the 1920s, which published works by Lucius Beebe, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and the early novels of James Gould Cozzens. Brathwaite was a friend and early literary supporter of Robert Frost. He paved the path for many other influential Black poets, including Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and his friend, Countee Cullen. After serving as a professor at the Atlanta University for over a decade, he retired in Harlem, where he lived until he died in 1962.

Jimmie Lunceford was an influential bandleader, saxophonist, and educator. He was the first public high school band director in Memphis. There, he formed the Chickasaw Syncopators, later known as the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, with former students and mentees. After starting in Memphis and touring throughout the country, the orchestra accepted a booking at the Cotton Club for their revue of “Cotton Club Parade,” where they rose to fame, rivaling the popularity of other jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. 

Maudelle Bass Weston was a concert dancer, model, cultural figure, and wife of George Weston, Antiguan dancer and member of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). She toured Mexico in the 1920s, where Diego Rivera, enthralled by her beauty, used her as a model. Maudelle spent several years touring with a group named Folklórico in Central and South America. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1930s, she became the first African American to study with modern choreographer Lester Horton. African American sculptor, Beluah Woodard, also used her as the subject of her piece entitled Maudelle.