Letter from the Archive: A Journey with Thurgood Marshall

On February 17, 1956, Thurgood Marshall flew from New York to Atlanta to attend an N.A.A.C.P. meeting about the progress of desegregation. His companion on the trip was Bernard Taper, a reporter for The New Yorker. During the Second World War, Taper had been one of the “Monuments Men,” and, over a forty-year career at the magazine, he wrote mainly about two subjects: the arts (he Profiled George Balanchine, in 1973) and the civil-rights movement. The story he wrote about his trip with Marshall, “A Meeting in Atlanta,” is one of my personal favorites—an understated, illuminating portrait of the thoughtfulness and grace of the activists and attorneys at the N.A.A.C.P.

On one level, the story is about what its title suggests: a committee meeting in which N.A.A.C.P. delegates from different states give one another updates on desegregation. (Brown v. Board of Education had been decided twenty months prior, in May, 1954, and the delegate from Mississippi could sum up his state’s progress in one word: “None.”) But it’s also about the civilizing force that the N.A.A.C.P. represents. In cities and towns across America, Taper writes, desegregation has caused “turmoil,” even violence. And yet, in this committee meeting, while decisions are being made which will affect the course of events everywhere, the atmosphere is calm, tranquil, and generous. During a break in the meeting, Taper reflects on what he’s seen, writing that, “in many ways, the meeting had not been at all what I had expected”:

I had anticipated more speculation, more oratory, more emotional outbursts. Certainly I had been unprepared for the orderliness—indeed, the ordinariness—of the procedure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find deep gloom at the turn events had taken in the last year, and demands for an agonizing reappraisal of the N.A.A.C.P.’s position, or even to hear at least some delegates, frustrated beyond endurance, call for violence or other direct action. But the concreteness, the calm, the serene feeling of assurance that the law would eventually prevail—these I had definitely not expected. As for the humor, I had expected some, but of a different sort. Funny without being escapist, the humor I had heard here reminded me in many ways of Mauldin’s G.I.s in the front lines.

“Mauldin” here is Bill Mauldin, the “Stars and Stripes” cartoonist whose G.I.s, Willie and Joe, endured every front-line hardship without losing their determination to win. Taper is deliberate in invoking those wartime cartoons; at the end of the story, the civility and rationality of the N.A.A.C.P.’s meeting is put into relief when news comes that Thomas Brewer, an African-American civil-rights activist, has been murdered.

“A Meeting in Atlanta”—which also includes many up-close glimpses of Thurgood Marshall—is available to everyone online. Last month, Jelani Cobb wrote online about race in New York City’s schools; in the magazine, Louis Menand and Cass Sunstein have written about the legacy of Brown. Subscribers can read Calvin Trillin on the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Above: Thurgood Marshall, circa 1955. Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis.