The closest Thurgood Marshall came to his own lynching was in Columbia, Tennessee, near the banks of the Duck River, a notorious repository of black bodies not far from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
On the night of Nov. 18, 1946, Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had just won the acquittal of “Rooster Bill” Pillow, a black man charged with rioting and attempted murder, and negotiated a lesser conviction for “Papa” Lloyd Kennedy, another black man charged with the same crimes. Months earlier, the first major post-World War II racial clash in the U.S. had broken out in Columbia after news spread of a fist fight between a white store clerk and a black veteran (who’d spoken up about the rude treatment his mother received after she complained of having to pay for a shoddy radio repair). Armed to protect themselves and the black section of town known as Mink Slide from white mob violence—the serviceman had been let out of jail and whisked out of Columbia for his own safety—Pillow and Kennedy were among more than 100 African-American men arrested following a standoff that left four white police officers with buckshot wounds.
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