Thurgood Marshall, the shrewd, folksy black lawyer, had started working for the NAACP in 1936 for the grand sum of $2,400 a year, plus expenses, and he carried the burden of much of the litigation. Marshall argued most of the early civil rights cases in small Southern courtrooms and suffered the worst indignities of segregation himself, not to mention the threat of physical danger. No town in which he argued seemed to be large enough to have a hotel or restaurant for black people.
