While Marshall looked into '38 Dallas episode, chief drew gun on him

04:21 PM CST on Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Thurgood Marshall never forgot his first trip to Dallas.

It was October 1938, and the city was tense over an incident in which two white men had thrown a black college president headfirst down the courthouse steps for insisting on his right to serve on a jury.

The victim, George Porter, was secretary of the Dallas NAACP chapter. Mr. Porter had appeared for jury service twice before and left, once under a threat of lynching.

But in late September, Mr. Porter decided to stay, and ended up sitting in the central jury room for three days. On Sept. 28, in plain sight of sheriff’s deputies, two men grabbed the 55-year-old educator and threw him down the stone front steps of the Criminal Courts Building. The fall would later be blamed for costing Mr. Porter his sight.

News of Mr. Porter’s assault prompted the NAACP to dispatch Mr. Marshall, its newly named counsel, to investigate.

Mr. Marshall later told his biographer that en route to Dallas, he heard that the police chief had instructed subordinates to avoid contact with him and that the chief had threatened to shoot Mr. Marshall on sight.

“I sort of considered the idea of having a bad cold or something and not going down there,” Mr. Marshall told his biographer, journalist Juan Williams, in a 1990 interview.

Threats of violence were nothing new to Mr. Marshall, but it was unusual for them to come from an armed public official. He asked the Texas governor, James Allred, for protection, and the governor assigned a Texas Ranger.

Mr. Marshall arrived by train on Oct. 8. In a 1974 interview with historian Michael Gillette, he recalled the atmosphere as “a heck of a situation: The Klan and the non-Klan white people, all together, against the Negro.”

One day, while leaving the courthouse, he was confronted by the police chief, pistol drawn. “Hi, you black son of a bitch. I’ve got you,” Mr. Marshall recalled, in his biography, the man telling him.

The Texas Ranger guarding Mr. Marshall spotted the chief and drew his own weapon. “Fella, you stop right there,” he warned, and the chief did.

Mr. Marshall never identified the police chief by name. But the man who held the office at the time was R.L. “Bob” Jones.

By the time Mr. Marshall left Dallas, the presiding district judge, Paine Bush, was allowing summoned blacks to remain in the central jury room, a small but unprecedented concession to racial equality.

The Dallas incident rallied civil rights groups around Texas to the cause of desegregating juries. Four years later, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to racial exclusion from grand jury service in an NAACP case out of Dallas County.

The first black would serve on a Dallas County trial jury — in a civil case — in 1949.

Mr. Marshall returned to Texas many times. His efforts on behalf of the NAACP toppled the state’s all-white primary and desegregated the University of Texas law school, along with several local school districts.

In 1986, as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Marshall mentioned Dallas in a concurring opinion to a landmark decision banning even one instance of racially biased jury selection.

Justice Marshall also cited a Dallas Morning News’ study of race bias in jury selection by the Dallas County district attorney’s office.