Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2020
Abstract
n “Thurgood Marshall in Tennessee: His Defense of Accused Rioters, His Near-Miss with a Lynch Mob,” David L. Hudson Jr. examines a pivotal yet lesser-known episode in the early career of Thurgood Marshall arising from the 1946 Columbia Race Riot in Columbia, Tennessee. The article recounts how a dispute between an African-American Navy veteran and a white store employee escalated into racial violence, mass arrests of more than 100 African Americans, and sweeping law enforcement actions in the Black community. Marshall, working alongside attorneys Z. Alexander Looby, Maurice Weaver, and others, joined the defense of 25 African-American men charged with attempted murder. Despite allegations of coercive investigations, discriminatory grand jury practices, and community hostility, an all-white jury acquitted 23 of the 25 defendants after a venue change. The article further details Marshall’s subsequent return to Columbia, where he narrowly escaped a suspected lynch mob after being detained under dubious drunk-driving charges. Hudson situates this episode within Marshall’s broader civil rights legacy, illustrating both the perilous conditions faced by civil rights lawyers in the Jim Crow South and the formative experiences that shaped Marshall’s later jurisprudential impact as the first African American Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Recommended Citation
David L. Hudson Jr., Thurgood Marshall in Tennessee: His Defense of Accused Rioters, His near-Miss with a Lynch Mob, 56 Tenn. B.J. 16 (September/October 2020).
