INTRODUCTION

Thurgood Marshall liked parties, but not the one planned for him on November 18, 1946, in Columbia, Tennessee. He recalled being held in a police car as law enforcement officers “carried me down toward the river.  When we got [there] you could see the people for the party.  By party, I mean lynch party.” The white lynch mob waited for its chance to hang Thurgood, a black man.
    Nine months before Marshall’s “party,” James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old black veteran of World War II, and his mother went to Billy Fleming’s repair shop in Columbia. They complained to Fleming, a white man, that he hadn’t fixed their radio properly. Fleming slapped Mrs. Stephenson and pushed her out the door. Stephenson punched Fleming, who fell through a plate glass window.  Fleming went to the hospital. The Stephensons went to jail.
    That night, a mob of angry whites gathered in town. Sheriff J. J. Underwood worried that the mob might lynch the Stephensons…. He asked two black men to meet him by the jail’s back door and smuggle the Stephensons out of town. Underwood prevented the lynching, but a riot ensued. The mob attacked Columbia’s blacks, who had hunkered down in Mink Slide, the black business district. The blacks were armed and determined to protect themselves.
    After the riot, state troopers wrecked the stores in Mink Slide, saying they were looking for hidden guns and ammunition. They arrested about one hundred blacks. Two Tennessee lawyers — a white man named Maurice Weaver and a black man named Z. Alexander Looby — were able to free all but about twenty-five men. That’s when Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), came to town.