When some boys wound up in the House of Reformation for Colored Boys, a juvenile correctional institution for Black boys in Cheltenham, Maryland, they turned to the NAACP for legal help. They found an attorney named Thurgood Marshall.
Before joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall advocated for a group of boys at Cheltenham. These four boys in 1936 faced legal issues while serving their sentences at the institution, notorious for brutal and unsanitary conditions.
“The whole situation merely renews in my mind our fight toward cleaning up Cheltenham,” Marshall wrote in a 1936 letter. “This investigation also convinces me that it pays to look into these matters toward the end that the people in authority in the Counties will realize that at least one group is constantly watching for the protection of the Negro’s rights.”
“This, I believe, tends to keep them in line.”
Marshall was a central figure in the Civil Rights Movement who led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which desegregated schools. A Baltimore native, Marshall was the first Black Supreme Court justice, serving from 1967 to 1991.
Marshall’s advocacy for the Cheltenham boys resonates today as Maryland lawmakers have passed legislation to investigate the brutal conditions and deaths of Black boys at Cheltenham.
A search of Marshall’s correspondence in the NAACP online archives showed 14 documents involving Marshall’s advocacy for boys at Cheltenham. In a Jan. 25, 1936, memo, Marshall reported on his investigation of four Cheltenham boys who were arrested in connection with an alleged attack on Eva Smith, a white matron at Cheltenham.
Marshall’s report to Lillie Jackson, then Baltimore NAACP branch president and a major civil rights figure, showed there was no evidence the four boys were on the same floor as Smith at the time of the attack. Marshall suggested Smith may have been upset with the administration, and noted some general staff dissension at Cheltenham.
Four days after Marshall submitted his memo, the boys were released from jail in Upper Marlboro and returned to Cheltenham.
In March 1936, Marshall asked Cheltenham Superintendent Hal T. Kearns about whether two boys, Ernest Patton and Hugh Davis, would qualify for parole. Kearns asked for Marshall’s help in finding Davis’ mother so the boy could be paroled. Marshall tried to locate the mothers of Davis and Patton, and
Hugh Davis was paroled in June 1936.
Almost a decade later, Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American, a newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland, alerted Marshall about boys being sent to Cheltenham without adequate due process.
“Recently a boy was sent to Cheltenham by Judge Smith because he was in a crowd which had jimmied a door of a store,” Murphy wrote in 1945. “Nothing was taken and there was no evidence that the boy did the jimmying but he got a five year term in Cheltenham.”
He asked for Marshall’s help in establishing a public defender’s office in Baltimore to handle such cases.
Reporters Haley Parsley and Zaka Hossain contributed to this article.
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