ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 3, 1996 TAG: 9612030091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
ONE OF HIS FEARS was that the movement would be seen as vulnerable to communist infiltration.
The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall maintained a secret relationship with the FBI during the 1950s, when he was a prominent civil rights lawyer, occasionally providing information to bureau officials and seeking advice from them, according to newly released FBI files.
Like many other civil rights leaders, Marshall often criticized the FBI publicly - especially in the 1940s, when he demanded greater efforts to investigate lynchings and other crimes against blacks. Some 1,300 pages of FBI documents released in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act reveal another side to the relationship.
In 1956, for example, Marshall told a senior FBI official that he would be giving the keynote address at an upcoming NAACP convention. As reported in a memo to a top aide of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Marshall thought he ``could do some good'' by noting communist efforts to infiltrate civil rights groups and believed that ``some general items as to what the communists are doing could be used to good advantage.''
The memo said Marshall ``stated that no one would know where he got the information and he wondered if I could be of any help to him.''
At the time, the FBI devoted considerable resources to surveillance and harassment programs against communists and others it considered subversive. The document suggests the FBI's domestic intelligence division was asked for information for Marshall, but there is no account of how the matter was resolved.
``These documents are written from the FBI's point of view and what is missing entirely is any account of Marshall's motivations,'' said Alexander Charns, a North Carolina attorney and author who has written extensively on the relationship between the judiciary and the FBI. Charns obtained the FBI files on Marshall.
``Marshall may have been trying to protect the NAACP from the kind of attacks that the FBI directed at other groups by convincing Hoover that they were part of the fight against communism or he may have been trying to develop a relationship so that the NAACP could count on more help from the FBI when it ran into trouble in the South. But for sure Marshall was no simple informant,'' Charns said.
The FBI files, which were first reported in USA Today, show a relationship that is ``very complex and changed over time,'' Charns said. In the 1940s Marshall harshly criticized the FBI for failing to investigate lynchings and other civil rights crimes forcefully enough, and in response Hoover openly stated his dislike of him, Charns said.
Then, in the 1950s, when Marshall was chief lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he cooperated with the FBI primarily on anti-communism. ``This is not surprising,`` said Taylor Branch, a historian of the civil rights era, ``because at the time any number of civil rights leaders were telling the FBI how vigilant they were against communism because it was the only way they could survive in the highly charged politics of that era.''
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Thurgood Marshall, who criticized the FBI in the 1940s,by CNBworked with the bureau in the 1950s. color.