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365
By the time the Maryland state appeal of the Murray case came to court in
January 1936, Donald Gaines Murray had successfully completed a semester of law
school, and his attendance at the university had caused no serious disturbances.
Given this context and the well-prepared arguments of Charles Houston and his
colleagues, the appeals court in (as Mrs. Mitchell put it) "the lynch state of
Maryland" upheld the Judge O'Dunne's decision. Somewhat to the disappointment
of the NAACP, the state declined to take its appeal any further; Houston and his
colleagues had hoped that the case would go to the Supreme Court, thereby setting
a national rather than state precedent. Nevertheless, Houston's campaign had won
its first victory, and, according to some analysts, the NAACP had taken its first step
on the road to Brown v. Brown. The freedom movement in Baltimore had also won
a clear-cut and surprising victory in times that such victories were few and far
**£.
between; in the process, it had begun to change course.
The success of the Murray case had three main, interrelated consequences
for the Baltimore movement. The first had to do with the use of the courts, the
second with the organizational structure of that movement, the third with national
linkage.
As we have seen, the use of litigation as a tactic had a long history in the
Baltimore freedom movement and had played an important role in recent years
with the Euel Lee case and court battles around the injunction against picketing in
the Buy Where You Can Work campaign. The Murray case was different, however,
in that a suit was filed as an offensive, not a defensive action. Moreover, the suit
was a pan of a larger concerted strategy. Not surprisingly, the success of the
Murray suit was followed by immediate calls for more of the same. As Hayward
Farrar has pointed out in his indispensable study of the Afro-American newspaper,
the Afro led the charge with an editorial that proclaimed:
[T]here are other inequalities in educational opportunities in
Maryland that are crying out for court action.
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