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Authority, as the taxi approached Sugar Hill. In this renowned neighborhood of Harlem, Marshall lived alongside the successful artists, intellectual elites, and wealthy blacks who, pursuing their dream of the “Sweet Life,” had gravitated there during the Renaissance. If Harlem was the black capital of America, Sugar Hill was its cultural soul. It contained “perhaps the most modern and beautiful residential areas for Negroes in black America,” and it was home to musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne, the writer Ralph Ellison, and actor Paul Robeson. At the heart of Sugar Hill was 409 Edgecombe Avenue, a thirteen-story neo-Georgian building on Coogan’s Bluff that towered over the town houses and tenements of Harlem. The poet Langston Hughes spoke of “two Harlems,” and he clearly had 409 Edgecombe in mind when he wrote of those who “live on that attractive rise of bluff . . . where the plumbing really works and the ceilings are high and airy.” Its residents included Aaron Douglas, the Kansas-born, Parisian-trained artist who became known as the “father of black American art”; W. E. B. DuBois, author and civil rights activist; and Walter White, Marshall’s boss. A 1947 issue of Ebony magazine commented that the building attracted so many black elites “that legend, only slightly exaggerated, says bombing 409 would wipe out Negro leadership for the next 20 years.”
    One resident at 409 had leadership skills that were disputed by no one, though she was not whom DuBois had in mind when he wrote of the exceptional “talented tenth” who would save the Negro race. Madame Stephanie St. Clair, known to most as “Queenie,” was purported to be the Numbers Queen of Harlem and, at one point, the richest black woman in America. In New York by way of Martinique, Madame St. Clair—abrasive, unsmiling, and tough as nails—had managed to withstand the violent efforts of Dutch Schultz and any other mobsters who’d tried to horn in on her gambling operations and territory.
    The building had its share of society parties hosted by Gladys and Walter White—their thirteenth-floor apartment was called “the White House of Harlem”—and at times it fostered a fraternity atmosphere. The Baltimore couple fitted right in. At one of White’s parties, Marshall couldn’t stop laughing as he watched his new friend, world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, chase the actress Tallulah Bankhead as she ran screaming down the hallways of 409 with the fighter in close pursuit. For the most part, however, and in stark contrast to the life he lived away from home, Thurgood Marshall’s life at 409 was a quiet one.
    On weekends, the young Marshalls attended upscale Harlem supper clubs like Happy Rhone’s Paradise on 143rd Street and Lenox, the “NAACP’s unofficial after-hours headquarters,” where the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement during World War II held court with black intellectuals, literati, and entertainers. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and the 1941 winner of the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s prestigious award “for the highest achievement of an American Negro,” was another of Marshall’s “sassiety” Harlem neighbors who moved in the same circle at the time. Thurgood also socialized with a friend from his college days at Lincoln University, Langston Hughes, who had come to New York years before and was one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Like many intellectuals and activists who joined the NAACP’s fight for equal rights, both Wright and Hughes were drawn to communism, and for decades Marshall had to navigate the complex relationship between communist supporters in the Civil Rights Congress—a communist front organization dedicated to civil liberties—and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which, Marshall knew, could destroy the NAACP with just a few well-timed words during the Red Scare.
    The Marshalls eventually settled on a modest one-bedroom