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on a ship going around the world,” a New York reporter later wrote. “They failed to find employment and had no alternative but to head back to Baltimore in disgrace.” 9
    The boys were saved when one clever student decided that the administration might have some mercy on the troublemakers if they admitted to their crimes. A confession was drawn up, and the twenty-six sophomores, including Thurgood, signed it and were allowed to return to school. The student who had come up with the bright idea was none other than Langston Hughes.
    Hughes, already a well-known poet, was completing his college education at Lincoln. He was twenty-five years old and had lived in Mexico, attended Columbia University, and even worked on the docks in New York. He jumped on one ship that took him to Europe for several months and took another ship for Africa. All the while Hughes’s poetry was being published in New York, especially by the NAACP’s magazine,
The Crisis
. When he came back to the United States in the early 1920s, Hughes became a celebrated member of the distinctive group of young black artists who were creating the Harlem Renaissance movement. He was circulating in a crowd that included the singer Paul Robeson and the writers Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. And his first book,
The Weary Blues
, was already attracting critical acclaim.
    Hughes was quite the star on the Lincoln campus when he showed up in 1926. He was immediately drawn to the pranks of the all-male campus life and joined the Omegas, the rival fraternity to Thurgood’s Alphas. But Hughes had a larger life. He left campus regularly, to attend poetryreadings and parties with artists and patrons in Manhattan. He was close to the NAACP’s leadership, including the executive director, James Weldon Johnson, and the editor of
The Crisis
, W.E.B. Du Bois.
    Thurgood, meanwhile, continued life as the happy-go-lucky college boy. Hughes later described the Thurgood Marshall he knew at Lincoln as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.” 10 But Hughes became a friend, largely because he was entertained and sometimes fascinated by Thurgood’s free and easy life on campus.
    Even on Lincoln’s rural campus, however, Thurgood couldn’t escape the racial issues that Hughes talked about regularly, much to Thurgood’s irritation. In Thurgood’s sociology class the students voted on whether Lincoln should integrate its all-white faculty. The majority of students, with Thurgood in the lead, voted to keep the faculty all white.
    That vote angered fellow students, such as Hughes, who had long protested the absence of blacks on the faculty. Hughes immediately called for a campuswide referendum on the issue. The final tally showed 81 of 127 students voted as Thurgood had, to keep the faculty all white. On a campus dominated by frat life, the number one reason offered for opposing black professors at Lincoln was “favoritism,” which might occur if the professor belonged to one of the competing fraternities. The second reason was “we are doing well as we are.” And the third explanation, the most ironic, was that “students would not cooperate with Negroes.” 11
    Thurgood’s cavalier attitude about race relations went through a pivotal transformation just after the campus vote. He and some college pals, including Monroe Dowling, had gone into the small town of Oxford to watch a Saturday afternoon silent cowboy movie. After they purchased tickets, they were told that they could not sit on the main floor of the theater but had to move to the “colored” balcony. The students became angry and asked for their quarters back. The usher refused to give refunds. “So we had a disturbance … pulled down curtains, broke the front door,” Dowling said. “I don’t know who chased us. They didn’t catch anybody.” Marshall later said of the incident, “We knew there was only one pot-bellied cop in town and he could not arrest all of