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Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
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Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys."

Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.

Editor's Note

Riveting & lauded…

Thurgood Marshall risks his life to defend four black men falsely accused of rape in King’s riveting & lauded history of a pivotal time for both the future Supreme Court justice and for civil rights in America.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMar 6, 2012
ISBN9780062097712
Author

Gilbert King

Gilbert King has written about U.S. Supreme Court history for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and is a featured contributor to Smithsonian magazine's history blog, Past Imperfect. He is the author of The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

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Rating: 4.315094356603774 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This story is truly horrifying. What a farce is Florida justice. King, though, misses the forest for the trees. We get blow-by-blow details of the trials and lots of essentially meaningless details. But I don't think King ever gives a bigger picture of racism in Lake County and Florida. Thurgood Marshall is a very compelling character, but the scope of the book is so narrow that we only get tangents on his life. I wanted more.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an in-depth look at a 1949 case in Groveland, Fla where 4 black men were accused of raping a white woman. Of course, no rape occurred. At least not by these 4 men. But that didn't stop the local sheriff, prosecutor, and judge and jury from beating confessions out of them, charging them, trying and convicting them, and sentencing them to death. The NCAAP provided a legal defense for the men, appealing the verdict all the way to the US Supreme Court - twice. Only one of the 4 men are still living. Two didn't survive the trials. The fourth didn't survive a trip back to town for a funeral shortly after his parole from prison in 1969. The details are incredible - I won't even try to summarize as I won't do justice to the impact they have. Suffice to say, even though I knew this kind of thing went on in the South, I still was shocked by the brutality and inhumanity of the "system". And the Sheriff, Willis V McCall, was nothing short of a monster who claimed as late as 1994 that "I never hurt anyone ... or killed anyone who didn't deserve killing" (pg 357). Amazingly, he was re-elected to his office 8 times, narrowly losing in 1972 only because he couldn't devote sufficient time to his campaign. He had been suspended from office pending legal actions that stemmed from allegations that a mentally-challenged black man had been kicked to death while in McCall's custody. (McCall was acquitted.)But I'm digressing. The book isn't about Sheriff McCall, it is about Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was head of the NCAAP's Legal Defense Fund, which provided representation to black defendants in cases all over the south. Initially, his primary focus was the desegregation of schools, and he was preparing Brown v Board of Education to be presented to the US Supreme Court at the same time Groveland was also in appeals. But increasingly, the NCAAP provided defense in cases where blacks were being deprived of their full legal rights in criminal matters. Eventually, as we all know, he was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Johnson, the first African-American to receive that appointment. However, this isn't a biography of Marshall's life. It is a look at his role in changing America, with Groveland as the featured case in point.I've heard many people complain about the excessive rights that defendants receive, to the detriment of the rights of victims and other law abiding citizens, or so it seems. I've expressed the same sentiment myself. However, this book has opened my eyes and shown me the reason those rights are so important. There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when a large portion of the population had virtually no rights as defendants. Regardless of the constitution. It came as a result of the work by Thurgood Marshall, and others like him, who overcame hardship and extreme risk to their personal safety, to insure that every American is given the opportunity to receive a fair trial.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Devil in the Grove is a riveting account of a real life crime committed in central Florida in 1949. Four young black men were accused of raping a young white women during the era of Jim Crow and segregation. A highly biased and racist community demanded immediate 'justice' in the form of lynching. However, what began as an open and shut case against the Groveland Four ended up in two trials, several Supreme Court challenges, multiple national new articles, several terrorists acts and two of the four men being murdered. Thurgood Marshall, a star defense lawyer for the NAACP spearheaded the legal team that defended the Groveland Four. He and his team worked tirelessly against the odds and a community that was hopelessly racist. One of the chief obstacles in the search for truth and justice was in the form of the town sheriff, Willis V. McCall. McCall was unfortunately the stereo-typical southern sheriff for that time and place. Deeply bigoted and embedded with the Klan, personally greedy and narcissistic, he was not above lying, brutality or even murder to keep his little pocket of Florida under his thumb. Google Willis McCall and prepare to be depressed. For anyone who longs for the good ole days, this little piece of history is exhibit A as to why those days weren't all that great.Woven throughout the story is the biography of Thurgood Marshall, and the history of several other civil rights cases that occurred throughout that time. Including Marshall's meticulous preparation for his landmark argument of Brown v. Board of Education. But the heart of the story is the Groveland case. A case that was tragic and devastating for the accused men, with only the thinnest of silver linings for the two lucky enough to survive the Florida justice system and Sherriff McCall.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In this 2013 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Devil in the Grove is about Thurgood Marshall's ("Mr Civil Rights" and arguably one of the best lawyers of the 20th century) work to save three black men accused of gang raping a 17 year old girl.Gilbert King did an amazing amount of research for this book including reading the FBI's Groveland case files and the NAACP's legal defense files - and this research really shone through. His prose was acerbic at times, and it flowed smoothly keeping my interest the whole way through. Devil in the Grove gave a lot of background information on Thurgood Marshall's life outside of the of the trial, thus bringing a personal light to the story. Gilbert also included stories about KKK activities against lawyers who defended black people accused of rape, which was terrifying and disgusting. Overall, a fantastic book. Read it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very worthy book, but an unusual one to categorize. On one hand, it very title suggests being offered as a crime story, much like Hampton Sides', Hellhound on His Trail, and, indeed, it starts off that way. On the other hand, there is much coverage of the NAACP and its internal politics, plus that organization's interactions with other civil rights organizations. To that extent, the book shifts more to being a classic history text. The transitions during the first part of the book are not always as smooth as they could be. Yet, ultimately, once all the ground work has been laid out for the reader -- what were Thurgood Marshall and his associates working on and under what conditions were the working -- the narrative flows much more evenly. In the end, the book seems more a political corruption analysis than either a crime story or civil rights history. I also had the distinct impression that the author would have preferred to have written an exciting story about Thurgood Marshall and the monumental Brown v. Board of Education case, but found this was the best way to get across to the reader why Justice Marshall was such a unique and significant American. The Groveland Boys case offered itself more easily to showing the main character in action while amply demonstrating his intelligence and skills. I should also add that, having read several books about civil rights violations and struggles in the Deep South, this book shows some nuances of Southern life interracial dynamics that other worthy books have failed to do as well. Despite its complexities, this book is definitely recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an incredible story. I knew nothing about it and was glad to have experienced the dramatic events as if living through them, unaware of what going to happen next. The less you know of the Groveland Case the better this book will be. The characters are made for Hollywood. It's been said that behind every evil is a lie. The lie of slavery is that some humans are sub-human, are less equal. The lie did not end with the Civil War, it was told to younger generations, and is at the heart of the evil in this book as it finds expression in a multitude of ways. The Constitution is the ultimate hero of this story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Devil in the Grove tells the story of the wrongful prosecution of four young black men for allegedly raping a young white woman in Lake County, Florida, in 1949(it appears likely in retrospect that she had not been raped at all, but she declined to speak to the author as he was researching the book). While the subtitle focuses on Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney with the NAACP, who was part of the defense team, Marshall is only one of a large cast of figures pulled into the case. Gilbert King tells the story as a gripping narrative, full of tension and unexpected twists, but along the way takes opportunities to illuminate African-American culture in the mid-century, the national politics of the Civil Rights movement, and the NAACP's broader litigation strategy. Of course the heart of the history recounts violent and systematic racial injustice, ranging from extraction of false confessions by torture, to extra-legal killings, to a blatantly biased judge overseeing a trial. The narrative paints a very clear picture of just how pervasive and brutal Southern white supremacy was, and how it operated on the ground. Beyond the main theme, the book is sufficiently sophisticated that it offers much else to think about as well. One striking contrast was the difference in outcomes for blacks trying to build decent lives for themselves in rural Florida, who mostly ended up on the losing end no matter how hard they worked - houses burned down, if they weren't actually shot or killed - versus the black (and white) attorneys from the big cities, who risked their lives to represent rural clients, but all ended up with successful careers. Structurally, that's important to King's story - it would be much more depressing but for the knowledge that Marshall ultimately became a Supreme Court justice - but it does mean the history lacks anything like a true happy ending.Another particularly compelling aspect of the history is the contrast between the two leading villains - and while that's not a word the author uses, it is appropriate here. One, Sheriff Willis McCall, is a racist tyrant who is willing to beat or kill anyone who disturbs white supremacy in Lake County. The other, Jesse Hunter, a state attorney dying of leukemia, is committed to law and order, and, while hating McCall for committing murder, uses all his legal skills and racist rhetoric to win a death penalty conviction of a man he knows is innocent. King doesn't ask which is worse; he's a historian, not a moralizer - but it's nearly impossible to read Devil in the Grove without considering the question.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book well tells a stunning story concerning an alleged rape in Lake County, Florida. Four black men were accused of raping a white teenage woman. One of the accused was hunted down and killed, the other three went to trial, were convicted and the convictions of two of them were reversed by the United States Supreme Court. The two men were taken by the sheriff of Lake County but on the way to the site of the new trial he shot both men, killing one,. assserting they were trying to escape though they were handcuffed to each other. This account tells an often sickening story and is filled with careful research as it tells the astounding story of the events of 1949 thru to the present. I read it because it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction this year. It is the 33rd such winner I have read. At first I was a bit annoyed by the lack of footnotes and the source notes are not as good as they could be, but this is a minor defect and the book is an gripping and astounding read and is well deserving of the prize d it was granted.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This account of a case Thurgood Marshall worked on while an attorney for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund is an important part of American history that needs to be told. I've given it 4 stars for its merit in documenting that which has often been downplayed and/or repressed. There are many episodes of graphic violence in the narrative, which made it very difficult to read. I am sad that this is part of my country's legacy, and hope that we never forget our capability for unspeakable violence and hatred so that we may strive to be a better citizenry.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonderful job of research was done on a troubled and twisted aspect of American History. The book tells the story of four young Black men who are falsely accused of raping a white woman and the extremes that law enforcement would go to make them pay with their lives. The author pays special attention to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP's role in defending them. The setting is Central Florida in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Even though there was absolutely no proof that the rape even occurred this shows the extent White society would go to find scapegoats for a crime that never happened. This is a period in American History that should never be forgotten. I can certainly see why the book got all the acclaim that it. did.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was read beautifully by Peter Francis James. If I could have, I would have given it ten stars. It should be required reading in schools across the country. I grew up, went to school, got degrees, but I was never taught about the injustice in the black community in such a detailed, well researched, honest and compassionate approach. It is inspiring and highly informative. The background of Thurgood Marshall’s life is compelling. In his early days, his fights to end racial tensions and racial bias consumed him and were fraught with danger. A lawyer, he fought for the rights of the black man and woman with a straightforward no-nonsense dedication and fervor. He was married, but he and his wife remained childless. He worked too hard, played too much and often drank too much. He was not always true to his wife, but he always loved her, and they remained together until she died.Thurgood Marshall spent his life fighting for the civil rights of blacks in all avenues of life. He fought for better educational opportunity and won the case in Brown v. Board of Education, granting the right to an equal education, in all schools, for all students, not separate but equal schools. He worked hard for the cause of desegregation and to right the wrongs of the justice system, but the ultimate goal of integration was a long and hard struggle. He fought to overturn the Jim Crow laws that divided the races. His life was often threatened as he fought the attempts of the KKK to defeat all of his efforts. He became the first black United States Supreme Court Justice.Although the book provides the background of Justice Marshall and his decades long fight for equality, it dwells largely on the Groveland Boys Case which was a travesty of justice. It took decades to overturn the verdicts due to corruption and deception. Four black men were framed and beaten to coerce confessions, some were murdered in cold blood by law enforcement for the rape of a white woman, “a flower of the south”, a crime they did not commit, and for which they were falsely accused. They were mistreated by a crooked, twisted law enforcement body and a blind court controlled by racists, judges, sheriffs, the KKK, and politicians, all of whom were complicit in allowing this corrupt behavior to dominate their justice system. The true story of the supposed rape and the night of the alleged crime is revealed slowly. The research leaves no stone unturned. As years go by, as people are murdered and terrorized to prevent them from telling the truth, whites and blacks, the tension builds as if it were a novel. It is a story one would wish had been made up from whole cloth; it is such a mockery of justice and an example of outright evil. The case is about two young black men who made the mistake of stopping to help a young white couple, stranded in a disabled vehicle, on a dark and lonely road which they just happened to pass by. It was to prove to be a terrible accident of fate. From that act of kindness a nightmare developed that extended for decades, ending in bloodshed and death. The true criminals and perjurers paraded around protected by the tactics of those who wore hoods. According to the book, even as late as 2005, there were possible repercussions from the Groveland Case, which occurred in Lake County, Florida. I live in Florida and I am ashamed, even though I was not a resident at the time this “so-called crime” took place. The complacency of everyone towards the plight of the falsely accused men, including the Governor, the courts and the media, was shameful, and the idea that it might still exist is appalling and inexcusable. Without the efforts of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund, and finally the media and a few good men, justice, however mediocre, might never have been served.After reading this book, it is easy to understand why people of color do not trust law enforcement and react with such vehemence when they suspect foul play against their race. They have no historic context to believe anything else. It was so easy for them to be framed, murdered and disposed of as collateral damage to the cause of white supremacy. They had no recourse, no way to fight back, and it took decades to achieve anything to improve their situation. The wheels of justice moved in slow motion and often not at all. My view of the Civil Rights struggle was distorted by a lack of education and a lack of information. This book was an eye-opening, unpleasant and painful history lesson. My ignorance of the real experiences, horrors and helplessness of the blacks everywhere, apart and aside from the common knowledge of the tragedy of slavery, was woefully obvious and speaks to a need for a broader education on black history for elementary school children, with full disclosure. The Southerners were adamant about separating the races. They didn’t see themselves as hypocrites, but rather as self-righteous keepers of the peace, their warped sense of ethics and their agrarian economy. Because of the atmosphere of fear in the South, even blacks shied away from supporting black causes and did not testify to save their brethren, but rather accepted money and bribes to lie. Their very lives, livelihoods, families and children were often threatened if they didn’t comply, and that went also for white people who went against the fray. Their homes were destroyed, businesses ruined, and their bodies were beaten and left for dead, if not actually dead! The book illustrates the decades of Thurgood Marshall’s dedication to the advancement of the cause of civil rights, so often at great risk to his own life. This book reads like a thriller; it is a book which one would wish was fiction, rather than fact, so horrific are the details revealed, so monumental are the miscarriages of justice. It is no wonder that blacks carry around the baggage of fear and mistrust. They sure have good reason because the white population has set the precedent for them. The system was unequal and unfair. Black men were murdered for crimes they didn’t commit and white men, when caught and tried for crimes against blacks, were dismissed with a slap on their wrists from all white juries that perpetuated the prejudice, corruption and brutality. While black men were murdered for the “supposed” rape of a white woman, white men were excused for the rape of a black woman. The crimes were not considered equal in the eyes of the interpreters of the law.I was sixteen when I was chased by a group of white youngsters because I was with a young black man. It was in Saratoga Springs, NY. In retrospect, I shouldn’t be so surprised by what I read, yet I was, because I thought what happened to me was an anomaly, not the norm.. Thinking about it now, we were really lucky that the four of us escaped bodily harm. I remember it well though. My black friends told us to separate from them because they wanted to protect us, and I, young and foolish, thought it was exciting and romantic. I never realized that this type of thing was a heinous threat that hung over them everyday. I was completely naïve.Marshall’s name goes down in history right next to some of the most memorable legal cases fought before the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly to achieve a legal system and educational system that was fair to all, regardless of color, and ultimately was successful, but there is still a tough road to hoe.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Chillingly documents a case of the domestic terrorism that plagued the segregated South. A must read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Groveland Boys were four young black men who were falsely accused of raping a young white woman in a rural county in Florida in 1948. They barely escaped being lynched, but their trial was intended to be a more palatable lynching, with a sanctioned death sentence resulting. Thurgood Marshall was in charge of the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP at the time, working on civil rights cases throughout the country. He took up the case of the Groveland Boys, and fought to save their lives through many judicial and extra-judicial proceedings.The book clearly presents how little value was placed on the lives of blacks in the deep South during this time. They could be disrespected, threatened and intimidated, their property could be destroyed, and their very lives taken with impunity and with no consequences. It was considered a great victory for the LDF to conclude a trial of innocent men with life sentences imposed instead of the death penalty.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just finished Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America and gave it 5 stars. Here is my review: This book made me sad, angry, proud and happy. I was saddened to read of the hatred these young men experienced for no other reason than that they happened to be born African-American and at such a tumultuous time in the history of this country. But had they not gone through this, we may not be as far along as a people or as a country. I was angered by those who knew the truth but would not speak up. Pride was inevitable, as Mr Marshall, the LDF, and others worked relentlessly to right the wrongs that they could. I realized, while reading this book, that there are some wrongs that only God can and will right. For that, I am happiest. I am also happy that the last living Groveland young man's life was not wasted in prison. I would recommend this publication as mandatory high school reading. These young men were teenagers and many of today's teens have no idea what life was like for that generation. Yet, they experience the same hatred. I think seeing these pictures, hearing their testimonies and observing the obvious racism will change the behavior of some.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A gripping, terrifying account of an important yet overlooked case of racial injustice in the Jim Crow South and a compelling look at the case that forged Thurgood Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The horrors of the Jim Crow laws are presented here. Four innocent black boys are to pay the price when a white woman cries rape. Thurgood Marshall, known as the Civil Rights lawyer., is brought in to defend the boys through the up starting group NAACP. Despite threats and the death of one of his associates by the KKK, Marshall was determined to defend the boys and, hopefully, makes some strides in the Civil Rights movement.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an important book (it won the 2013 Pulitzer for Nonfiction), and I'm going to recommend it because of the importance of its subject matter. It tells an eye-opening and thrilling story. However, it does so in a confusing and convoluted way. I found it to be, for the most part, extremely disorganized and poorly written, and I couldn't believe that it had won a Pulitzer. I nearly gave up on it many times during the first 100 or so pages. After that it flowed better, but oh how I wish it was more competently written.In 1949, in Groveland Florida a 17 year old white girl claimed to have been raped by 4 black men, and Sheriff Willis McCall went into action. Four innocent young men were blamed (one of whom was already in police custody for another matter at the time the rape allegedly occurred, but never mind). In short order, three of the young men were arrested and the fourth was killed "resisting arrest." Riots were instigated by the KKK, and much of the black area of town was burned down. The three arrestees were brutally beaten and tortured, and two of them confessed to the rape; one refused to confess.At the time the Groveland events were unfolding, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was an attorney for the NAACP deeply involved in the case that became the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Nevertheless, he signed on to defend the "Groveland Boys," as they were known. Marshall expected to lose the case at the trial level. The NAACP strategy at the time was to get these types of cases overturned at the appellate level, and that's how this case proceeded. The three surviving Groveland Boys were convicted at the trial level; two received the death penalty but one was given "only" a life sentence. Since at the time there was no guarantee that if the case were retried, the defendant who had initially received the life sentence would not then be sentenced to death, that defendant did not appeal.The convictions of the other two defendants were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. A few years later, when their cases were to be retried on remand, Sheriff McCall was transporting the two defendants, chained together, from the state penitentiary to the courthouse. McCall made it look like they were trying to escape and shot them both in cold blood. One of the defendants died, but the other lived. While the sheriff was investigated for this blatant act of murder, he was never charged or convicted. Thurgood Marshall called the failure to charge Sheriff McCall, "the worst case of injustice and whitewashing I have come across." McCall continued to be reelected as Groveland's sheriff until 1972, when he was indicted and suspended from office for kicking to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell.The now one remaining Groveland Boy was convicted on retrial and again sentenced to death. This time the Supreme Court did not overturn the conviction, and the last part of the book is an exciting page turner as we follow the legal maneuverings to attempt to save the final defendant from execution.Although I've heard of other similar cases that occurred in the first half of the 20th century, I had never heard of the Groveland case. And, although the case went to the Supreme Court more than once, it is rarely mentioned in civil rights histories, law texts, or apparently even in biographies of Thurgood Marshall. At the time it was ongoing, the case itself and the various coverups generated little attention or outrage other than in the black newspapers. Perhaps I'm naïve, but this case shed so much light for me on how evil and corrupt the justice system was (and perhaps still is). It also shed light on how courageous the civil rights workers and lawyers were as they took on these cases, and other types of civil rights issues. (In fact the NAACP rep for the Groveland area died when his house was firebombed on Christmas day before the trial of the Groveland boys. The perpetrators were never found--and there is some suspicion that the sheriff may have had some type of involvement. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the event: "The Ballad of Harry Moore.")Again, although this book was for the most part not well-written, I'm going to highly recommend it.3 1/2 stars
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This masterful and riveting non-fiction book, subtitled “Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” is about some of the bravest men in the history of this country. It is a useful corrective to anyone who thought (from reading The Help, for instance) that Jim Crow America wasn’t so bad. Or worse, those who thought that what was described in The Help was as bad as it got! Gilbert King, who has written about U.S. Supreme Court history for both The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that by the mid-1940’s, Thurgood Marshall, the grandson of a mixed-race slave, “was engineering the greatest social transformation in American since the Reconstruction era.” With a rhetorical facility (“benighted towns billeting hostile prosecutors”) that transcends the sobering subject matter, King allows you to forget you are reading non-fiction, but he never allows you to forget you are reading a genuine horror story. Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues in the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP traveled throughout the South in the 1950’s, trying to fight white supremacy using the weapon of the Constitution. Marshall knew he could not win cases at the local or state level, so his goal became to establish firm grounds for appeals on record. If favorable rulings on equal protection could be obtained in higher courts, these precedents could then be used as additional building blocks for the rights of blacks.The story of Marshall’s battle is told by a focus on one particular case, that of the Groveland Boys, which was, according to King:"…key to Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer, willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials, and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes – even if it nearly killed him.”And he was nearly killed a number of times.The case of the Groveland Boys made national news at the time, and also had a significant impact upon the NAACP’s goals for future litigation. It took place in Florida, a state that somehow escaped the bad reputation attributed to Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana even though it had a higher per capital lynching rate. King notes that "In the postwar decade Florida would…prove to be a state with a boundless capacity for racial inhumanity, even by measure of the rest of the South…”In Groveland, the Klan was populated by lawmen, and blacks had no hope of protection. So it was that when four young black men were arrested for the rape of a young white girl, in spite of the fact that no semen was found in her, or that two of the boys weren’t even in the area that night, a conviction and death penalty for all four boys was a foregone conclusion. Two of the young men were in the area, and they were World War II veterans, the object of particular rancor among white southerners since these veterans no longer were acting subservient enough.The book describes the horrific events that surrounded this case, including the beatings of suspects and murder of three of them by the sheriff, who managed to remain in office until 1972 when he was finally suspended for kicking to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell; the personal risks with their lives taken by all the defense lawyers; and the jaw-dropping injustice in the courtroom. It also enumerates the pressures on Marshall, who was simultaneously working on arguments for Brown v. Board of Education to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. While desperate stays-of-execution were filed in the Groveland Case, Marshall was forced to respond to the Supreme Court’s order that all five of the segregation cases coalesced into Brown v. Board had to be reargued in terms of the statutory intent of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s an amazing story, and my respect for Marshall increased tremendously as a result of it.Evaluation: This is a book that should be required reading. This horrifying, edge-of-your-seat tale really happened, and not that long ago. Its repercussions helped make the country what it is today. The author, who unearthed FBI files under seal for sixty years, has done an outstanding job in telling this story which manages to be heart-breaking, inspiring, infuriating, and admirable all at once.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Rarely does a carefully crafted and meticulously researched history read as if it were a novel, and that is precisely what Gilbert King has accomplished in his account of the years Thurgood Marshall spent as an attorney on the staff of the NAACP’s legal team. The centerpiece of the narrative is the investigation and prosecution of a rape in Lake County, Florida, in July, 1949. In what appears to have been an attempt to punish a young black man for failing to be properly subservient to a white man, a 17-year-old white woman filed a spurious police report, claiming that four black men had beat her husband, then kidnapped and raped her. By the time a retrial, ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court, was in progress in early 1952, two of the accused had been killed by law officers and one was in prison serving a life sentence. As Thurgood Marshall explained to his client, Charles Greenlee, the fact that he had not been sentenced to death meant the jury believed he was innocent, and that was as close to justice as a black man could expect in Lake County, Florida. On that advice, Greenlee chose to serve his sentence and hope for a future reduction of his sentence. The brilliance of the defense in the retrial of Walter Irvin in 1952 was to no avail; he was again found guilty and sentenced to death.Greenlee was granted parole in 1960, married, had children, and built a successful HVAC maintenance business. Irvin’s sentence was eventually commuted, and he was paroled in 1968, provided he never returned to Lake County. A year later, Irvin sought and won the approval of his parole officer to attend his uncle’s funeral in Lake County. Irvin was found dead in his car “of natural causes.”Wrapped around the central tale and woven throughout the narrative are the stories of the other carefully crafted, history-changing cases that the NAACP’s legal team tried under the aegis of Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall. Rarely expecting to win a case, they depended on courtroom strategy and carefully written briefs that would yield successes on appeal. Their goal was to build a body of case law that would support individuals in future suits who sought to assert their moral rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and they succeeded. Their hard-fought successes at the U.S. Supreme Court transformed civil rights from words in the Constitution to realistic expectation and, as the subtitle suggests, “the Dawn of a New America.”King uses an interesting device for his source notes, which appear at the end of the book, where quotations in the text are listed by page number. The reading is smoother without the superscript numbers appearing throughout the text, and for those who like to read source notes in the course of their reading, they are as accessible as if they had been handled more traditionally. There are also an epilogue and index. In later editions, such as the recent paperback that I read, there are three additional sections: A Conversation with Gilbert King (a brief and worthwhile interview with the author), The Last Word (the text of letters King received from readers who were moved by the book), and Questions for Discussion (for book clubs). Having breathlessly finished the last word of the text, I was not ready to part with the story, just as if I had been reading a thrilling novel. I wanted to know what happened to the characters, and I needed a conversation to digest what I’d read. These last sections provided that opportunity.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's a good.book. didn't. Want to stop reading it. May read threw the night
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very Nice .
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hard, heavy, heart-breaking, but so fascinating that it reads as a thriller. Proof that no work of fiction could ever rival the truth.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When and Where Were the First Dirt Bikes Developed?

    Dirt biking, with its adrenaline-pumping off-road adventures, has become a thrilling motorsport and recreational activity enjoyed by enthusiasts worldwide. But when and where did the first dirt bikes make their mark? The journey of dirt bikes takes us back to the early 20th century, with roots in various corners of the world. You can visit: dirtbikeaide.com
    Europe: Early Trials and Pioneering Spirit
    Europe played a pivotal role in shaping the concept of dirt bikes. In the United Kingdom, motorcycle trials were a popular sport in the early 1900s. These trials involved navigating challenging off-road terrains, prompting riders to modify existing road motorcycles to withstand the rugged conditions. As these modifications evolved, they laid the foundation for the development of dirt bikes.

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Got through 20% , didn't really get into it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An ugly piece of recent US history laid bare by a skilled writer. This one hurt to read, but I'm glad I did. Recommend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    [Devil in the Grove] is a nonfiction book that takes place in Florida the 1940s-50s. It follows a case where four young Black men were accused of raping a white woman when she and her boyfriend find themselves in a broken down car along the side of the road. It is absolutely obvious from the very beginning that these Black men had nothing to do with raping her or injuring the couple in any way. In fact only two of the accused were even on the scene at all - they had stopped briefly to see if the couple needed help - but the other two were honestly just the closest Black men at hand to round out the 4 needed to support the woman's accusation. One of the 4 Black men that they try to arrest runs and is killed. The other three will stand trial in Lake County, Florida. The NAACP gets involved in this case, and Thurgood Marshall as well, so the book includes some detail about Marshall's life. But mainly, the focus is on the trial and the brutal conditions for Black people living in Lake County, Florida. The police brutally coerce confessions from some of the accused men through some of the worst torture you can imagine. The community burns down the family home of one of the accused, Samuel Shepard. They were one of the most successful Black families in the county. During the trial, any evidence that would stand against the prosecution's case is blatantly hidden and not introduced and the local judge supports all of it. Supporting evidence is obviously fabricated. The NAACP defense knows that their only chance is to try for an appeal. This book also briefly describes other similar trials around the country to show that this is not only happening in Florida. There is a nationwide focus to the book and there are other cases making their way to the Supreme Court concurrently with this case. These parts give a little break to the reader to catch your breath from all the horror happening in Florida. One of the most evil people (with plenty to choose from in this book) is the Sheriff of Lake County, Willis McCall. There is no way to view this man without complete disgust. I found it unbelievable that he didn't die until 1994 - when I was a sophomore in high school. It's so easy to think about the Jim Crow South as existing in a different era, but that fact connected it to me. These things were happening when my grandparents were adults and my parents were just being born. It's not the distant past. I think books like these make it so obvious why we are still where we are today - with police brutality against Blacks and inequalities in our schools, just to scratch the surface. It's only been 70 years since lynchings were commonplace and there were no rights for Black people in the courts. Despite this rather long review (for me), I didn't even scratch the surface of what actually happened in this trial or the outcomes for these accused. I think every American should read this book. I think it's vital for us to acknowledge what life was like for Black people in the South in the not so distant past, both because it's part of our history and because it informs what is happening in our country today.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There are a lot of non-fiction books, and quite a few well written novels, that detail the cruelty, brutality, and the injustice of the Jim Crow South, but few are better than DEVIL IN THE GROVE by Gilbert King, the Pulitzer Prize winning account of a rape case in Lake County, Florida, in July 1949. The story centers on Norma Padgett, a 17 year old White woman who went out for a Saturday evening of dancing with her estranged husband, a night that ended with her being sexually assaulted by four young Black men—or so she claimed the next day. Four suspects, ranging in age from late teens to early twenties, who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time were quickly singled out. This rape accusation for a crime where there was little or no evidence that the actual rape had been committed, set off a chain reaction of Klu Klux Klan mob violence, murder, multiple trials, and an exhaustive effort by the NAACP to save the lives of the defendants from a corrupt legal system intent on putting them to death one way or another. It is a true life thriller filled with heroes and villains, and secondary characters that emerge as compelling and complex. The hero of the story is Thurgood Marshall, the top lawyer of the NAACP who took on the daunting task of walking into hostile Southern courtrooms filled with die hard segregationists to make the case for a Black defendant who had run afoul of the system. More than once, Marshall had barely escaped the wrath of Klansmen and vigilantes intend on punishing the Black northern lawyer who dared to come into their county and act “uppity.” Marshall oversaw the defense of the surviving defendants who became known as the Groveland Boys; he had little or no hope of winning an acquittal in a Florida courtroom, but the strategy was to win on appeal in the Federal courts which were not always sympathetic to the shoddy ways of Southern justice. As a litigator, few were better than Thurgood Marshall, but he still had to find a White lawyer to sit at the table with him in front the jury. King paints a full portrait of Marshall, a crusading lawyer who worked himself into a sick bed for his clients who nevertheless liked to party hard in the off hours, and was perhaps less than faithful to an ailing wife. King makes it plain that even though the legal branch of the NAACP was doing the work of the angels, it was also a place where ego and ambition thrived. Still, one cannot help but make the contrast between the experiences of Marshall on his way to becoming the first Black American to be appointed to the Supreme Court to some of the frat boys and networkers who sit on the Court today. If Marshall is the hero of the story, then Sheriff Willis V. McCall of Lake County is the villain. In the annals of nefarious Jim Crow era law enforcement, McCall just might be the very worst of a truly sorry lot. He ruled his Florida fiefdom with an iron hand and doled out violence with virtual impunity to any and all challenges to White supremacy. A bullet for “resisting arrest” or “attempting to escape” was part of this playbook, and he was determined that his brand of justice would be meted out to the Groveland Boys no matter what. And if their Black lawyers pushed too hard in the courtroom, then too bad for them. To dismiss McCall as a Boss Hogg buffoon is to miss the point. Among the book’s large cast of characters, those who stood out to me were local newspaper editor Mabel Norris Reese, state prosecutor Jesse Hunter, and martyred lawyer Harry Moore, among the White thug deputies, crusading civil rights activists, complacent judges and politicians, and the suffering family members of the accused who turn up in the story. Despite its disturbing subject matter (it has some harrowing depictions of racial violence), I really did enjoy reading DEVIL IN THE GROVE. Other reviewers will may not come out and say it, but this book is a great read because it tells an engrossing story very well. Author King wisely gets out of the way and lets the events unfold and the story tell itself. It’s a true life legal thriller with plenty of twists and turns, and I found it to be a real page turner. King explains how the economic system in Florida exploited poor Black and Whites alike, but kept them from ever making common cause on their own behalf because of racial animus whipped up by the Klan. Blacks who got out of line, or who got too prosperous in the eyes of their White neighbors, did not fare well. There is not a Hollywood ending to this story, life is far more complex than pop culture, but King makes the case that the story of the Groveland Boys had an impact on a post WWII America that was slowly, but surely, becoming less tolerant of the outrages of the police dictatorship for Black Americans that had existed in the Old Confederacy since the end of Reconstruction in no small part because men like Thurgood Marshall and his fellow lawyers would not let the country look away.I know that for many their reaction to the DEVIL IN THE GROVE will be outrage and anger. But books like this fill me with humility. If, as Americans, we are the heirs of those who came before us, then we should look back at the courage of men like Thurgood Marshall and strive to not fall short when called to do what is right even when it pains us. Yet, if we are the heirs of Thurgood Marshall, then we are also part of the legacy of Sheriff Willis McCall, and we must be wary of wedding ourselves to a status quo that we are willing to do anything, even countenancing cold blooded murder, in order to preserve it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    nonfiction (civil rights cases in 1950s Florida) [pulitzer #20]. I don't know how people can criticize G.King for presenting history in such a dramatic way, because it *was* a life-and-death situation for so many people (and more than half of them didn't survive). If kids read this instead of dry old history books that gloss over everything, we'd all have a much better understanding of our world and its history.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5

    This is beautiful.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Inte resting...!!

Book preview

Devil in the Grove - Gilbert King

(Courtesy of Cecil Williams)

Dedication

For Lorna, Maddie, and Liv

and in memory of Matthew P. (Matty) Boylan

CONTENTS

Dedication

Prologue

1 - Mink Slide

2 - Sugar Hill

3 - Get to Pushin’

4 - Nigger in a Pit

5 - Trouble Fixin’ to Start

6 - A Little Bolita

7 - Wipe This Place Clean

8 - A Christmas Card

9 - Don’t Shoot, White Man

10 - Quite a Hose Wielder

11 - Bad Egg

12 - Atom Smasher

13 - In Any Fight Some Fall

14 - This is a Rape Case

15 - You Have Pissed in My Whiskey

16 - It’s a Funny Thing

17 - No Man Alive or to Be Born

18 - All Over the Place, like Rats

19 - Private Parts

20 - A Genius Here Before Us

21 - The Colored Way

22 - A Place in the Sun

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

A Note on Sources

Notes

Index

P. S - Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the author

About the book

Read on

About the Author

Praise for Devil in the Grove

Also by Gilbert King

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Flag outside the NAACP offices at 69 Fifth Avenue, New York City. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

ALL HIS LIFE, it seemed, he’d been staring out the windows of trains rumbling toward the unknown. Again, he was seated in the Jim Crow coach, hitched directly behind the engines, where the heavy heat bore the smell of diesel. Still, the lawyer sat proud in his smart double-breasted suit, a freshly pressed handkerchief dancing out of his pocket, as the haunting Southern landscape of cypress swamps, cotton fields, and whitewashed, tin-roofed shanties flickered by. Traveling alone, he hunched his six-foot, two-inch frame over case files; a cigarette dangling from his lips, he scribbled some notes on a yellow legal pad. He would rewrite the draft before he typed it up later; he worked meticulously. A federal clerk once told him that with just one look at the smudges or erasures on a lawyer’s pleading he’d know if it was written by a white man or a Negro. It was a remark Thurgood Marshall never forgot. In cases like his there was too much at stake for him to be filing any nigger briefs.

The trains he rode bore grand names like the Orange Blossom Special, the Silver Meteor, and the Champion, and their rhythms ran in Marshall’s Baltimore blood. Both his father, Willie, and his uncle, Fearless, had been porters on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and to help pay for college, young Thurgood himself had worked as a waiter in a B&O dining car. The railroads were for him and his family a source of pride, and status, but on trips like these, when he was riding alone, they also summoned in Marshall an old sadness. His wife, Buster, unable to bear the children he had longed for, had one year for his birthday given him the electric train set she had hoped someday to present to her husband and their son. With the train, and with an engineer’s hat perched atop his head, Marshall entertained the boys in their Harlem apartment building instead.

By the mid-1940s, Marshall, the grandson of a mixed-race slave named Thorney Good Marshall, was engineering the greatest social transformation in America since the Reconstruction era. He had already devoted more than a decade of his career to overcoming the inherent defects of a Constitution that had allowed, by law, social injustices against blacks, who had been denied not only the right to vote but also equal rights and opportunities in education, housing, and employment. With his far-reaching triumphs in landmark cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall would indeed redefine justice in a multiracial nation and become, as one civil rights pioneer described him, the Founding Father of the New America.

Before achieving those victories, however, Marshall fought countless battles for human rights in stifling antebellum courthouses where white supremacy ruled. Neither judges nor juries in the Jim Crow South had much interest in Marshall’s nuanced constitutional arguments. To Marshall, the representation of powerless blacks falsely accused of capital crimes became his opportunity to prove that equality in courtrooms was every bit as vital to the American model of democracy as was the fight for equality in classrooms and in voting booths.

On Marshall’s journeys, when the moon lit the passing landscapes of the South, he customarily drank bourbon, and he enjoyed the company of the night porters—they’d joke and talk together in segregated cars atop suitcases and the occasional casket. Or, sitting in the coach car, Marshall would drift in and out of sleep to the lullaby of the locomotive, its plaintive cry announcing every crossing as it rolled onward, southward, closer and closer to benighted towns billeting hostile prosecutors, malicious police, and the Ku Klux Klan. In the rhythm of the rails came the whipping of the wind as again the dream descended on him, and in the wind the massive black flag unfurled outside the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and as a pall fell over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, he read again the message, in stark white letters on the flag’s flapping black field: A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.

The photographs were always horrifying: shirtless black victims, their bodies bloodied, eyes bulging from their sockets. Of all the lynching photos Marshall had seen, though, it was the image of Rubin Stacy strung up by his neck on a Florida pine tree that haunted him most when he traveled at night into the South. It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body, that caused Marshall, drenched now in sweat, to stir in his sleep. It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race. I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice, Marshall said of the dream.

Seventeen-year-old Norma Lee Padgett had that look—chin held high, lips pursed—when in her best dress she slowly rose from the witness box to identify for the jury the three Groveland, Florida, boys whom she had accused of rape. Like the sworn truth of the fictitious Mayella Ewell, the white teenage accuser in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Norma Lee’s dramatic testimony against the Groveland Boys tore a county apart. Her pale index finger extended, it dipped from boy to boy as she spoke out each name, like a young schoolteacher counting heads in class, and her breathy cadence sent a chill through the courtroom.

. . . the nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee . . .

And like Harper Lee’s heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, Thurgood Marshall found himself at the center of a firestorm. It would bring the National Guard to Lake County, Florida, where mob violence drove hundreds of blacks from their lives in Groveland, and in the aftermath it would prompt four sensational murders of innocents, among them a prominent NAACP executive. Despite the fact that Marshall brought the Groveland case before the U.S. Supreme Court, it is barely mentioned in civil rights history, law texts, or the many biographies of Thurgood Marshall. Nonetheless, there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story. The case was key to Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer, willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials, and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes—even if it killed him. And Groveland nearly did.

By the fall of 1951, Marshall had already filed and had begun trying in lower courts what would become his most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education, when he was again riding the rails toward Groveland. It was on such a journey to the South that one of Marshall’s colleagues noticed the battle fatigue setting in on the lawyer. You know, Marshall said to him, sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul. Battling personal demons as well as the devils who brought bullets, dynamite, and nitroglycerin into the Groveland fray, the lawyer saw death all around him in central Florida. So intense did the violence in Groveland become that on one of Marshall’s visits, J. Edgar Hoover insisted that FBI agents provide the NAACP attorney with around-the-clock protection. Usually, though, Marshall negotiated Florida alone, despite the number of death threats he daily received.

A fellow NAACP lawyer thought of Marshall as a suicidal crusader, because he involved himself in such explosive criminal cases in the South at an exceptionally crucial time in the history of the blacks’ struggle for equal opportunity. Suicidal or not, Marshall was unquestionably irreplaceable in the mission of the burgeoning civil rights movement. And Marshall’s colleague too got swept up in the enthusiasm and commitment. Thurgood says he needs me, the NAACP associate told his wife. If he needs me, I’m going. If I get killed, I get killed. But I gotta be on that train. . . .

Marshall would later say, There is very little truth in the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality. Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil. Thurgood Marshall might never have spoken those words if he hadn’t defended the Groveland Boys. The case made a lasting impact on both him and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. It also became the impetus behind the NAACP’s capital punishment program, which eventually led to the Supreme Court ruling that capital punishment was unconstitutional as well as to the Court’s later decision to invalidate the death penalty for rape.

The victories came only after many train rides to towns where no hotels or restaurants accommodated people of Marshall’s race. Local blacks would welcome him, though, with hospitality and tears of gratitude. They’d clean their houses spotless for his stays. He’d join his hosts at their dinner tables and tell them stories from his travels that brought laughter to the night. He’d eat their modest offerings of salt pork and poke salad with such aplomb you’d think he was dining on his favorite she-crab soup over drinks with friends back in Harlem. The women would have lunches packed and delivered to him at court each day. Broken-down cars would get glued together to taxi him back and forth. Later in the day, word would spread: Men are needed to sit up all night with a sick friend. You’d hear it whispered everywhere. They’d all know what it meant. They were lining up armed guards to keep Marshall safe from night-riding Klansmen while he slept.

Alice Stovall, Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP, recalled the effect Marshall had on blacks when he showed up at courthouses in small Southern towns. They came in their jalopy cars and their overalls, she recounted. "All they wanted to do—if they could—was just touch him, just touch him, Lawyer Marshall, as if he were a god. These poor people who had come miles to be there."

Southern juries might be stacked against blacks, and the judges might be biased, but Thurgood Marshall was demonstrating in case after case that their word was not the last, that in the U.S. Supreme Court the injustice in their decisions and verdicts could be reversed. He was a lawyer that a white man would listen to and a black man could trust. No wonder that across the South, in their darkest, most demoralizing hours, when falsely accused men sat in jails, when women and children stood before the ashy ruins of mob-torched homes, the spirits of black citizens would be lifted with two words whispered in defiance and hope:

Thurgood’s coming.

1 MINK SLIDE

Interior of the Morton Funeral Home, Columbia, Tennessee, showing vandalism of the race riots in February 1946. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

November 18, 1946

IF THAT SON of a bitch contradicts me again, I’m going to wrap a chair around his goddamned head."

One acquittal after another had left Tennessee district attorney general Paul F. Bumpus shaking his head in frustration over the NAACP lawyers, and now Thurgood Marshall was hoping to free the last of the twenty-five blacks accused of rioting and attempted murder of police in Columbia, Tennessee. The sun had been down for hours, and the start of a cool, dark night had settled over the poolrooms, barbershops, and soda fountains on East Eighth Street in the area known as the Bottom, the rickety, black side of Columbia, where, nine months earlier, the terror had begun. Just blocks away, on the news that a verdict had been reached, the lawyers were settling back into their chairs, fretfully waiting for the twelve white men on the jury to return to the Maury County courtroom. They’d been deliberating for little more than an hour, but the lead counsel for the defense, Thurgood Marshall, looked over his shoulder and knew immediately that something wasn’t right. Throughout the proceedings of the Columbia Race Riot trials, the spit-spangled courtrooms had been packed with tobacco-chewing Tennesseans who had come to see justice meted out. But the overall-clad spectators were equally intrigued by Marshall and his fellow NAACP lawyers: by the strange sight of those niggers up there wearing coats and talking back to the judge just like they were white men.

Marshall was struck by the eeriness of the quiet, nearly deserted courtroom. The prosecution’s table had been aflutter with the activity of lawyers and assistants throughout the trial, but none of them had returned for the verdict. Only the smooth-talking Bumpus had come back. All summer long he’d carried himself with the confidence that his Negro lawyer opponents were no match for him intellectually. But by relentlessly attacking the state’s case in a cool, methodical manner, Marshall and his associates had worn Bumpus down, and had already won acquittals for twenty-three of the black men on trial. The verdicts were stunning, and because the national press had defined the riots as the first major racial confrontation following World War II, Bumpus was no longer facing the prospect of humiliation just in his home county. The nation was watching and he had begun to unravel in the courtroom, becoming more frustrated, sarcastic, and mean-spirited as the trial progressed.

Lose your head, lose your case, was the phrase Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, had drilled into him in law school. Marshall could tell that his adversary, seated alone at the prosecutor’s table, was in the foulest of moods as he was forced to contemplate the political ramifications of the unthinkable: his failure to win a single conviction against black lawyers defending black men accused of the attempted murder of white police in Maury County, Tennessee.

The shock from the summer’s not-guilty verdicts had worn off by November, and Marshall sensed that the white people of Columbia were becoming angrier and more resentful of the fact that this Northern Negro was still in town, making a mockery of the Tennessee courts. He’d watched patiently as Bumpus stacked the deck in his own favor by excusing every potential black jury member in the Maury County pool (there were just three) through peremptory challenges that did not require him to show cause for dismissal. And Marshall had paid close attention to the desperation in Bumpus’s closing statement to the jury, when the prosecutor warned them that if they did not convict, law enforcement would break down and wives of jurymen would die at the hands of Negro assassins. None of it surprised Marshall. He was used to, and even welcomed, such tactics from his opponents because they often helped to establish solid grounds for appeals. But Marshall also noticed that the atmosphere around the Columbia courthouse was growing more volatile.

A political cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier now doing public relations work for the NAACP had been poking around the courthouse and had come to believe that the telephone wires were tapped and that the defense lawyers were in danger. Learning this, Marshall refused to discuss any case details or sleeping arrangements over the phones, and the PR representative reported back to Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, that the situation in the Columbia Court House is so grave that anything may happen at any time. White issued a memorandum to NAACP attorneys, demanding no telephone calls be put through to Columbia or even to Nashville [where Marshall was staying] unless and until Thurgood says that it is safe to do so. White noted that we are dealing with a very desperate crowd and want nothing to jeopardize the lives of anyone, particularly persons as close and as important to us as Thurgood and his three associates. White even contacted the U.S. attorney general’s office and warned that if anything happened to Marshall while he was in Tennessee, it would create a nation-wide situation of no mean proportions.

Marshall’s associates didn’t need Walter White to warn them of any danger they might be in. They were local Tennessee lawyers who had investigated enough lynchings in these parts to know that the death threats they received from the citizens of Columbia were to be taken seriously. Sitting to one side of Marshall at the table was a forty-seven-year-old poker-playing highbrow with a faint Caribbean accent named Zephaniah Alexander Looby, who came to Tennessee by way of the British West Indies. At fourteen years of age and living in Dominica, Looby found work as a cabin boy aboard a whaling ship, and two years later, in 1914, broke and bedraggled, he jumped ship in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with the dream of becoming a lawyer. He eventually received his degree from Columbia Law School in New York and taught economics at Fisk University in Nashville until the call of civil rights law beckoned and Marshall put him on the Columbia case.

To Marshall’s left was the lone white attorney on the case, the young, hotheaded Maurice Weaver, who reveled in the danger of standing up to white authority and racism; on more than one occasion throughout the Columbia Race Riot trials he had nearly come to blows with prosecutors. Marshall and Looby enjoyed having Weaver around, in part because the two black attorneys were inherently polite and gracious in court whereas Weaver was something of a lightning rod for white anger. Whenever prosecutors or witnesses referred to a black as that nigger, Weaver loudly interrupted with objections, insisting that the person be referred to as Mr. or Mrs. for the record. Bumpus seethed.

Weaver also endeared himself to Marshall because the Tennessee lawyer liked to drink, though at one point during the trial, his provocative nature had become not only distracting but dangerous, and Marshall was forced to intervene. Weaver’s teenage and very pregnant wife, Virginia, decided that she’d like to see her husband at work and asked to ride along with Looby’s associates and black reporters. Locals were speechless when the pregnant white girl hopped out of a car packed with Negroes and marched straight into court. Marshall, observing the commotion, pulled her aside and told her to take a Greyhound bus to court next time. You almost started another lynching here in the courthouse, he warned.

As the jury of twelve began filing back into the courtroom, Looby and Weaver searched their tired, sullen faces for a hint of the verdict. Marshall was on edge; he remembered how colleagues and friends had urged him not to return to Columbia. Over that terrible summer of 1946, he’d been running a constant fever while working in courtrooms that had no bathrooms or drinking fountains for blacks. The long hours, relentless travel, and Tennessee heat were taking their toll, but Marshall would not slow down. By July the lawyer’s body had finally wilted. Mid-case, he succumbed to exhaustion and a debilitating pneumonic virus that led to a long stint in a Harlem hospital, followed by weeks of doctor-ordered bed rest. Still, from his bed, and against everyone’s wishes, Marshall continued to lead late-night telephone strategy sessions with Looby and Weaver until he could no longer stay away—and no one was going to stop him from boarding a train to Nashville. The Columbia case, he said, is too important to mess up. And I, for one . . . am determined that it will not be messed up.

MARSHALL WAS IN New York on February 26, 1946, when a desperate call from Tennessee came into the NAACP offices, describing a full-blown race riot in Columbia. An emergency meeting was called and Marshall learned that the trouble began the previous morning when a black woman, Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, went into a Columbia appliance store with her nineteen-year-old son, James, to complain about being overcharged for shoddy repairs to a radio. After loudly proclaiming that she’d take the radio elsewhere, Gladys exited the store with her son. But twenty-eight-year-old radio repair apprentice Billy Fleming did not appreciate the threatening look he got from James on the way out.

What you stop back there for, boy, to get your teeth knocked out? Fleming asked, before racing over and punching James in the back of the head.

James’s boyish looks were deceiving. A welterweight on the U.S. Navy boxing team, he barely flinched and countered with several punches to Fleming’s face, sending him crashing through a plate-glass window at the front of the store.

Bleeding profusely from his leg, the army vet came up fighting, and other whites joined the melee, shouting, Kill the bastards! Kill every one of them! One man went after Gladys, slapping and kicking her to the ground and blacking her eye. A few minutes later police arrived and carted mother and son off to jail. After pleading guilty to public fighting and agreeing to pay a fine of fifty dollars each, the two were about to be released when Billy Fleming’s father convinced officials to charge both Gladys and James with the attempted murder of his son; the two were held by police in separate cells. As the news spread that James Stephenson had gotten the better of Billy Fleming and sent him wounded to the hospital, Maury County became galvanized. A mob began to gather around town and outside the jail, and by late afternoon the sheriff was hearing talk that a group of men were planning to spring the Stephenson niggers out of the jail and hang them.

Carloads of young, white workers from the phosphate and hosiery mills in nearby Culleoka (where the Flemings lived) began arriving at the square, and more volatile World War II veterans joined them. Rumors that rope had been purchased had reached the Bottom, and Julius Blair, a seventy-six-year-old black patriarch and owner of Blair’s Drug Store, had heard enough. He’d seen firsthand what white mobs in Columbia were capable of in recent years, around that courthouse down the block. He’d been there when they’d taken one man out of jail and lynched him back in ’27, and more recently, there was young Cordie Cheek. The community was still raw over Cordie’s killing. The nineteen-year-old had been falsely accused of assaulting the twelve-year-old sister of a white boy he had been fighting with. The boy paid his sister a dollar to tell police that Cordie had tried to rape her, but a grand jury refused to indict and Cordie was released and abducted that same day by county officials, who took him to a cedar tree and hanged him. Julius Blair was well aware that it was Magistrate C. Hayes Denton’s car that had driven Cordie to his death; yet, undeterred, Blair marched into Denton’s office and demanded that Gladys and James Stephenson be released. Let us have them, Squire, Blair told him. We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County.

Blair managed to convince the sheriff to release the Stephensons into his custody and arranged for them to be dropped off at his drugstore early that evening. By then, though, blacks in the Bottom had gone past being intimidated by the hooting and honking of armed whites circling the area in cars; they weren’t going to stand passively by this time while another Cordie Cheek lynching unfolded. More than a hundred men, many of them war veterans, took to the streets with guns of their own, determined to fight back at the first sight of a mob moving toward the Bottom. Armed and angry, they told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that they were ready if whites came down to the Bottom. We fought for freedom overseas, one told him, and we’ll fight for it here.

True to his word and hoping to avoid any more trouble, the sheriff released the Stephensons that evening, and Blair arranged for the two of them to be whisked out of town, blankets over their heads for their protection. Uptown, they are getting together for something, Blair told them.

The nearby white mobs meanwhile did not disperse, and blacks in the Bottom were growing more fearful as the night progressed. Drinking beer and circling in cars, whites fired randomly into Mink Slide, as they derisively referred to the Bottom. Blacks, drinking beer on rooftops, were also firing in response and by bad chance hit the cars of both a California tourist and a black undertaker. When half a dozen Columbia police eventually moved into Mink Slide, a crowd of whites followed behind. They were welcomed by shouts of Here they come! and Halt! and then, in the confusion, came a command, Fire! and shots were exploding from all directions. Four police were struck with buckshot before they retreated.

Reports of the skirmish roused whites around town. Columbia’s former fire chief headed toward Mink Slide with a half gallon of gasoline and the intent to burn them out, but he was shot in the leg by Negro snipers as he stole down an alley. With the arrival of state troopers and highway patrol reinforcements, the whites finally outnumbered the blacks and moved into Mink Slide, where they ransacked businesses until dawn, fired machine guns into stores, and rounded up everyone in sight. You black sons of bitches, one patrolman shouted, you had your-alls’ way last night, but we are going to have ours this morning.

Just after 6 a.m., gunfire from the street rained into Sol (son of Julius) Blair’s barbershop. Rooster Bill Pillow and Papa Lloyd Kennedy, hiding in the back, saw armed officers coming and were said to have fired a single shotgun blast before they were overpowered and taken into custody. They were stuffed with other blacks from the Bottom into overcrowded cells at the county jail and interrogated without counsel for days. Two prisoners were shot dead trying to escape.

Mary Morton had watched helplessly as state patrolmen barged into her family’s funeral home on East Eighth Street and arrested her husband. From the street she heard the sound of breaking glass and the building being ransacked. A short time later she saw the same officers, laughing and joking, return to the street. Once they were out of sight, Morton went inside to discover the parlor furniture broken and slashed, clothes torn to pieces, and the entire interior doused with embalming fluid. With horror, she laid eyes on a defaced casket. Photographed soon after, the image of that casket would be published in newspapers across the country and ultimately come to symbolize the Columbia riot of 1946. Across its lid, in large letters, KKK was crudely scrawled in chalk.

Mary Morton tried to pick up the phone, but patrolmen caught her, cursed her, and threatened to throw the phone out on the street. Police had declared war on the black citizens of Columbia, and the highway patrolmen, instead of trying to bring order to the town, had joined in with vigilante mobs. The Tennessee State Guard had cordoned off the area, but they did nothing to stop the destruction and violence in Mink Slide. The Maury County jail had become a deadly destination for Mary Morton’s husband and other leaders of the black community. Officials would soon shut down telephone service into and out of Mink Slide, but not before Mary Morton managed to make her call. After the police moved on, she phoned a friend in Nashville. She implored him to get word to the NAACP immediately.

Nine hundred miles north, in New York, a lanky lawyer in suspenders was called into a meeting. He grabbed his coffee and settled into a chair. He heard another all-too-familiar story of violence and cruelty in the South, and he knew that once again order would be restored, as always, with blacks’ blood running in the gutters. An editorial in the Columbia Daily Herald proclaimed that the situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. . . . The white people of the South . . . will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be. In Marshall’s early days at the NAACP, emergency meetings would sometimes end with the unfurling of the ill-omened black flag, alerting New Yorkers that yet another man had been lynched. The flag’s gloomy stain over the city usually meant that Marshall would be back on a train, alone, again riding toward trouble.

And nine hundred miles south, in Columbia, Tennessee, where the town’s blacks were holed up in their homes and jail cells, there rose whispers of relief: the lawyer was coming.

THE TWELVE white men on the jury took their seats in the box, and the foreman rose to announce the verdict against Rooster Bill Pillow for shooting and wounding a state highway patrolman. The courtroom was still.

Not guilty.

Marshall, Looby, and Weaver sat in quiet shock. In the last acquittals, Weaver had loudly slapped a defendant’s knee in excitement and leapt from his chair to shake hands with jurors who appeared to be just as stunned as everyone else in the courtroom. This makes me proud to be an American! he’d shouted. Marshall wanted no celebratory outbursts this time.

Papa Kennedy’s verdict was next. Marshall was expecting Kennedy would be going to jail, for unlike Pillow, Kennedy had been surly and impudent throughout the trial—at one point telling Bumpus to shut up in open court. But the jury rejected the charge of attempted murder and convicted Kennedy on a lesser count that enabled him to leave the courthouse free on bail.

Marshall and his lawyers rose from their seats, wanting nothing more than to leave town quickly. Because of the constant threats and concerns for his safety, Marshall had been staying in Nashville, almost fifty miles to the north, and driving back and forth each day with Looby and Weaver. Tagging along was reporter Harry Raymond, who’d been covering the trial for the Daily Worker, a New York newspaper published by the Communist Party of the USA. He described the moments after the verdict as tense, and he expected something serious, something of a violent nature, to happen. On his way to telegraph the verdict to his newspaper, Raymond noticed one agitated, heavyset spectator rushing out the doors and declaring that something must be done about the failure of the jury to convict.

Raymond knew the NAACP lawyers had been threatened with lynching, and had been told their bodies would wind up in Duck River, which they had to cross each day on the way to court. The white reporters covering the trial pleaded with Raymond to leave town with them, but he had a feeling the story of the Columbia Race Riot hadn’t ended with the verdicts, and he chose to ride back to Nashville with Marshall and the NAACP lawyers.

With their heads down, the lawyers humbly exited the courtroom. Gone was Marshall’s usual swagger. There were no pictures or proclamations on the courthouse steps. Marshall walked briskly. Looby tried to keep up with him as best he could on his bad leg; he’d spent months in a cast after being struck by an automobile and was still limping noticeably. Marshall waited impatiently as the lawyers, with Raymond tagging along, hopped into Looby’s car. They drove a few blocks to Mink Slide, where they picked up soft drinks and crackers at Julius Blair’s drugstore—the epicenter of the race riots nine months earlier. After some congratulatory handshakes, Blair urged them to get moving. Marshall, though, wanted to do some private celebrating.

Maury County was a dry county, but Marshall had become acquainted with the local bootlegger, so there would be just one stop to make before they headed north to Nashville. The sedan stole down a dirt road at just about eight o’clock in the evening. The bootlegger, however, had disappointing news. I just sold the last two bottles to the judge! he told Marshall. The four men headed for Nashville, empty-handed.

With Marshall at the wheel, Raymond beside him, and Looby, in part because of his bad leg, in the back with Weaver amid piles of law books and case files, the four men heaved a collective sigh of relief as they headed out of Columbia. They had seen the signs posted around town during the trials:

NIGGER READ AND RUN. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE. IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYHOW!

To Marshall, they recalled a message he had received mid-trial from Walter White: Take care of yourself and keep your feet in running order.

The sedan had just crossed a bridge over Duck River when they came upon a car parked in the middle of the road. Marshall honked the horn and waited, but the car did not move, so he drove around it and headed for Nashville. Inside the sedan it was quiet; unspoken went the fear that something was amiss. Then, piercing the silence, the sound of a siren screamed from behind.

Thurgood, Looby said. That siren. It’s a police car!

Is it following us? Marshall asked.

Yes. It’s coming after us fast.

You’d better stop the car, Thurgood, Weaver said.

Marshall turned his head and was troubled to see three cars following them. The first, carrying highway patrolmen, roared past the sedan and forced Marshall to jam on the brakes. Quickly, eight men, some in police uniforms and some in civilian clothes, converged on the sedan. Marshall saw that a few of them had their hands on their guns while others shone flashlights on the men inside. Reporter Harry Raymond kept his mouth shut, but he knew this wasn’t a routine police stop.

The lawyers and Raymond were ordered out of the car. They froze as one cop approached.

You men the lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?

Yes, I’m Thurgood Marshall. This is Maurice Weaver and this gentleman is Alexander Looby.

The cop looked them over. Drinking, eh?

I beg your pardon, Marshall replied.

I said you’ve been drinking. Celebrating the acquittal. Driving while intoxicated.

Weaver interjected that this stop was a civil rights violation and, furthermore, it was obvious none of them had been drinking.

Stay out of this, Weaver, the cop said. You’re a white man and have no business in this car anyway.

The police then asserted their right to search the car and Weaver demanded that they produce a warrant. Using flashlights, Marshall was able to read the John Doe warrant signed by a deputy sheriff, charging the lawyers with transporting whiskey in violation of county local option law.

Look, Marshall told Weaver. Let’s watch him. Don’t let him put any liquor in there, ’cause this is a dry county.

The police search of the car turned up nothing, so they decided to search the lawyers.

You got a warrant to search us? Marshall asked.

No, the officer responded.

Well, the answer is no, Marshall said.

The police let the lawyers return to their vehicle, and this time Looby took the wheel.

You weren’t driving this car, were you? one cop asked Looby.

I’m not answering your question, Looby replied.

The cop then looked to Marshall, who said, I’m not answering your question, either.

Confused about what to do next, the police argued over who had been driving the car when it was stopped. That’s the one! The tall yaller nigger! one of them insisted with certainty, and the officers approached Marshall, who was asked to show his license.

The cop took one look. Get out, he said. Put your hands up.

Marshall was dumbfounded. What is it? he asked.

Drunken driving, the officer responded.

Drunken driving? You know I’m not intoxicated, Marshall said. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four hours!

Get in the car, one of them said.

With guns drawn and flashlights glaring, four men hustled Marshall into the backseat of a nonofficial sedan.

Keep driving, they shouted back to Looby and Weaver as they placed Marshall under arrest. With Marshall wedged into the backseat, the car sped away, back toward Columbia. As they picked up speed, the four law enforcement agents were quiet and all business. They drove into the darkness. Walter White had warned Marshall, as had Looby and Weaver, about these Tennessee men and their Master Race preachments. Marshall knew that the Ku Klux Klan in Columbia was deeply entrenched in the local police; he knew its members served as sheriffs and magistrates. He had read the NAACP reports. This wasn’t the Klan of cowardly hood, rather, it wears cap and visor, and shining badge. . . . It is the LAW. It arrests its stunned victims, unlisted.

Marshall had no idea where they were going. For years his dark humor had horrified young lawyers and assistants when he would go into great detail about what Southern police or the Klan did with uppity Negroes in the woods. Now Marshall was the uppity Negro, alone, and he wasn’t in a joking mood. Looking out the window of the sedan, he could see the cedar trees as the headlights flashed across them. It was under a cedar tree just down the road that hundreds of townspeople had gathered around young Cordie Cheek in his last living moments. They had watched and cheered as officials pulled down Cordie’s pants and castrated him before forcing him up a stepladder and hanging him. Pistols were passed around the crowd; they were fired until all the bullets were gone.

The car began to slow. The lawmen were quietly mumbling and pointing; then the driver turned left down a dirt road, toward the famous Duck River. Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads. He knew that the bodies of blacks—the victims of lynchings and random murders—had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.

The sedan was lumbering forward, bouncing down the dirt road, when Marshall caught his first glimpse of the men waiting down by the river. The headlights illuminated their stern faces. The car slowed, then stopped. Suddenly headlights appeared behind them. Had word spread about the lynching of the NAACP lawyer? Glimpsing the glare of the lights behind them, one of the policemen in Marshall’s car stormed out of the sedan to confront the driver of the second car. Marshall craned his neck to see; he recognized the limp.

It was Looby!

Instead of driving to Nashville as the police had ordered, Looby had spun a U-turn and followed the police sedan. As soon as it turned left off the main road, he knew Marshall was in trouble. He’d been teaching at Fisk University, just down the block from where the Maury County officials arrested Cordie Cheek, threw him into a sedan, and drove him to these same woods along Duck River. Well, they’ll have to kill me, too, Looby thought. He wasn’t going to leave Marshall to the devices of murderous law enforcement officers.

Once again the policemen ordered Looby to leave the scene. Waiting to be arrested, or worse, the slight, gimpy lawyer stood his ground; he refused to budge. He’d had these same police and town officials on the witness stand, and he’d wanted to question each one of them about the lynching of Cordie Cheek so that he could rightfully raise the issue of self-defense during the trial, but the judge had refused to allow it. Now Looby spoke his mind: he wasn’t leaving without Marshall, he said. Livid, the deputies and police conferred to the side. Whatever the plan had been, there were now too many witnesses, and there was sure to be another riot if things got out of hand with the lawyers. The police returned to the car and made a loop back up to the main road, with Marshall’s eyes lingering on the lynch party waiting by the river, while Looby, the man Marshall called a Rock of Gibraltar, followed close behind with Weaver and Raymond. This time the police drove Marshall back to the courthouse in Columbia, where he was pointed toward a magistrate’s office.

You go over there, one of the policemen said. We’ll be over.

No, you won’t. I’m going with you, Marshall replied, reminding the police that they had placed him under arrest. You’re not going to shoot me in the back while I’m ‘escaping.’ Let’s make this legal.

Smart-ass nigger, one said, and they shuffled Marshall up to the second floor of the courthouse, with Weaver trailing behind to serve as Marshall’s lawyer. Once there, they met Magistrate Jim Buck Pogue, a small, bald man not more than five feet tall.

What’s up? Pogue asked police.

We got this nigger for drunken driving, one officer told him.

Weaver was fuming. He accused the officers of being frame-up artists and demanded that Pogue examine Marshall.

Pogue looked Marshall up and down. He doesn’t look drunk to me, he observed.

I’m not drunk, Marshall exclaimed.

Boy, you want to take my test? Pogue asked.

Marshall paused and looked quizzically at the magistrate. Well, what’s your test?

I’m a teetotaler, Pogue said. I’ve never had a drink in my life. I can smell liquor a mile off. You want to take a chance?

Marshall stepped forward. Sure, he said, and leaning his tall, lanky frame down to Pogue till his mouth was just an inch from the magistrate’s nostrils, Marshall blew so hard he almost rocked this man.

Pogue took a deep whiff and exploded at the police. Hell, this man hasn’t had a drink. What are you talking about?

The arresting officers quickly filed out of the office.

What else is there? Marshall asked.

Pogue told him that there was nothing else and stated that those officers had come to the wrong man if they wanted to frame Marshall. He said he was the one magistrate in Columbia who had refused to sign warrants for the arrests of Negroes during the February trouble, and then he extended his hand to Marshall, saying, You’re free to go.

Marshall quickly left the courthouse for the second time that day. He noticed again that the streets were deserted. This time, however, he understood why. Everybody, Marshall realized, was down at Duck River waiting for the party.

He and Weaver hurried over to the Bottom, where Looby and Raymond were waiting at Sol Blair’s barbershop. They made sure Marshall was okay, but they also suspected Marshall wasn’t out of danger just yet. The officers, they figured, had probably been hoping to bring Marshall before Magistrate C. Hayes Denton, who surely would have locked Marshall up for the night. Then, in the pattern of all recent Maury County lynchings, it would only have been a matter of storming the jail with some rope and finishing the job.

Looby thought it likely the officers might not yet be ready to give up on their party. He came up with a plan of his own. Well, Thurgood, he said, we’ll put you in another car.

They decided to send a decoy driver out with Looby’s car, which would head toward Nashville, while Marshall and Looby in a different car sneaked out of town on back roads. Sure enough, Marshall watched members of the mob turn the corner and follow Looby’s car; then he and Looby drove off in another direction. He would later learn that Looby’s car was indeed pulled over, and when the pursuers discovered that Marshall wasn’t in it, they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.

In another car, Maurice Weaver made it back to Nashville that evening along with Harry Raymond, who immediately began typing his story for the Daily Worker. I am certain . . . a lynching was planned, he wrote. Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.

Walter White was convinced that had Looby obeyed police orders and continued driving to Nashville on that November night in 1946, Marshall would never have been seen again.

Safely back in Nashville and his heart still pounding, Marshall made a late-night phone call to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to tell him what had happened.

Drunken driving? Clark asked.

Yes.

Clark paused. He had come to know Marshall well since being appointed attorney general in 1945 by President Truman, and he had just one question for the man who would one day replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Well, Clark asked, were you drunk?

No, Marshall asserted, but exactly five minutes after I hang up this phone I’m going to be drunk!

2 SUGAR HILL

NAACP attorney Franklin Williams and blinded World War II veteran Isaac Woodard went on a nationwide speaking tour to raise money and awareness of the brutality Woodard suffered at the hands of law enforcement agents in the South. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Franklin Williams Papers)

NIGGER BOY, WHAT are you doing here?"

Marshall had been standing under the sweltering sun on the far end of the platform. He had stomach pangs from hunger and he tried to make himself look small, but the white man had come straight toward him, eyes cold and firm, the gun on his hip in plain sight.

Waiting for the train, Marshall told him.

The man eyed him up and down, suspicious of the suit.

There’s only one more train comes through here, the man told him, and that’s the four o’clock—you’d better be on it because the sun is never going down on a live nigger in this town.

His appetite gone, Marshall’s eyes followed the man as he turned away. So I wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket . . . and caught the next train out of there, the lawyer recalled.

One trip bled into another, and he never felt safe until he was riding the rails north again: sitting with a glass of bourbon in his hand, waiting for the porter to bring him a good cut of meat. Outside the parlor car window, the whitewashed shacks eventually gave way to factories and highways and row houses with white marble steps . . . until he finally stepped off the train in the entirely different world of New York. Pennsylvania Station, with its colossal pink granite columns and glass and steel train sheds, was one of the largest public spaces in the world, its grandeur awing the millions of travelers and commuters who daily passed through it. One entered the city like a god, architectural historian Vincent Scully noted. Yet the anonymity of strolling across the breathtaking ten-story vaulted concourse like any other man wearing a fedora and hauling his briefcase and luggage suited Marshall just fine. Standing out in a crowd on a train platform was something Marshall was happy to leave behind him in the South.

From Penn Station, Marshall hailed a DeSoto Sky View taxi and headed up the west side of Manhattan to his Harlem apartment. Though the Great Depression had put an end to the Harlem Renaissance, the concentration of blacks in the fifty-by-eight-block area created a dazzling energy and culture that continued to thrive in Harlem in the postwar 1940s; it was still the Negro capital of America. Uniformed black soldiers on leave from World War II swarmed the uptown streets, flocking to popular clubs like the Savoy Ballroom at night and bars like the Brown Bomber during the day. Past the Victoria and Apollo theaters on 125th Street, Marshall crossed over tracks laid on cobblestone, where trolley cars encouraged commuters to Ride the Surface Way.

Thurgood and his wife, Buster, in their twenties, childless, and already married for seven years, had come to New York in the fall of 1936. Like so many blacks who had migrated from the South, the young couple had come to Harlem, but not to escape Jim Crow. Thurgood had been offered a job with the NAACP, where he’d share a Manhattan office with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston. The money wasn’t good. Houston himself was living at the YMCA in Harlem, and he pulled in nearly twice Thurgood’s two-hundred-dollar salary each month. The Marshalls had packed their bags in Baltimore and headed north to stay with Thurgood’s aunt Medi and uncle Boots (Denmedia and Clarence Dodson) on Lenox Avenue—in the heart of Harlem in the waning moments of the Renaissance. It was the place to be.

FATS WALLER PARKED on a piano bench for the night in a Harlem flat, fedora perched on his head and a flask within easy reach. He popped and rolled his eyes and wiggled his brows between verses as the dancers—maids, elevator operators, and other working-class blacks who lived uptown—brushed against him, fighting for space to unwind. Men were patted down on entry, but Fats had to remind some of them to behave, mid-song, until the words were said so often they crept into his lyrics: Put that gun away! Lights dimmed with colored bulbs hung over the dance floor, a space cleared of furniture except for a table and chairs to accommodate a five-hour poker game. Bourbon and gin flowed. The floors shook, and from the kitchen the sweet smell of yardbirds (chicken) and grits wafted in the air. All night long piercing laughter and shouts rose above Fats’s voice until the lights continued to dim and he was singing and playing swing and stride piano in darkness.

A lively young couple, Thurgood and Buster reveled in the Harlem nightlife. They had looked for a place of their own but quickly realized they were going to have to compromise. With a total population more than double what it is today, the buildings and tenements uptown were overflowing with roomers: residents who rented sleeping space in apartments where living and dining rooms were converted into bedrooms at night. To help pay the rent, many tenants held rent parties; they would simply throw up a sign with the date and their address, and for a dollar or so guests could gain entry.

We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan

Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!

The tradition of the rent party, which thrived during the Harlem Renaissance, continued into the forties out of economic necessity. Because famous clubs like Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club did not allow black customers, and Small’s Paradise, though not segregated, had high door fees that ensured mostly upscale white audiences, much of the great live music at the time was not accessible to blacks. This spurred musicians like Waller and Louis Armstrong to play at rent parties—not just for the extra cash but also for the joy of performing at lively parties with enthusiastic black crowds.

After a few weeks with Marshall’s relatives, the young couple found a place of their own on 149th Street. It was small and cramped, but they weren’t sharing it with people twice their age, and with Charlie Houston holed up at the YMCA, neither Buster nor Thurgood was complaining, even though money would be tighter. To make ends meet, Buster realized she’d have to contribute. Light-skinned, with wavy hair and soft brown eyes, she’d been a student at the University of Pennsylvania when she met Thurgood at a restaurant in Washington. Marshall claimed it was love at first sight, but eighteen-year-old Vivian Burey disagreed, claiming that the Lincoln University student and self-avowed ladies’ man was so busy arguing and debating with everybody at the table that [he] didn’t even give me a second glance. The daughter of a Philadelphia caterer, Vivian had an ample chest that had earned her the nickname Buster in her teen years—a nickname that she maintained throughout her life. She had pluck and a radiant smile, and her intelligence and outgoing personality helped her to acclimate to New York as easily as her husband did.

Soon after they arrived in New York, Buster became involved with the Harlem cooperative grocery markets that had been sprouting up after the Great Depression to develop black economic power. Her work with the co-op helped lower the couple’s food bills each week and added a few extra dollars to their cash flow. Despite

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