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

478 Pages·2013·15.64 MB·English

by  Gilbert King

DEVIL IN THE GROVE
Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys,
and the Dawn of a New America
GILBERT KING
Dedication
For Lorna, Maddie, and Liv
and in memory of Matthew P. (Matty) Boylan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication

PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1: MINK SLIDE
CHAPTER 2: SUGAR HILL
CHAPTER 3: GET TO PUSHIN’
CHAPTER 4: NIGGER IN A PIT
CHAPTER 5: TROUBLE FIXIN’ TO START
CHAPTER 6: A LITTLE BOLITA
CHAPTER 7: WIPE THIS PLACE CLEAN
CHAPTER 8: A CHRISTMAS CARD
CHAPTER 9: DON’T SHOOT, WHITE MAN
CHAPTER 10: QUITE A HOSE WIELDER
CHAPTER 11: BAD EGG
CHAPTER 12: ATOM SMASHER
CHAPTER 13: IN ANY FIGHT SOME FALL
CHAPTER 14: THIS IS A RAPE CASE
CHAPTER 15: YOU HAVE PISSED IN MY WHISKEY
CHAPTER 16: IT’S A FUNNY THING
CHAPTER 17: NO MAN ALIVE OR TO BE BORN
CHAPTER 18: ALL OVER THE PLACE, LIKE RATS
CHAPTER 19: PRIVATE PARTS
CHAPTER 20: A GENIUS HERE BEFORE US
CHAPTER 21: THE COLORED WAY
CHAPTER 22: A PLACE IN THE SUN
EPILOGUE
A NOTE ON SOURCES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author
Also by Gilbert King
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
NOTES
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)

A
LL 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.”