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

by Gilbert King

“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”

Marshall had nothing but respect for serious women who were committed to achievement.

Southern rape complex “had nothing immediately to do with sex,” but rather with the feeling among Southerners that if blacks were to advance beyond their severely circumscribed social station, they might “one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage.”

Today, as in ages past, we are not without tragic proof that the exalted power of some governments to punish manufactured crime dictatorially is the handmaid of tyranny. Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement. Due process of law, preserved for all by our Constitution, commands that no such practice as that disclosed by this record shall send any accused to his death. No higher duty, no more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution—of whatever race, creed or persuasion.

As one reporter noted, it was impossible “to tell where the mob left off and law enforcement began.”

The process of the case, frustrating in the extreme from its deplorable beginning to its unjust end, was a repulsive reminder to Moore and Marshall of the ruthless measures men took to protect the flower that was “Southern white womanhood.”

“You don’t investigate a lynching in the same way you investigate a hot automobile. . . . You have more local feeling to overcome. You have more unwillingness of people to talk.” Agents, he said, needed special training, and most important, Marshall stated, they must “themselves believe in the enforcement of civil rights.”

What they discovered was a county controlled not by politics, money, the citrus industry, or the law, but by an embittered contingent of the Ku Klux Klan intent upon codifying a racial caste system, through violent means if necessary, that would effectively deny blacks access to political influence, economic opportunity, and social justice.

Marshall relished any moment in Supreme Court proceedings that forced Southerners to defend their Jim Crow traditions before the country’s top legal minds.

Except that when the lawyer for the state of Florida walked out of the Supreme Court building at the end of arguments, he would shake hands with his opponents and return safely to his home in the south of the South. No one was going to chase Assistant Attorney General of Florida Reeves Bowen out of the capital at ninety miles per hour, or drag him at gunpoint to a waiting mob along the banks of the Potomac.

“The case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. It is on that ground that I would reverse.”

He did not appreciate having his good name used in a whitewash.

“I am ashamed of Florida. I am ashamed of the white race. . . . I am ashamed of all the churches of Florida and elsewhere that have turned their eyes away from what has been going on in Lake County for these past years, and passed by on the other side while their fellow-Americans of a darker skin were being denied the most basic American and human rights and privileges. I weep for my country’s sacred honor.”

their indifference was going to cost him his life.