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

by Gilbert King

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marshall said to him, “sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul.”

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.

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.

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.”

One trip bled into another, and he never felt safe until he was riding the rails north again:

Standing out in a crowd on a train platform was something Marshall was happy to leave behind him in the South.

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.

In many ways they were living a dream life—a young, attractive, educated couple with a desirable place to call home in the greatest city on earth. In private, however, the Marshalls were struggling with disappointments. Buster had miscarried again. Married for more than a decade, she’d been unable to carry a baby to term, and sadness was turning to frustration and grief.

Everyone around them had children, it seemed, and Buster’s sense of self-worth had become wedded to her fertility problems

THURGOOD MARSHALL SMOKED three packs of cigarettes a day. By mid-June of 1946, however, Marshall’s body was failing him. He was drinking steadily and not getting much sleep, and his constant travel to Columbia, Tennessee, where temperatures soared over a hundred degrees, had left him exhausted, with no time for exercise—not that he’d ever shown any interest in exercise. Nor did his preferred diet of fried food and red meat do him any favors. He was laughing less, talking in muted tones, and to friends and associates, he was not himself. Sensing something might be amiss with his health,

Months would pass before Marshall regained full strength, but he nevertheless returned to Columbia, despite his doctor’s warnings. In November he won in Tennessee, but more important, he survived not only a mysterious virus but also a lynching party. Walter White, in his autobiography A Man Called White, wrote, “It is doubtful whether any other trial in the history of America was ever conducted under more explosive conditions.” But White wrote those words in 1948, one year before Thurgood Marshall became involved in his most deadly and dramatic case ever. It would far surpass the Columbia Race Riot trials in its explosive conditions, and its consequences would have an impact on the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and its staff for decades to come.

Houston’s incessant credo took hold of the impressionable young man: “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”

Marshall’s hiring practices were not a conscious attempt to achieve diversity on his staff: he just didn’t think about it,

Evelyn Cunningham, who later became a noted Harlem columnist and feminist, referred to her friend Thurgood Marshall as one of the “first feminists.”

BY THE LATE 1940s, Marshall was logging some fifty thousand miles each year as he swooped into cities and towns across the South, usually alone. The postwar years marked the beginning of a more violent era in the American South, and Marshall’s willingness to ride into a hornet’s nest of racial conflict in pursuit of his well-stated goal—to dismantle Jim Crow—only cemented his growing legacy as a crusader for justice. Marshall relished his role as Mr. Civil Rights—it suited his gregarious, larger-than-life personality—and he was acutely aware that when he stepped off the train, his only sword was “a piece of paper called ‘The Constitution.’ ” He had grown into a celebrity, and wherever he went he was treated like one. Men respected him and wanted to drink with him and listen to his stories; women simply fawned over him.

IN FEBRUARY 1949, with the volume of criminal cases coming through the NAACP threatening to paralyze the LDF, Marshall issued a memorandum that established three rules to be applied “to the types of criminal cases we accept . . . (1) That there is injustice because of race or color; (2) the man is innocent; (3) there is a possibility of establishing a precedent for the benefit of due process and equal protection in general and the protection of Negroes’ rights in particular.”

The most unsettling involved teenage and preteen girls from black communities who were raped and often beaten or killed by advantaged, even prominent white citizens and law enforcement personnel in the South. Frequently the accused men would not be indicted, or else they’d stand trial (on reduced charges of unlawful carnal knowledge) before a jury of their peers, who were not about to take the word of poor blacks over that of white policemen, doctors, insurance collectors, or plumbing contractors. Most frustrating to Marshall was the fact that the NAACP did not have sufficient funds to provide legal assistance; also, many of the rape cases simply did not fit the criteria that Marshall himself had defined for the LDF. Outraged by the inhumanity of whites who abused their power or authority, and moved deeply by the suffering of their poor black victims, Marshall could only apologize that he and the organization could not do more, in the affectively written letters he sent to regional NAACP personnel, as well as to the families of raped, beaten, and sometimes murdered adolescent girls.

The law may have been on Marshall’s side, but law enforcement wasn’t.

No one in the courtroom had ever seen anything like it before: a black man in a Jim Crow state standing up in court and talking to powerful white people without the slightest form of deference—all the while looking them straight in the eyes. And he wasn’t done.

Confident he could reverse the verdict on appeal, Marshall boarded a train for the long trip back to New York. Despite the loss, he was becoming more optimistic about what had happened in Oklahoma. Every visit to a Jim Crow courtroom confirmed to him that the American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks—but he was seeing tiny cracks in the veneer. Guilty verdicts with recommendations of mercy instead of death sentences. Police officers indicted on brutality charges. Hope where there was none before. Criminal cases could affect people in unexpected ways. They raised awareness, increased NAACP membership, and if handled properly, they could bring in money.

McCall noticed that the automobiles—some parked, others cruising the streets—had come from neighboring counties, as well as from Georgia. It was common Klan practice to use outside Klaverns on “rides” or “jobs” in cars with the license plates intentionally obscured so that local riders could not be easily identified.

From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana.

that by World War II, Florida still ranked high among the most violent states in the South. Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida history professor who studied racial violence in the South, concluded that “a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country.” Alarmingly, despite the shocking and heinous nature of the lynchings in Florida, the crimes and the cover-ups generated little attention, let alone outrage—beyond the black newspapers. The state of Florida—that tropical vacation territory lying south of Georgia and, it would seem, of the Jim Crow South—appeared to be immune to media scrutiny.

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.

“it is necessary to establish the principle of the indivisibility of liberty so that the masses recognize that no matter where liberty is challenged, no matter where oppression lifts its head, it becomes the business of all the masses.”

The master’s mantle had fallen onto the pupil’s shoulders. The legal strategy, Houston had told Marshall, was in place; all that was needed was the courage and strength to see it through. As Hastie had so eloquently eulogized him, Houston “guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land . . . closer than even he dared hope. . . .”

The New York Times opined that the Court’s decisions left Plessy in “tatters.” More privately, some justices on the Supreme Court concluded that Sweatt and McLaurin, along with Henderson v. United States—a railway segregation case that was decided on the same day—had sealed the fate of Jim Crow. The South braced for the inevitable end of segregation in elementary and secondary schools.

Of course, Marshall knew that the decisions had not gone so far as to obliterate Plessy completely, but he was at last beginning to see the fruits of the seeds Houston had planted after he and Marshall, in 1930, had sat down together to study the findings in the Margold Report. In the twenty years since, they had honed “the tools to destroy all governmentally imposed racial segregation.” The work was not done, but it had unquestionably and irrevocably begun. “It will take time. It will take courage and determination,” Marshall said, as if to convince himself that he had the fortitude to continue the mission without the man who had envisioned it.

With military as with civil cases, Marshall urged his staff to exercise caution in choosing which cases to represent, to look at the person beyond the color. It was a principle Marshall had established early in his legal career at the NAACP, and one he would follow for nearly a quarter century. “My dad told me way back”—way back being when young Thurgood was growing up in Baltimore—“that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Some lessons you don’t forget.

bombed Jewish site had been planted a cross bearing “anti-Semitic and anti-Negro slogans” as well as Nazi and KKK symbols. “The Jew has already ruined the northern cities and wishes to invade the South,” read one letter that had arrived at the governor’s office. “They are teaching communism to the colored people, and inciting rioting through them.” By autumn, violence by dynamite had spread to central Florida. The Klan had flattened the Creamette Frozen Custard Stand in Orlando because the owner had refused to dedicate a separate service window for blacks. Before the year’s end the “Florida Terror,” as it was dubbed by the press, had resulted in a dozen disastrous bombings and numerous failed attempts to destroy racial and religious-based sites: the Saturday Evening Post designated 1951 as “the worst year of minority outrages in the history of Florida or probably any other state in recent times.”

We seek no special favors; but certainly we have a right to expect justice and equal protection of the laws even for the humblest Negro. Shall we be disappointed again?

The Washington Post made the link between the killing and the sheriff even plainer in an editorial titled “Terror in Florida,” which stated, “When state officers flout the law, it can be scarcely surprising that the lynch spirit should spread.” Harry T. Moore became the first civil rights

leader to be assassinated in the United States when he was killed on Christmas night in 1951.

Moore’s killing unsettled Thurgood Marshall profoundly. In his travels across the South his hosts always attended to his safety in his comings and goings to court, on his social visits, and even in his sleep. Although in conversation he generally downplayed the danger and his fear, so as not to worry his family and associates, in a statement he made in 1951 he admitted to the terror he felt every time he set foot in the hostile environment of the South. “I can testify,” he said, “there’s times when you’re scared to death. But you can’t admit it; you just have to lie like hell to yourself. Otherwise, you’ll start looking under the bed at night.” Marshall could empathetically imagine, then, the hostility, the menace—the “pressure”—

that locals like Harry Moore bore on a daily basis, year in and year out, as they continued bravely, despite “the possibility of violent death,” the campaign for the civil rights of blacks in the Jim Crow South. The governor’s office was flooded with thousands of letters and telegrams demanding action on behalf of the Moores, but the telegram that Governor Warren received from Thurgood Marshall struck a more somber note, reminding the governor that the Moores were “representatives of the finest type of citizens of your state” and that “unless they can be secure from lawlessness no one in Florida is safe from destruction.”

As the day of Moore’s funeral approached, the public outcry grew. So did the reaction to it, with black-owned homes and social clubs becoming targets for bombings throughout the South. Mostly, though, the nation’s attention was fixed on Florida and the increasingly high-profile case of the civil rights leader who was slain in the twelfth of that state’s bombings in 1951.

By no means was he underestimating the threat to Marshall in Florida. Swinney, along with nearly two dozen other agents committed to the Moore case “to ensure that the FBI was doing a thorough investigation,” had recently been looking into the shootings of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. In fact, he had just spent three days interviewing Willis McCall and local Klansmen in connection with Groveland and its aftermath, although he had not yet concluded, as he would eventually, that in regard to Harry Moore and his wife, “Klan members and some law enforcement officers were behind these murders.” They were also hell-bent on obstructing the FBI, no matter what the case, not to mention hobbling the NAACP.

an “American Confederate Army” of ninety-seven cohorts in thirty-one states, all of them prepared to bear arms in the event that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation. At the rally that evening, Hendrix’s “rebel army” voted in support of three measures in its avowed purpose to forestall justice for all: 1. denounce the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League as “hate groups”; 2. retain the hood, robe, and mask as official uniform; and 3. keep the fiery cross as a religious symbol. “Florida must have a few lynchings if its law enforcement officers don’t enforce 100 percent segregation in the state,” Hendrix reportedly proclaimed, after marching his army through the downtown streets of Orlando.

“There is very little truth to the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality,” Marshall posited in a 1966 White House conference on civil rights. “Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.”