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

by Gilbert King

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.