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

by Gilbert King

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.

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.

.” 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.

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.”

Leaders are important but they must be competent. Thurgood Marshall was extremely competent.

“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.

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.”

Seems a bit harsh.

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

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.’

Dr. Samuel Green’s Association of Georgia Klans. An Atlanta obstetrician and Grand Dragon, Green boasted that the Klan was once again growing by “leaps and bounds” in its purpose to establish “a beachhead in Florida.” Outraged by President Truman’s espousal of civil rights legislation, Green had promised that any Yankee attempt to force equality between the races would oblige Americans to “see blood flow in these streets.

Here you go again. You are like a broken record. Obey my white supremacy agenda or die. Perhaps you will be the one languishing in jail.

“Thurgood was the savior,” said Dr. Gilbert Porter, Moore’s friend and colleague. “We never started winning any cases until he came. But after he won a few, all you had to say to a white superintendent, ‘Well, I’m gonna talk to Mr. Marshall,’ and they’d cooperate.”

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.

TN was up there as well.

“Jesus,” Greenlee had said, remembering for Williams the night he’d lost his future. “If I, if I thought a white woman had been raped within a hundred miles of [Groveland] and Negroes were suspected, I would have opened the door and left.”

Seems like a lot of white rapists were getting away with their crimes. But, really, isn’t that what purpose of black oppression was? To protect white criminals from being punished?

Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance. Fathers of black soldiers warned their sons not to come home in their uniforms because police had made a practice of searching and beating black military men. “If he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, they’d kill him,” one Mississippi man related.

Seems like southerners are or were completely indifferent to US veterans.

None of it surprised Marshall, who had seen enough such cases to know that in the South coerced confessions were more the rule than the exception. Even President Truman’s 1946 Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights acknowledged as much, with J. Edgar Hoover testifying that “lawless police action” against blacks was so commonplace in the South that at one particular jail “it was seldom that a Negro man or woman was incarcerated who was not given a severe beating, which started off with a pistol whipping and ended with a rubber hose.”

It took decades for these practices to gradually disappear.

Quigley and Matthews took their investigation in Lake County beyond law enforcement personnel and established witnesses to civic officials, politicians, prominent businessmen, and grove owners in this largely rural area of central Florida with a population of thirty-six thousand. 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.

When Scottsboro had completed the retrial and Poston his assignment, he made a show of reserving a seat on the day coach at the train station so that the ticket seller would be sure to remember him. Then he quietly slipped out of town by bus. He later learned that, as he had feared, about the time the train he’d reserved the seat on was due to arrive, a crowd of angry whites, nearly a thousand strong, had turned up at the depot, obviously not to offer him a friendly good-bye.

For a measure of security, too, Poston reserved a suite in a Negro hotel in Orlando for the duration of his assignment, but each night he would steal out the back door of the hotel to sleep instead at one of three secret private homes. Not a man to take any chances in the South, Poston made sure the defense lawyers had the telephone number of the city editor at the New York Post “just in case anything happens.”

On the judge’s desk lay a pile of cedar sticks; seated, Truman Futch pulled a knife from a drawer and demonstrated, as he would throughout the trial, how he’d gotten nicknamed “the Whittlin’ Judge.” Oppressive heat, old Southern lawyers in red suspenders, whittling judges, a fearsome sheriff, and a crowd of racist, tobacco-stained crackers on the benches behind him—“it was,” Williams observed, “almost to me like a story that I was living through and these were caricatures that I was being exposed to.”

To his detractors, Williams was “glib,” sometimes brash, and he could certainly raise Mabel Norris Reese’s hackles. She’d once suggested that the New York lawyer might benefit from living some while in the gentlemanly South; without courtesy Williams bellowed, “I would not live in the South!”

Southerners are very polite no matter their race, creed or color.

The state had responded to the suit by admitting McLaurin to the University of Oklahoma’s doctoral program in education, but with conditions. For one, McLaurin was forced to sit at a desk in an “anteroom” from which he could only look into the classroom. (Marshall noted that the “anteroom” was merely a “broom closet.”) Protest had then prompted the state to amend its ruling—slightly: McLaurin was assigned a special seat in the classroom; it was surrounded by a railing and marked “Reserved for Colored.” The absurdity had not been lost on the white students, who’d immediately torn down the original railing and sign, as well as all the new ones that had replaced them, at a cost to the state of more than five thousand dollars.

Marshall eventually did meet with General MacArthur, whom he characterized as being “as biased as any person I’ve run across.” Apparently staunch in his conviction that blacks as a race were “inferior,” the general had no black soldiers in the honor guard protecting him—had none in his entire headquarters, in fact—“not even in the band,” Marshall noted, “and I assume that there are some Negroes who can play instruments.”

Another strike against the arrogant general.

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. Shortly after the bombing Eleanor Roosevelt warned, “That kind of violent incident will be spread all over every country in the world, and the harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold.”

The first of many. Sadly.

“You watch her on the witness stand. You listen to her story. You note the righteous ferocity with which the prosecution defends that story. You note the timidity with which the defense challenges it. You count the dead . . . Ernest Thomas . . . Sammy Shepherd . . . maybe Walter Irvin . . . and you realize that it’s perfectly all right to starve a Southern white woman and deprive her of education and make her old before her time, but by God, no damned outsider is going to dare question the sanctity of her private parts, the incontrovertibility of her spoken word.”

Ayup

The Brown ruling triggered a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity and White Citizens’ Council activism, whereby “respectable citizens” joined together to exert economic pressures against local individuals and organizations that either supported desegregation or did not openly oppose it. In Lake County, an editorial by Mabel Norris Reese praising Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court’s decision was not inconsequential. The opposition planted a burning cross on her front lawn, smeared “KKK” in red paint across her office windows, and poisoned the family dog with strychnine.

Ain’t they sweet. So evil they kill a dog.

“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.” In Groveland, Mabel Norris Reese had come round. So had Jesse Hunter. Governor LeRoy Collins had done the right thing.

You can legislate morality. We do it all the time. Morality changes over time, thus so does legislation.

I will be forever grateful for the lifetime of sacrifices made by the heroes of the civil rights movement, particularly Thurgood Marshall, whose intellect, wisdom and intense devotion to constitutional law saved so many lives and forced us all to think differently. Finally, I am grateful you decided to research and retell this story so that we might never forget the gross injustices of the past in order that they will never be a part of our future. Sincerely, Anne Pattillo Kail

Amen.