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.”

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.

It was those same students who founded in Austin the nation’s first all-white chapter of the NAACP.

“not one of the more than 14 bombings in Florida has produced a defendant.”

I read later in the book that when they finally found those responsible for a bombing murder, no charges were pressed because the state did not want to disrupt the "tranquility"!

in the same county courthouse Marshall was delivered a stern warning by one of the opposing white lawyers: “If you show your black ass in Clarendon County ever again, you’re a dead man.”

The next day, when school opened, the children found a chalk line running down the middle of the sidewalk; one side was marked “White People,” the other “Nigger Lovers.” One child who had signed the petition was stoned with pebbles. A deputy meanwhile visited the Platts with a message from the sheriff’s office “that if they weren’t out by that night, their house would be burned down.”

In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of limitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay.

FULLER WARREN’S SPECIAL investigator J. J. Elliott was off by twelve years when he forecast that McCall’s shooting of Shepherd and Irvin would guarantee the sheriff three more terms in office. In fact, McCall served seven consecutive terms as sheriff of Lake County.

The sheriff’s personal reign of terror ended in 1972, when he was indicted and suspended from office by Governor Reubin Askew: the sixty-two-year-old McCall had kicked to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell. Although McCall was acquitted of the charges, the time he’d spent defending himself in court had prevented him from campaigning effectively enough to win that year’s election. Still, he was only barely defeated in his bid for an eighth consecutive term.

McCall was never charged for other murders.

I heard from the African-American mother of a fifteen-year-old son who had just moved to Lake County, Florida from Chicago. She was very concerned about the slaying of Trayvon Martin, and since their new home wasn’t far from Sanford, Florida, (where Martin was fatally shot) she wanted her son to read the book so that he had some sense of the area’s history. She wanted him to know that in 2012, as a young black man in America, he still had to be careful and smart.

As far as I know every human heart has the potential for darkness or light, influenced largely by how we are raised and how thoroughly we are loved—or at some point whether we come to know how worthy we are of that love.