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

by Gilbert King

Marshall and the board of the NAACP found it necessary to pass and adopt an anticommunist resolution, which directed the organization’s leaders to “eradicate Communists from its branch units.” The irony of the resolution was not lost on the NAACP itself; an article in its magazine, the Crisis, later pointed out, “It was one of the great ironies of the era that the nation’s oldest civil rights organization discriminated against individuals on the basis of their political beliefs and affiliation.”