Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
✒️ Author: Gilbert King |. 📖 Published: 2013 | 🗓 Read: July 26, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 464
Summary
Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.
In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.”
Why You Should Read It
As the awareness around the fight for social justice heightens in 2020, it’s essential to look back in history to understand that the same battle has persisted well before the flashpoint of George Floyd.
Notable Highlights
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.
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“You know,” Marshall said to him, “sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul.”
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“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.”
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“Lose your head, lose your case,” was the phrase Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, had drilled into him in law school.
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With a total population more than double what it is today, the buildings and tenements uptown were overflowing with “roomers”: residents who rented sleeping space in apartments where living and dining rooms were converted into bedrooms at night. To help pay the rent, many tenants held rent parties; they would simply throw up a sign with the date and their address, and for a dollar or so guests could gain entry. We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!
Notes: 1) Some things never change. Roomers, I like the word.
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The tradition of the rent party, which thrived during the Harlem Renaissance, continued into the forties out of economic necessity. Because famous clubs like Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club did not allow black customers, and Small’s Paradise, though not segregated, had high door fees that ensured mostly upscale white audiences, much of the great live music at the time was not accessible to blacks. This spurred musicians like Waller and Louis Armstrong to play at rent parties—not just for the extra cash but also for the joy of performing at lively parties with enthusiastic black crowds.
Notes: 1) Rent parties - musicians got their start.
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“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”
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danger of the Southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro has always been comparatively small . . . much less, for instance, than the chance that she would be struck by lightning,” it was “the most natural thing in the world for the South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held off.” In Cash’s estimation, the Southern rape complex “had nothing immediately to do with sex,” but rather with the feeling among Southerners that if blacks were to advance beyond their severely circumscribed social station, they might “one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage.”
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Willis McCall realized fully how fine was the line he’d have to walk between the requirements of the law and the unspoken expectations of the Klan. For neither politicians nor the powerful citrus barons held sway over white mobs bent on vengeance in the matter of Negroes, the flower of Southern womanhood, and rape.
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McCarthy learned that whites in Groveland (who accounted for about 60 percent of the town’s population of one thousand) were tolerant of blacks, as long as they continued to work in white-owned citrus groves. “The Negroes do most of the work around here,” the Klansman told McCarthy. “It’s these nigger farmers—they’ve got to go.” Black farmers like Henry Shepherd and his family threatened, “by their example, the whole system of servitude and forced labor which is the base of the local economy,” McCarthy wrote. He noted that the whites he spoke with were less interested in seeking revenge for the rape of Norma Padgett than in seeing the demise of “all independent colored farmers.”
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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.
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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.
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Marshall had seen, time and again, the FBI arrive at the scene in the aftermath of a lynching, and time and again leave without any suspects. Moreover, Marshall had learned, the bureau’s agents in the aftermath of a lynching evinced so much antagonism toward the black victims and witnesses that the latter simply would not talk to the FBI, out of fear that any information they provided would be relayed to local law enforcement and thus put their lives in danger.
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The Sentinel reporter also suspected that Ernest Thomas’s involvement with bolita was the reason the young man had fled Lake County, not the fact that Norma Padgett claimed to have been raped. Powers had questions for Sheriff McCall about the specifics of Thomas’s resistance at the time the Groveland native was gunned down, and those questions “have never been answered.” The reporter had come to suspect that McCall was “desperate to seal Thomas’s lips” and that the reason for such an extensive manhunt “was for the purpose of shutting up Thomas permanently.”
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The authorities, Powers said, viewed Thomas as a “definite threat to the established and entrenched gambling set-up in that section of Lake County,” and the posse was organized to make “absolutely sure Thomas had no chance to TALK.”
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As U.S. Army regulations allowed soldiers to continue to wear their military uniforms after completing their service, many black veterans did exactly that, perhaps to remind their communities that they, too, had defended their country. They had also been dispatched to foreign nations, particularly in Europe, where minorities experienced more tolerance and openness than they ever had in America, especially in the South. So, like many black veterans returning home to states in the South and the one south of the South, Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were not prepared to return to the fields or citrus groves of Lake County under the conditions defined by Jim Crow. White Southerners, meanwhile, may have been outraged by the reported egalitarian attitudes of Europeans toward Negroes, but they were flat-out enraged by stories from France of white women sleeping with American black men; they were thus determined to put returning black veterans back in their place.
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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.
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In rural counties and parishes across the South, as the FBI was well aware, the sheriff’s office was the seat of power. Elected to office by a countywide vote, the sheriff was viewed by his electorate not only as the county’s chief law enforcement officer but also as a community leader who shared his electorate’s interests.
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The job, Marshall stressed, was, as always, “to cause constitutional error or to find constitutional error in the process.”
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At one point, while mourners paid their respects to Moore before a makeshift shrine—a stack of shattered planks that had been the front porch—a young black boy, who had crawled under the house, was beating the underside of the first floor with a stick. He caught the eye, or ear, of Special Agent Robert Nischwitz of the FBI, who asked the boy what he was doing under there. “Trying to scare the rats away” was the boy’s reply, in which Nischwitz found an apt metaphor for the situation in Mims. “Certain” that the Klan was responsible for the blast when he had arrived at the scene, the agent noted that Klansmen, too, “were all over the place, like rats.” Like rats, they’d have to be beaten out of hiding.
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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.
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“You can pick up a newspaper or tune in on your radio set any time and learn where the FBI has out-witted some of the cleverest criminals in the world,” Marshall declaimed at Pittsburgh’s Central Baptist Church. “Yet when it comes to mob violence against Negroes, all you can get is, ‘We’re investigating.’ It’s time we got up off our plush seats and did something about it.”
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