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

Prologue

    Flag outside the NAACP offices at 69 Fifth Avenue, New York City. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
     
    A LL HIS LIFE, it seemed, he’d been staring out the windows of trains rumbling toward the unknown. Again, he was seated in the Jim Crow coach, hitched directly behind the engines, where the heavy heat bore the smell of diesel. Still, the lawyer sat proud in his smart double-breasted suit, a freshly pressed handkerchief dancing out of his pocket, as the haunting Southern landscape of cypress swamps, cotton fields, and whitewashed, tin-roofed shanties flickered by. Traveling alone, he hunched his six-foot, two-inch frame over case files; a cigarette dangling from his lips, he scribbled some notes on a yellow legal pad. He would rewrite the draft before he typed it up later; he worked meticulously. A federal clerk once told him that with just one look at the smudges or erasures on a lawyer’s pleading he’d know if it was written by a white man or a Negro. It was a remark Thurgood Marshall never forgot. In cases like his there was too much at stake for him to be filing any “nigger briefs.”
    The trains he rode bore grand names like the Orange Blossom Special, the Silver Meteor, and the Champion, and their rhythms ran in Marshall’s Baltimore blood. Both his father, Willie, and his uncle, Fearless, had been porters on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and to help pay for college, young Thurgood himself had worked as a waiter in a B&O dining car. The railroads were for him and his family a source of pride, and status, but on trips like these, when he was riding alone, they also summoned in Marshall an old sadness. His wife, Buster, unable to bear the children he had longed for, had one year for his birthday given him the electric train set she had hoped someday to present to her husband and their son. With the train, and with an engineer’s hat perched atop his head, Marshall entertained the boys in their Harlem apartment building instead.
    By the mid-1940s, Marshall, the grandson of a mixed-race slave named Thorney Good Marshall, was engineering the greatest social transformation in America since the Reconstruction era. He had already devoted more than a decade of his career to overcoming the “inherent defects” of a Constitution that had allowed, by law, social injustices against blacks, who had been denied not only the right to vote but also equal rights and opportunities in education, housing, and employment. With his far-reaching triumphs in landmark cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall would indeed redefine justice in a multiracial nation and become, as one civil rights pioneer described him, the Founding Father of the New America.
    Before achieving those victories, however, Marshall fought countless battles for human rights in stifling antebellum courthouses where white supremacy ruled. Neither judges nor juries in the Jim Crow South had much interest in Marshall’s nuanced constitutional arguments. 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.
    On Marshall’s journeys, when the moon lit the passing landscapes of the South, he customarily drank bourbon, and he enjoyed the company of the night porters—they’d joke and talk together in segregated cars atop suitcases and the occasional casket. Or, sitting in the coach car, Marshall would drift in and out of sleep to the lullaby of the locomotive, its plaintive cry announcing every crossing as it rolled onward, southward, closer and closer to benighted towns billeting hostile prosecutors, malicious police, and the Ku Klux Klan. In the rhythm of the rails came the whipping of the wind as again the dream descended on him, and in the wind the massive black flag unfurled outside the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and as a pall fell over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, he read again the message, in stark white letters on the flag’s flapping black field: “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.”
    The photographs were always horrifying: shirtless black victims, their bodies bloodied, eyes bulging from their sockets. Of all the lynching photos Marshall had seen, though, it was the image of Rubin