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

for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson , the landmark 1896 decision upholding racial segregation. One reporter observing Marshall in Texas wrote “everyone knows what the score is . . . and those of us who sit in the crowded courtroom day after day realize that we are watching history being made.”
    At the same time that Marshall and his attorneys were preparing for Sweatt v. Painter , they were also filing briefs for another segregation case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents , wherein George McLaurin, who’d already earned his master’s degree, had applied to the University of Oklahoma to pursue a doctor of education degree. The state of Oklahoma had never been friendly territory for Marshall and his staff; he’d lost the Lyons murder case there years before, and more recently, in 1946, he’d returned to argue a case on behalf of Ada Sipuel, who had been denied entry into the all-white University of Oklahoma Law School. The Sipuel trial had been nearing its end when the judge had summoned Marshall to his chambers; there the judge had acknowledged the clarity and intelligence both of Marshall’s arguments and of his black expert witnesses, all of which had “ ‘opened [the judge’s] eyes,’ to the wrong of school segregation.” Marshall could only briefly savor the moment, for the judge had then returned to the courtroom and ruled against Sipuel and the NAACP attorney.
    On that same occasion, but away from the bench, Marshall had had a less satisfying private exchange with the assistant attorney general of Oklahoma, who’d inveighed, “You keep talking about equal justice, equal facilities. We’re setting up an atom smasher at the University of Oklahoma. Do you mean that we’ve got to set up an atom smasher for niggers? Everybody knows that niggers can’t study science.” A year later, when arguing the Sipuel case on appeal in Oklahoma, Marshall had again run into the distasteful assistant attorney general and again, Marshall recalled, “it was ‘nigger’ this and ‘nigger’ that.” More surprising, though, had been the assistant attorney general who in 1948 had arrived in Washington, D.C., to argue Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla. before the Supreme Court, especially when, to Marshall’s dismay, he’d informed the justices that he was defending segregation only because of his oath of office and that if the Court ruled against him, he would “not only follow the letter, but the spirit of the law.” Marshall’s shock had ceded to curiosity when, in the lawyers’ lounge, he’d asked the attorney “what the hell happened” to him. “My son’s been a student at the University of Oklahoma,” the attorney had replied. “He’s read about this case. He’s been berating me about it, including the question whether I really believe in the U.S. Constitution. He convinced me that I was a jackass.”
    Marshall’s argument of Sipuel before the Court was observed by the future Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, then a law clerk to Associate Justice Wiley Rutledge: “Thurgood was respectful, forceful and persuasive—so persuasive that on the following Monday—only four days after the argument—the Court unanimously ruled in Sipuel’s favor.”
    At the time that Marshall had returned to Oklahoma City to argue McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents , the Dixiecrats had been stirring up their ranks with forecasts of the perils immanent in any legislation of social equality for Negroes, particularly with their predictions that “there would be intermarriage” if desegregation was enforced in educational institutions. Marshall, however, had managed to stay one step ahead of the South’s political powers that be. In Oklahoma, Marshall noted, “we had eight people who had applied and who were eligible to be plaintiffs, but we deliberately picked Professor McLaurin because he was sixty-eight years old and we didn’t think he was going to marry or intermarry. . . . They could not bring that one up on us, anyhow.”
    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