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

classroom; it was surrounded by a railing and marked “Reserved for Colored.” The absurdity had not been lost on the white students, who’d immediately torn down the original railing and sign, as well as all the new ones that had replaced them, at a cost to the state of more than five thousand dollars.
    Jack Greenberg found the McLaurin case to be especially attractive, and provocative, because “it offered the [U.S. Supreme] Court no escape from deciding the issue of segregation.” On the other hand, Greenberg thought at the time that “it was dangerous because it allowed no victory on grounds short of overruling Plessy , which the Court might be reluctant to do.” He, Constance Baker Motley, and Franklin Williams focused their legal savvy and abundant energy on getting the briefs and petitions cast exactly as Marshall wanted them, for Sweatt as well as McLaurin , since both cases were scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court on the same day, April 3, 1950. At the printer’s shop, the young lawyers stood by the “clattering hot-lead Linotype machines and clanging presses,” and as the pages came off the press they edited them and read them aloud to each other to be sure the proofs were Thurgood-perfect. Their vision may have begun to blur by the time the sun started to rise; but not their focus. Or Marshall’s. Standing by them, with them, like them, as Greenberg averred, “Thurgood focused on the end of Jim Crow.”
    Once the briefs for both Sweatt and McLaurin were filed, Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, did more than offer his former pupil advice. He launched an attack from the flank, by having his solid connections at the Justice Department file amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in support of both Sweatt and McLaurin , essentially stating, “ Plessy must go.” Marshall himself was meanwhile filling notebooks with case summaries so that he’d have every relevant reference at his fingertips, and he’d composed lists of every question he could imagine the justices might possibly pose. In Washington, in the days leading up to his arguments, he’d regularly take his staff down to Howard University for “dry runs” before a distinguished panel of academics and lawyers, including Houston and his cousin William Hastie. Mostly, they were trying to prepare for any issue that might be raised by the inquisitional associate justice Felix Frankfurter, the former Harvard Law School professor and the reputed intellectual among the justices, who was perceived by Marshall and his team to be a potentially dangerous adversary. Marshall entered the rigorous moot court sessions at Howard “like a boxer going into training,” said Jack Greenberg. “Thurgood would limit himself to one glass of wine at dinnertime, usually sherry, and no other alcohol.”
    On April 3 and 4, with associates Greenberg, Williams, and Motley along for support, the assistant special counsel Robert Carter argued McLaurin and Marshall argued Sweatt . In just a few sentences Marshall crystallized his argument for the Court. Emotional but reserved, the lawyer stood before the justices and “employed a rhetoric with persuasive force beyond its basic ideas.” Marshall said:
    The rights of Sweatt to attend the University of Texas cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of any group of citizens. It matters not to me whether every single Negro in this country wants segregated schools. It makes no difference whether every white person wants segregated schools. If Sweatt wants to assert his individual, constitutional right, it cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of every other citizen.
    Marshall proved to be so well prepared, and his argument so tightly constructed, that he did not face a single question he hadn’t already anticipated in his “training” at Howard. The attorney general of Texas attempted unsuccessfully to counter Marshall’s case with the argument that Sweatt’s admission to the university would lead to blacks being allowed in public places such as swimming pools and hospitals. “All we ask in the south,” he said, “is the opportunity to take care of this matter and work it out [ourselves].”

    T HE TWO ARDUOUS Supreme Court arguments now behind them, Marshall and his LDF lawyers returned to New York and to their work on the Groveland appeal, which Franklin Williams would be arguing before the Florida Supreme Court with Alex Akerman. Williams, though, was not eager to revisit the orange groves