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

and white crackers of central Florida, for by the spring of 1950 he had developed a taste for arguing segregation cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, cases that, in Williams’s view, stood at the forefront of the nation’s growing civil rights movement. With the taste came ambition.
    One year earlier, Williams had accompanied Marshall to Washington, where as assistant counsel the thirty-one-year-old lawyer had argued Watts v. Indiana alongside the NAACP’s star attorney, albeit he’d had to persuade a reluctant Marshall—hard-pressed though he was, as he had no one else to argue the case—to allow him the opportunity. “I was the first deputy of Thurgood’s to argue a case before the court,” Williams noted, and he’d made a memorable debut, as the Court overturned a murder conviction because the defendant’s confession to the crime had not been voluntary. Moreover, Williams’s performance had caught the eye of Felix Frankfurter, who wrote a note to his clerk, Bill Coleman, during the proceedings: “Bill, take a few minutes off to listen to Franklin Williams (do you know him?).” Coleman replied that Williams was “now Mr. Marshall’s assistant” and that he had “studied his law at Howard and comes very highly recommended.” Frankfurter crossed out “Howard” on the note and wrote in “Fordham,” then added one more word to describe Williams’s courtroom comportment: “Excellent!”
    Since his arrival at the LDF in 1945, Williams had aligned himself closely with Walter White, who in fact had hired the recent Fordham Law School graduate. The two men also socialized outside the office. “Walter liked me and respected me as a dynamic young guy in the office,” Williams recalled, “and Thurgood probably thought I was in league with Walter—and since I did hang out with him, I suppose I was.” So it had come as no surprise to Marshall when he learned that Williams’s promptings lay behind the memos Walter White had issued regarding the “overfamiliarity and casualness” in the LDF offices that fostered a less productive working environment. Still, Marshall more than tolerated the young attorney’s ambition. Indeed, he encouraged it, for Marshall was not a man to be threatened by bright, enterprising minds.
    A self-confident manager and a crafty leader, Marshall thrived on the talents of his staff and associates. Even Williams, as critical as he was of Marshall’s apparent informality, had to admire the effectiveness of his modus operandi. “He had great success in picking people’s brains and manipulating them in the interests of the cause,” Williams said of Marshall. “He’d get a lot of outside lawyers together in a room, and he’d be talking and laughing and drinking along with the rest of them and getting everybody relaxed and open, and he’d seem to be having such a good time with them that you wouldn’t think he was listening. But after they’d left, there it all was—he’d had the benefit of all their brains, which was his strategy in the first place. Frankly, it was a little embarrassing—until I came to understand what he was up to.”
    Williams also understood that, and why, Marshall was chary in regard to the cases he was willing to have the NAACP represent, but understanding did not restrain the younger attorney, who had Walter White’s influential ear, from criticizing Marshall for being “cautious to a fault in taking thorny cases.” Williams, not unlike other attorneys and associates of the NAACP, was eager to pursue civil rights suits more widely, whereas “Thurgood,” said Williams, “had to be convinced of victory beyond a reasonable doubt before he said yes.” Fewer of the staff and consultants at the NAACP office, however, agreed with Williams than agreed with Marshall, who was reluctant to bring cases to the Supreme Court prematurely “because they might make lasting unfavorable precedents.” Still, Marshall felt the debate as to the aims and reach of the NAACP among its executives and the LDF staff was a healthy one, and he did not discourage it. (He was not pleased, though, when the NAACP magazine, the Crisis , mistakenly referred to Franklin Williams as “special counsel.” Only half jokingly, the special counsel Marshall dashed off a memo to Williams, stating that “all pretenders to the throne may use any . . . exit to the building without picking up any past due salary,” and closing with a not-informal “Please acknowledge