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

Carter. Ordinarily, Houston would have written to Marshall, but he knew that his former student and longtime friend, along with Roy Wilkins, was fully occupied in the administration of the NAACP office in Walter White’s absence; nor did Houston want to burden Marshall with the news of his failing health, that “something other than fatigue” was a problem. The letter assured Carter: “These education cases are now tight and sufficiently so that anyone familiar with the course of the decisions should be able to guide the cases through. You and Thurgood can proceed without any fear of crossing any plans I might have.”
    Houston, who had suffered a heart attack, had moved into the home of his physician, Dr. Edward Mazique, while attempting to regain his strength after what would later be diagnosed as acute coronary thrombosis. He had placed his casework in the hands of his father, William, with whom he’d been working over the last quarter century, but the fifty-four-year-old Charlie Houston really “didn’t know how” to stop working, even when bedridden. More worrying than his casework were Houston’s concerns for his five-year-old son, Bo, whom Marshall called “Little Charlie.”
    Houston’s constant chest pains had increasingly been taking a physical toll on his body, and he had not wanted his son to witness him withering away but rather “to remember his father as vigorous, impressive and strong.” Houston had always felt extraordinarily protective of his young son. Joseph Waddy, Houston’s partner at their law firm, recalled an incident in a Washington, D.C., drugstore, where little Bo had climbed up on a counter stool while his father was making his purchases. “Get down from there, you little nigger—you got no business here,” the man behind the soda fountain had shouted at the boy, and had so upset the father that “when they got back to the office,” Waddy said, “we had to take Charlie into the back room and give him a sedative.”
    Although both Charlie’s wife, Henrietta, and his son had protested his more recent protective impulses, he had kissed them both good-bye as he’d put them on a train to Baton Rouge and the home of Henrietta’s sister.
    That December Houston was too infirm to shop for Christmas presents; so, to express his appreciation of the attentive Dr. Mazique, Houston gave him one of his prized possessions, a poster of an “open-air Scottsboro protest meeting in Amsterdam”—in the hope that Mazique would one day hand on the poster to Bo. To explain further to Bo the “domestic and international significance” of the landmark case he had worked on twenty years earlier, he recorded the story of the Scottsboro Boys on tape. Since Scottsboro “you have seen . . . the movement of the great masses of the people,” said Houston to his son, and therefore “it is necessary to establish the principle of the indivisibility of liberty so that the masses recognize that no matter where liberty is challenged, no matter where oppression lifts its head, it becomes the business of all the masses.”
    A second heart attack landed Houston in the Freedman’s Hospital at Howard University. Despite the setback, and critical as his condition was, Houston was not prepared to have his family come back to Washington. His aunt Clotill was a frequent visitor, however, and together they would read and discuss the lessons in Peace of Mind , by Joshua Loth Liebman. Aunt Clotill had given the book to her nephew, and he exacted her promise to pass the book along to Bo, should he not make it out of the hospital.
    In the early afternoon of April 22, Mazique was preparing a medication for nausea and his patient was resting in bed when Joseph Waddy stopped in to visit. “Hi, Joe,” Houston said softly, as his slightly raised hand slumped to his side. Charles Hamilton Houston had drawn his final breath. Beside his bed lay his copy of Peace of Mind. In its pages Houston had written some last words for his son:
    Tell Bo I did not run out on him but went down fighting that he might have better and broader opportunities than I had without prejudice or bias operating against him, and in any fight some fall.
    He had driven a young Thurgood Marshall across the South; he had opened his onetime student’s eyes and mind to the inequalities blacks suffered by law. For decades he had been laying the groundwork to overturn the injustices enacted against his race in Plessy . He did not live to see the