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

culmination of his labor. The funeral services for Charles Hamilton Houston at Howard University’s Rankin Chapel were attended by Supreme Court justices Tom C. Clark and Hugo Black, an official from President Truman’s cabinet, numerous civil rights activists, and hundreds of friends and colleagues. Houston’s cousin, William Hastie, whom President Truman had nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1949, paid homage to a civil rights champion’s “unremitting struggle to win for the Negro full status without discrimination.” Hastie celebrated a warrior’s spirit: “Yet, as we grieve, we cannot forget that he believed, perhaps above all else, in strength; strength to do and to bear what lesser men would regard as impossible or unbearable. He counted nothing, no physical weakness and not even death itself, as an obstacle to the onward sweep of strong men and women in the accomplishment of worthwhile ends. He had a soldier’s faith that winning the fight is all that matters; that every battle must be fought until it is won and without pause to take account of those stricken in the fray. He reflected that conviction in a slogan which he gave to his students: ‘No tea for the feeble, no crepe for the dead.’ I know he would wish all of us to carry on in that spirit.”
    Marshall was one of Houston’s pallbearers. He was also one of the NAACP executives who would ensure that Houston be posthumously awarded the thirty-fifth Spingarn Medal, a tribute that came years too late. “Whatever credit is given him is not enough,” Marshall said of his mentor, whose contributions to the cause of civil rights were ultimately immeasurable as he had so willingly and unselfishly toiled behind the scenes while others received credit for the gains. It was Marshall’s idea to present the Spingarn Medal to Houston’s son at the NAACP’s forty-first annual convention, in Boston. In a photograph that appeared in newspapers across the country, Marshall—the trace of a smile barely masking his sorrow—can be seen standing over the shoulder of the boy as little Bo is being handed his father’s medal.
    Four years earlier, in Cincinnati, Charles Hamilton Houston had presented the Spingarn Medal to Thurgood Marshall. Even then, Marshall had not outstripped his mentor or ceased to follow his lead. Rarely in the two decades before or four years since had Marshall made an important legal decision without consulting Houston, and with his passing Marshall, too, had lost a protector and a champion. The master’s mantle had fallen onto the pupil’s shoulders. The legal strategy, Houston had told Marshall, was in place; all that was needed was the courage and strength to see it through. As Hastie had so eloquently eulogized him, Houston “guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land . . . closer than even he dared hope. . . .”
    T HE CRUEL APRIL passed, but the spring, as in Eliot’s metaphor, had begun to breed lilacs out of the dead land. Just weeks after Houston’s death, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decisions on Sweatt and McLaurin . In both cases the justices’ opinions were unanimous.
    Marshall immediately called Heman Sweatt. “We won the big one!” he proclaimed, explaining to the letter carrier that the Court did not find “substantial equality” between the University of Texas Law School and a basement equipped with a pile of textbooks. “Now the state will have to age law schools like good whiskey,” Marshall told him.
    The New York Times opined that the Court’s decisions left Plessy in “tatters.” More privately, some justices on the Supreme Court concluded that Sweatt and McLaurin , along with Henderson v. United States —a railway segregation case that was decided on the same day—had sealed the fate of Jim Crow. The South braced for the inevitable end of segregation in elementary and secondary schools.
    In June 1950, then, Marshall was finally again in the mood to celebrate. Once again he was “Thurgood . . . a party man. ‘Party’ was his middle name,” said Constance Baker Motley. And he proved it. He hosted a victory party at the midtown office, where, as young Jack Greenberg remembered, there was “lots of Scotch and bourbon, clouds of cigarette smoke, lots of laughter and noise and bragging, jokes about race and racial banter, and the almost obligatory poker