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

convinced that had Looby obeyed police orders and continued driving to Nashville on that November night in 1946, Marshall “would never have been seen again.”
    Safely back in Nashville and his heart still pounding, Marshall made a late-night phone call to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to tell him what had happened.
    “Drunken driving?” Clark asked.
    “Yes.”
    Clark paused. He had come to know Marshall well since being appointed attorney general in 1945 by President Truman, and he had just one question for the man who would one day replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court.
    “Well,” Clark asked, “were you drunk?”
    “No,” Marshall asserted, “but exactly five minutes after I hang up this phone I’m going to be drunk!”

CHAPTER 2: SUGAR HILL

    NAACP attorney Franklin Williams and blinded World War II veteran Isaac Woodard went on a nationwide speaking tour to raise money and awareness of the brutality Woodard suffered at the hands of law enforcement agents in the South. ( Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Franklin Williams Papers )
    N IGGER BOY, WHAT are you doing here?”
    Marshall had been standing under the sweltering sun on the far end of the platform. He had stomach pangs from hunger and he tried to make himself look small, but the white man had come straight toward him, eyes cold and firm, the gun on his hip in plain sight.
    “Waiting for the train,” Marshall told him.
    The man eyed him up and down, suspicious of the suit.
    “There’s only one more train comes through here,” the man told him, “and that’s the four o’clock—you’d better be on it because the sun is never going down on a live nigger in this town.”
    His appetite gone, Marshall’s eyes followed the man as he turned away. “So I wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket . . . and caught the next train out of there,” the lawyer recalled.
    One trip bled into another, and he never felt safe until he was riding the rails north again: sitting with a glass of bourbon in his hand, waiting for the porter to bring him a good cut of meat. Outside the parlor car window, the whitewashed shacks eventually gave way to factories and highways and row houses with white marble steps . . . until he finally stepped off the train in the entirely different world of New York. Pennsylvania Station, with its colossal pink granite columns and glass and steel train sheds, was one of the largest public spaces in the world, its grandeur awing the millions of travelers and commuters who daily passed through it. “One entered the city like a god,” architectural historian Vincent Scully noted. Yet the anonymity of strolling across the breathtaking ten-story vaulted concourse like any other man wearing a fedora and hauling his briefcase and luggage suited Marshall just fine. Standing out in a crowd on a train platform was something Marshall was happy to leave behind him in the South.
    From Penn Station, Marshall hailed a DeSoto Sky View taxi and headed up the west side of Manhattan to his Harlem apartment. Though the Great Depression had put an end to the Harlem Renaissance, the concentration of blacks in the fifty-by-eight-block area created a dazzling energy and culture that continued to thrive in Harlem in the postwar 1940s; it was still “the Negro capital of America.” Uniformed black soldiers on leave from World War II swarmed the uptown streets, flocking to popular clubs like the Savoy Ballroom at night and bars like the Brown Bomber during the day. Past the Victoria and Apollo theaters on 125th Street, Marshall crossed over tracks laid on cobblestone, where trolley cars encouraged commuters to “Ride the Surface Way.”
    Thurgood and his wife, Buster, in their twenties, childless, and already married for seven years, had come to New York in the fall of 1936. Like so many blacks who had migrated from the South, the young couple had come to Harlem, but not to escape Jim Crow. Thurgood had been offered a job with the NAACP, where he’d share a Manhattan office with his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston. The money wasn’t good. Houston himself was living at the YMCA in Harlem, and he pulled in nearly twice Thurgood’s two-hundred-dollar salary each month. The Marshalls had packed their bags in Baltimore and headed north to stay with Thurgood’s aunt Medi and uncle Boots (Denmedia and Clarence Dodson) on Lenox Avenue—in the heart of Harlem in the waning moments