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

Jacksonville, Williams had returned to New York with an authoritative report, concluding that Florida’s plummeting membership could be attributed directly to Moore’s leadership. Although the members in the NAACP branches of all three cities agreed that Moore’s voter registration drives were impressive, they roundly criticized his endorsement of candidates through the Progressive Voters League, since it was alienating Democratic and Republican Negroes alike.
    No doubt, Moore could read the writing on the wall. Nonetheless, he continued his push for justice and money. By citing unresolved issues in the Groveland case, Moore had lobbied and successfully arranged for a delegation of black leaders to meet with Governor Fuller Warren to discuss a wide range of topics politically crucial to blacks, from police brutality to voting rights. He continued traveling from county to county in Florida, and continued making speeches and raising money to fund LDF appeals in the Groveland case. He continued writing letters to editors of Florida newspapers, among them Mabel Norris Reese, in which he severely criticized Sheriff Willis McCall, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, and Judge Truman Futch. Months after the convictions, Moore was keeping the Groveland Boys case alive in his hope of saving their lives and his job, his mission, his calling. “I plan to touch many more [branches] while this Groveland Case is fresh in their minds,” Moore wrote to the New York office.
    Harry Moore was not the only one in the employ of the NAACP whose job stood in jeopardy. Jack Greenberg was sitting at his desk on the fourth floor of the NAACP’s Manhattan headquarters working on the Groveland writs when Franklin Williams strode straight past him and into Thurgood’s office. The door slammed shut. The women in the office braced themselves; they had witnessed the like of it before, a year earlier, when behind a closed door, in a bout of angry shouting, Williams had confronted Marshall about arguing Watts v. Indiana before the Supreme Court. Within minutes Greenberg heard “a lot of yelling and screaming and carrying on” about the Groveland Boys appeal. The Supreme Court might be hearing the case soon, and Williams wanted to be assured that he’d argue it in Washington as he did in Tallahassee. Only Marshall was not guaranteeing anything, a response that Williams interpreted as an undeserved vote of no confidence, and the disputation became even more heated. Fed up, restive, Williams wanted and demanded a straight answer. Was the Groveland case his?
    Marshall told him no, and Williams exploded with “I won’t take it!”
    “Well . . . ,” Marshall replied, with a glance toward the door to indicate that Williams was free to go.
    Williams ignored the gesture, holding his ground, and Marshall laid into him like, Marshall said later, a “Dutch uncle”: “Frank, I know what you’re shooting at. You’re shooting for either my job or Roy Wilkins’s, and so far as I’m concerned, you better start shooting for Roy’s because you can’t take mine. You’re not man enough.”
    Williams stormed out of Marshall’s office and into Walter White’s.
    It wasn’t just about Groveland. Thurgood knew that Williams had been complaining to White, before the executive secretary’s leave and since his return, that Marshall was “less than bold in his leadership,” particularly in the LDF’s assault on Plessy . White apparently agreed; in 1949, he himself had voiced his displeasure with Marshall’s not expressly combative tactics to the civil rights–friendly Judge Julius Waties Waring of South Carolina, before whom Marshall was bringing the school desegregation test case Briggs v. Elliott , the first of the five cases that would ultimately constitute Brown v. Board of Education . Waring, in turn, had arm-twisted Marshall into filing a more aggressive attack on the state’s segregation laws. The confrontation had “made Marshall look either incompetent or craven,” in Robert Carter’s opinion, when in fact he was “not dragging his feet in this” but merely “struggling to find the right way.” More important, in regard to the staff and operations of the LDF, Marshall believed that the source of his embarrassment over Briggs lay with Franklin Williams, who had used Walter White to influence Judge Waring.
    Once the indignant Williams had detailed his exchange with Marshall about the Groveland case for Walter White, the recently restored