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

eligible and available for grand jury service.” As the state attorney in Lake County had selected a grand jury in virtually the same manner, Greenberg made the Cassell ruling the first point in his petition. Closed though the mind of the Florida Supreme Court might have been to the argument, the U.S. Supreme Court, Greenberg noted, “would not be likely to treat its own precedent so cavalierly.”
    Further, in studying the court records, Greenberg was pleased to discover that Williams and Akerman had filed the proper motions with the trial judge in a timely fashion. They had also properly raised constitutional objections over the unfair trial atmosphere in Lake County when filing their motion for a change of venue. While Williams and Akerman themselves may have felt that they were being steamrollered by Jesse Hunter and Truman Futch during the proceedings and trial, what Greenberg felt after reviewing the transcripts and affidavits was confidence that the Groveland Boys might very well prevail at the appellate level.
    Greenberg’s confidence was not misplaced. On November 27, 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Groveland Boys case. The young attorney immediately began working on the brief, in which he would include “a number of old English cases from the 1700s on change of venue, because Justice Frankfurter liked English precedents.”

    E ARLY IN THE summer of 1950, at the NAACP’s forty-first annual convention, in Boston, Marshall announced to the delegates, “The complete destruction of all segregation is now in sight. . . . We are going to insist on non-segregation in American public education from top to bottom—from law school to kindergarten.” To achieve this far-reaching goal in all (then) forty-eight states without unnecessary political distractions, Marshall and the board of the NAACP found it necessary to pass and adopt an anticommunist resolution, which directed the organization’s leaders to “eradicate Communists from its branch units.” The irony of the resolution was not lost on the NAACP itself; an article in its magazine, the Crisis , later pointed out, “It was one of the great ironies of the era that the nation’s oldest civil rights organization discriminated against individuals on the basis of their political beliefs and affiliation.” Yet, ever since the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, the rift had widened between communists and NAACP executives who believed that the “radicals had been extremely severe and frequently unfair in their attempts to discredit the NAACP.”
    Marshall took special delight in trumping the political maneuvers of the NAACP’s communist wing. At the annual convention in Los Angeles in 1949, the communist faction of the NAACP had put forth a resolution to stop the Marshall Plan, in which General George C. Marshall, after touring postwar Europe, proposed massive U.S. funding to jump-start the European economy and thereby prevent the spread of communism. Misguided in their conviction that the communists had set out to defeat Thurgood Marshall’s plans, delegates at the convention were soon protesting the measure: “They’re in there, the Commies are fighting, they’re trying to get rid of our lawyer!” the offended delegates shouted. “They’re voting against the Marshall Plan!” Marshall’s plans got passed pretty easily that year.
    The next year in Boston, Marshall could again boast, “we socked them good,” after an unsuccessful attempt by the communist faction at the convention to weaken the NAACP’s leadership by spreading rumors that vastly inflated the salaries of the LDF lawyers and the executive staff—in part with Marshall’s collaboration. For Marshall had been on his way to church with some friends when he’d been spotted by a group of communists who’d wanted to know about “all this money that you and Walter and Roy make.” Marshall had replied that as Wilkins, he, and White earned all that money, they deserved it, but he had not appeared to be willing to tell the agitators just how much “it” was. Then he’d paused a moment, as if to consider the matter further, and added, with a touch of glee in his mischief, “Of course, I’ll tell you. If you’re a member of the NAACP, you’re entitled to know . . . fifty-five thousand dollars plus expenses.” Pressed further as to Walter White’s take, Marshall had estimated “around eighty,” although he knew that White was drawing only about ten