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

thousand dollars annually, around fifteen hundred more than Marshall himself. When one of Marshall’s friends had inquired why he’d tossed out such inflated amounts, Marshall had responded that if any of those guys at the convention quoted those figures, they’d be “hooted off the floor.” And “sure enough,” Marshall later recalled, “the damn fools did.”
    The executive staff and majority delegates of the NAACP had in fact socked the communists good on virtually every resolution they’d brought to the convention floor in 1950. They walked out in frustration “and never came back,” said Marshall, whose management of the communist issue in Boston earned him an oral commendation from J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI director had “evidently had the meeting monitored”). “The communists brought it on themselves,” Walter White told reporters. “We have always kept the door open. But they alienated and infuriated the members by their clumsy efforts to take over the NAACP.”
    About the same time that the convention in Boston was ending, on June 25, 1950, communist North Korea invaded the Republic of Korea. Thus began the first significant military conflict of the Cold War. In 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, President Truman had, by executive order, desegregated the armed forces, but the U.S. Army had not been prepared then or since—and certainly not at a time of war—to effectively integrate blacks into daily military life. Racial prejudice and the negative stereotyping of black soldiers—their supposed fear of the dark, for one example—had a particularly demoralizing effect on the largely African-American 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, in part, it would appear, because the regiment’s white leadership blamed its own failures on the black soldiers in the field. When dozens of men from the 24th Infantry Regiment found themselves being court-martialed and convicted for cowardice and desertion, they began requesting NAACP representation. It struck Marshall as strange that the notable 24th, which, despite “staggering casualties,” had demonstrated exceptional valor in retaking the city of Yechon on July 20, 1950, had gone from “heroes to cowards, all within a few days.”
    Marshall decided he would have to get the facts for himself, in Korea, but he almost immediately encountered problems in his attempt to secure military clearance for his travel. Although the FBI approved Marshall’s travel plans expeditiously enough, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. troops in Korea, cited evidence from the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Thurgood Marshall had belonged to two legal guilds whose members were known to include communists. On that basis, the State Department denied Marshall entry to the Far East. Marshall countered by appealing to President Truman, and the White House pressured MacArthur to withdraw his objections. Marshall arrived in Tokyo on January 14, 1951. He spent weeks there, interviewing blacks who’d been imprisoned at the Tokyo stockade, before proceeding to Korea. There, Marshall had to hunt down the military court’s records of the “so-called trials,” which he eventually found in a warehouse near Tejon. The transcripts were astonishing. In hearings that lasted mere minutes, men had been sentenced to life imprisonment. One man—Leon Gilbert, a black lieutenant—had even received a death penalty, for being absent in the presence of the enemy: to Marshall’s mind, a highly suspect charge, given the testimony of two medical officers that Gilbert had not gone AWOL but had been “in a base hospital.”
    To track down witnesses, Marshall traveled to the front lines. “There was so much sniper fire that we couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a buddy,” Marshall recalled, “and then both of us had to take rifles.” On one occasion, he was walking with a group of soldiers and his escort, Colonel D. D. Martin, when the sound of a rifle pop and the whish-crack of a bullet overhead sent the men scrambling for their lives into a nearby ditch. “Where are you, Marshall?” the colonel shouted in alarm; in an uncharacteristically small voice came the reply: “Are you kiddin’? I’m under you.”
    Marshall may have found humor under fire, but he found nothing amusing about the Jim Crow discrimination he witnessed among the armed forces in Korea and Japan. “What happened over there is that they had this big withdrawal, and