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

the records show that that was just [the] damnedest retreat you’ve ever seen,” Marshall said. “They were running, ducking—I mean, it was awful. And they had to stop it. And the only way to stop it was to pick a unit, and court-martial them and make examples of them, and here was this Negro unit. So that’s the one they grabbed.”
    Marshall eventually did meet with General MacArthur, whom he characterized as being “as biased as any person I’ve run across.” Apparently staunch in his conviction that blacks as a race were “inferior,” the general had no black soldiers in the honor guard protecting him—had none in his entire headquarters, in fact—“not even in the band,” Marshall noted, “and I assume that there are some Negroes who can play instruments.” On MacArthur, who failed to follow, or simply ignored, Truman’s order to desegregate the troops, Marshall laid the blame for the “ramrod justice” in Korea, even as he reminded the general and his staff that “the United States Air Force took just one day to end segregation. They gave a single order, and the Air Force is now an integrated, American body of men using the best efficiency and skill each man can provide in his country’s service.”
    Ultimately, Marshall managed to have the sentences on many of the black GIs in Korea reduced, and he successfully lobbied President Truman to commute Lieutenant Leon Gilbert’s death sentence to time served. In that the courts-martial and convictions of the 24th’s black infantrymen so clearly demonstrated racial bias, Marshall was careful to point out that the Korean War was a battle against communism and not a war between the races. “The Red Koreans and Chinese bayoneted black as well as whites,” Marshall said, adding that anyone who signed petitions for communists claiming to represent black GIs in Korea were “dupes or dopes.”
    In some of the GI cases Marshall determined that no injustice had been committed on grounds of race, such as one in which he concluded that the convicted soldier was “just a bad egg and is using the race question as a cover up for his misdoings.” With military as with civil cases, Marshall urged his staff to exercise caution in choosing which cases to represent, to look at the person beyond the color. It was a principle Marshall had established early in his legal career at the NAACP, and one he would follow for nearly a quarter century. “My dad told me way back”—way back being when young Thurgood was growing up in Baltimore—“that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Some lessons you don’t forget.

CHAPTER 14: THIS IS A RAPE CASE

    From left to right: Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Franklin Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Alex Akerman, James Nabrit Jr., and Robert Carter, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court following the March 9, 1951, argument of the Groveland Boys case. ( Courtesy of The Crisis magazine )
    S HE ARRIVED IN Lake County on a Greyhound bus on July 24, 1950. First thing she did, she called the Baptist minister in Leesburg: she’d be needing accommodations for a few days and maybe he could direct her to some parishioners with a room to rent? She found a place, at a home on Main Street, close by the filling station where Curtis Howard was working the night that Willie Padgett showed up after he’d been assaulted, so he’d said, and his wife had been abducted by four black men.
    In her mid-twenties, wearing a plain farm dress and lugging the suitcase she’d packed with clothes, stationery, and a Bible, she introduced herself to the woman of the house on Main Street as L. B. De Forest; only that wasn’t her real name. She told the woman and everyone else she met in Lake County that she was looking to buy a house with a small orange grove; that wasn’t true, either. She’d come to the Bay Lake area foremost to cultivate a relationship with Norma Padgett, and through that acquaintanceship to uncover evidence that might aid the Groveland Boys case should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Lake County’s verdict. Miss De Forest was strongly opposed to capital punishment, and she was also convinced that the Groveland Boys had been victims of institutionalized injustice. Once the young woman’s intentions on her visit to Lake County had become clear, Judge Truman Futch would tell reporters that a “Communist agent . . . had been sent into Lake