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

responsibilities to his protégé. With Houston set to leave in July 1938, Marshall was about to be handed control of the NAACP’s legal office. He’d receive a $200 raise, so he’d now be earning $2,600 per year. “How much is that a week?” a frugal Buster wanted to know.
    In the days before Houston departed, he and Marshall went for a walk outside the office. The two could not have been more different. Houston was serious and tightly wound, whereas Marshall was folksy, familiar, and always laughing. But they shared a commitment to hard work and thorough preparation, and Houston wanted Marshall to know that he’d continue to counsel and support his former student. Houston warned Thurgood about the difficulties of working under Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP. White wasn’t a lawyer, but he liked to think he was at times, and he didn’t shy away from voicing opinions on legal strategies. White also had an ego, and Houston wanted Marshall to know that it would probably take some time before he’d see a reasonable salary that was worthy of the work he’d be doing. “You know how much money you’re making,” Houston said. Marshall just nodded.
    “And you can imagine how much money I make. And I still say you have more goddamn fun than I do.”
    With that, Marshall let out one of his hearty, high-pitched laughs. “Ain’t no question about that!” he said.
    Not long after Marshall’s promotion, Buster realized that the tiny flat on 149th Street wasn’t going to do for the couple anymore—not with her husband’s newfound social status. She began asking around, talking to some of the other NAACP wives, and before long she had her sights set high on the bluff.

    O N THE WAY home from Penn Station after another grueling trip south, Marshall sat in the DeSoto, eyeing the wide sidewalks in front of the Super Food Markets and Harlem tenements with “To Be Demolished” signs posted by the New York City Housing Authority, as the taxi approached Sugar Hill. In this renowned neighborhood of Harlem, Marshall lived alongside the successful artists, intellectual elites, and wealthy blacks who, pursuing their dream of the “Sweet Life,” had gravitated there during the Renaissance. If Harlem was the black capital of America, Sugar Hill was its cultural soul. It contained “perhaps the most modern and beautiful residential areas for Negroes in black America,” and it was home to musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne, the writer Ralph Ellison, and actor Paul Robeson. At the heart of Sugar Hill was 409 Edgecombe Avenue, a thirteen-story neo-Georgian building on Coogan’s Bluff that towered over the town houses and tenements of Harlem. The poet Langston Hughes spoke of “two Harlems,” and he clearly had 409 Edgecombe in mind when he wrote of those who “live on that attractive rise of bluff . . . where the plumbing really works and the ceilings are high and airy.” Its residents included Aaron Douglas, the Kansas-born, Parisian-trained artist who became known as the “father of black American art”; W. E. B. DuBois, author and civil rights activist; and Walter White, Marshall’s boss. A 1947 issue of Ebony magazine commented that the building attracted so many black elites “that legend, only slightly exaggerated, says bombing 409 would wipe out Negro leadership for the next 20 years.”
    One resident at 409 had leadership skills that were disputed by no one, though she was not whom DuBois had in mind when he wrote of the exceptional “talented tenth” who would save the Negro race. Madame Stephanie St. Clair, known to most as “Queenie,” was purported to be the Numbers Queen of Harlem and, at one point, the richest black woman in America. In New York by way of Martinique, Madame St. Clair—abrasive, unsmiling, and tough as nails—had managed to withstand the violent efforts of Dutch Schultz and any other mobsters who’d tried to horn in on her gambling operations and territory.
    The building had its share of society parties hosted by Gladys and Walter White—their thirteenth-floor apartment was called “the White House of Harlem”—and at times it fostered a fraternity atmosphere. The Baltimore couple fitted right in. At one of White’s parties, Marshall couldn’t stop laughing as he watched his new friend, world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, chase the actress Tallulah Bankhead as she ran screaming down the hallways of 409 with the