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

fighter in close pursuit. For the most part, however, and in stark contrast to the life he lived away from home, Thurgood Marshall’s life at 409 was a quiet one.
    On weekends, the young Marshalls attended upscale Harlem supper clubs like Happy Rhone’s Paradise on 143rd Street and Lenox, the “NAACP’s unofficial after-hours headquarters,” where the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement during World War II held court with black intellectuals, literati, and entertainers. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and the 1941 winner of the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s prestigious award “for the highest achievement of an American Negro,” was another of Marshall’s “sassiety” Harlem neighbors who moved in the same circle at the time. Thurgood also socialized with a friend from his college days at Lincoln University, Langston Hughes, who had come to New York years before and was one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Like many intellectuals and activists who joined the NAACP’s fight for equal rights, both Wright and Hughes were drawn to communism, and for decades Marshall had to navigate the complex relationship between communist supporters in the Civil Rights Congress—a communist front organization dedicated to civil liberties—and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which, Marshall knew, could destroy the NAACP with just a few well-timed words during the Red Scare.
    The Marshalls eventually settled on a modest one-bedroom flat on the ninth floor at 409 Edgecombe, where they mostly socialized on weekends with a couple they knew from their college days—eating and drinking together late into the night, and playing card games. (They called their little group “the Pokenos,” after the card game Po-Ke-No.) With Thurgood traveling so frequently and often being gone for long stretches, Buster kept herself busy with social affairs and Urban League activities in Harlem. In many ways they were living a dream life—a young, attractive, educated couple with a desirable place to call home in the greatest city on earth. In private, however, the Marshalls were struggling with disappointments. Buster had miscarried again. Married for more than a decade, she’d been unable to carry a baby to term, and sadness was turning to frustration and grief.
    “Buster had a weak uterus,” said Marshall’s secretary, Alice Stovall, adding that Buster had become pregnant “quite a few times because she said she knew how much Thurgood wanted children.” Everyone around them had children, it seemed, and Buster’s sense of self-worth had become wedded to her fertility problems and the notion that she was disappointing her husband. She was unable to shake the sadness that enveloped her.
    Thurgood compartmentalized the pain and occupied himself increasingly with work and travel. On the rare mornings when he was in New York, he’d ride the elevator down to the white-tiled lobby, where Nathan the doorman would hold open the tall glass doors as Marshall stepped onto Edgecombe Avenue. High on Coogan’s Bluff, Marshall could look out over the Harlem River to Yankee Stadium on his way to work. More impressive, though, was the view of the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants baseball team played their home games. The stadium hosted the first game of the 1946 Negro World Series, in which the Kansas City Monarchs beat the Newark Eagles, 2–1. They did so without their former star, Jackie Robinson, who had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers before the season and was lighting up the International League with the Montreal Royals in preparation for his 1947 debut, when he would break baseball’s color line by becoming the first black to play in America’s major leagues. In that 1947 season, when Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey wanted a black lawyer to help put Robinson’s financial affairs in order, he sent the rookie to Thurgood Marshall.
    Before heading downtown to the NAACP offices, Marshall would stride past Colonial Park and down Seventh Avenue to the Hotel Theresa at 125th Street, the “social capital of Negro America.” On June 19, 1946, nearly a quarter million people turned out for a parade there on 125th Street to wish Joe Louis luck in his rematch that evening with Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium. Louis was greeted all along 125th Street with music, floats, honking horns, and large signs that read, “Good Luck, Joe.” Before the fight, Louis famously said of the lighter Conn, “He can run, but