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

he can’t hide,” and in the eighth round, before the first television audience to witness a world heavyweight championship, Louis finally found Conn, landing a vicious right-uppercut, left-hook combination that sent the Pittsburgh fighter onto his back for the ten count.
    Ebony magazine kept an office at the Hotel Theresa, Walter White did his WLIB radio show there, and just across the street from the hotel, the black newspapers the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had offices. Marshall often met with reporters or addressed women’s groups at the hotel. In Theresa’s coffee shop he sometimes sat with Joe Louis, ate mushroom omelets, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bumpy Johnson, the notorious bookmaker for Madame St. Clair. But it was Marshall who commanded the attention of the staff. A waitress there remembered that “they treated him like a movie star.” She recalled, “He was so handsome in those days.” The waitress recalled, too, how Julia Scott, the manager of the coffee shop, used to wait on Marshall “because she was afraid we’d spill coffee on him or cause some embarrassing accident because we were so nervous in his presence. ‘You girls stop staring at Mr. Marshall,’ she’d say when he came in.”
    Despite the difficulties at home, Marshall was riding high in 1946. In May the thirty-seven-year-old attorney became the thirty-first Spingarn medalist, joining the likes of Wright, Robeson, DuBois, author and activist James Weldon Johnson, and the American contralto Marian Anderson as recipients of the esteemed award. Next to Wright, Marshall was the youngest person to receive the Spingarn Medal, conferred in recognition of his “distinguished service as a lawyer before the Supreme Court of the United States . . . particularly in the Texas Primary Case which conceivably may have more far reaching influence than any other act in the ending of disenfranchisement based upon race or color in the country.” In this 1944 case, Smith v. Allwright , involving an all-white primary, the U.S. Supreme Court justices voted 8–1 in Marshall’s favor, ruling that blacks “cannot be legally barred from voting in the Texas Democratic primaries.” One Spingarn Medal Award Committee member noted that Marshall’s work in the case “brought about the most beneficial results for the Negro since Emancipation.” Marshall was also cited for his attack on the Jim Crow travel system and unequal educational opportunities as well as for his battle to win for blacks “basic human rights and justice in the courts.”
    In May 1946 Walter White wrote a note to Marshall, informing him that because the company making the Spingarn Medal would be unable to create a new die in time for the June ceremony in Cincinnati, the NAACP would instead be presenting him with a replica gold-plated medal. “Lest you think we are trying to pull a fast one on you,” White went on to explain, the company would be casting a solid gold medal that Marshall would receive “as soon as it is delivered.” Marshall returned the note after writing a two-word response: “Oh yeah.”

    T HURGOOD MARSHALL SMOKED three packs of cigarettes a day.
    By mid-June of 1946, however, Marshall’s body was failing him. He was drinking steadily and not getting much sleep, and his constant travel to Columbia, Tennessee, where temperatures soared over a hundred degrees, had left him exhausted, with no time for exercise—not that he’d ever shown any interest in exercise. Nor did his preferred diet of fried food and red meat do him any favors. He was laughing less, talking in muted tones, and to friends and associates, he was not himself. Sensing something might be amiss with his health, Marshall arranged NAACP staff participation in the Blue Cross Hospitalization Plan, which, he said, at “very reasonable rates” would relieve employees of “that mental worry of wondering where the money is coming from to meet the bills.”
    Two weeks later, more than seven hundred delegates joined thousands of members in Cincinnati for the NAACP’s thirty-seventh annual conference, at which, on the closing night, Marshall would receive the Spingarn Medal. Onstage, Marshall was seated beside Joe Louis and Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the famous Tuskegee airman. Next to Louis, Marshall looked gaunt and run-down in his dark pinstripe suit and spectator shoes: a stark contrast to the smiling, muscular fighter. Still, Marshall managed to rise to the