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

understated way, “even if it costs me my life. Jesus Christ lost his life doing what he thought was right. And I believe the Lord intended for me to do this work for the colored race. I may live to be a ripe old age or I may be killed tomorrow, or next month, or perhaps never, but I intend to do this until the day I die.”

CHAPTER 18: ALL OVER THE PLACE, LIKE RATS

    ( Federal Bureau of Investigation )
    A T NINE O’CLOCK on Christmas night of 1951, a dense ground fog had begun to settle in the orange groves of Mims. Harry T. Moore cranked the engine of his sedan. The Moores—Harry; his mother, Rosa; his wife, Harriette; and their daughter Peaches—had enjoyed a quiet holiday dinner with family and friends at the house of Harriette’s brother, Arnold Simms. Moore edged his car slowly onto Old Dixie Highway, the headlights no help in the fog. Still, in a few minutes, he’d driven the short distance, several hundred yards, home.
    The Ford parked, Harry helped his seventy-one-year-old mother out of the car and walked her to the house; Harriette and Peaches trailed behind. Harry lingered for a moment, alone, on the porch, in the fog, his thoughts lost in the surreal atmosphere of the night. Across the grove another man stood quiet, too, in the fog, beneath an orange tree, his eyes trained on a vague, diffuse glow.
    The light inside the house seemed all the brighter when Harry joined his family in the living room. The day had tired Harriette, but before she went to bed, her husband insisted, they had more than Christmas to celebrate. It was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, after all; they should at least have some cake.
    Rosa laid a fruitcake on the oak dining table. Harry was about to cut the first slice when Harriette gently placed her hand over his—they shared a smile, as if posing for a wedding portrait—and together they ceremoniously pressed the knife into the cake. After the cake, when Harriette did retire, Harry sat with his mother at the table as he reminisced about his wedding (a modest affair in the home of a doctor in Cocoa, with only a handful of people in attendance), his youth, his wife, their little girls. Shortly after 10 p.m. Rosa, too, retired; as she headed to the guest room at the back of the house, she reminded Harry to send Peaches to bed and turn off the lights.
    Peaches had fallen asleep on the settee in the living room. Harry nudged her awake, and with some comic books in hand, she said good night. Harry turned off the lights behind her.
    Rosa was drifting toward sleep when she heard the footsteps. “Is that you, Harry?” she asked. As he ducked into the bathroom, Harry answered her: “Yes, Mamma, that’s me.”
    The house was nearly dark. Peaches had given up reading for sleeping by the time Harry had lain down beside his wife. He switched off the bedroom light. No hazy glow hovered any longer in the fog outside. The man waiting beneath the orange tree had a moment to brace himself and steady his hands for the task. It was 10:20 p.m.
    The force of the blast split the house at its seams. It lifted the chimney into the air. It blew out every window; it splintered the front porch. It shredded the floorboards in Harry and Harriette’s bedroom, and propelled the back of a chair through the ceiling into the attic. The explosion roused the town of Titusville four miles away.
    Only the chimney settled back down in place at the Moores’ house in Mims. Jolted by the blast, Peaches had screamed out for her mother, to no response, and then for her grandmother. Groggy, disoriented, Rosa stepped into the room.
    “Grandma, are you hurt?” Peaches asked.
    “No, are you?”
    “No,” Peaches answered.
    Then Rosa heard the groans. She and Peaches made their way to the Moores’ bedroom at the front of the house. Peaches fiddled with the switch of a lamp in the dining room; it worked, and in its light, she and her grandmother could barely make out, in the rubble of the bedroom, on the floor, under the debris, the figures of Harry and Harriette. Their bedspring and mattress had been cast up against the wall.
    “Evangeline . . . Evangeline . . .” Harriette was mumbling repeatedly: Evangeline who in two days was planning to join her family for further celebrations in Mims.
    When Rosa first stepped into the room her foot sank into the floorboard just inside the door. She and Peaches managed between them to pull a bookcase off Harriette, but they lacked the physical strength to deal