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

wreckage; they photographed footprints in the grove; they gathered Moore’s paperwork, which had been scattered everywhere by the explosion. By the time the morning sun had burned off what remained of the fog, mourners had begun to congregate in front of the Moores’ cordoned-off house. They’d number more than a thousand by day’s end, and many of them had traveled on foot. They’d all known Harry T. Moore, either through voter registration drives or by his NAACP work. They talked; they conjectured; they wondered why anyone would want to harm the nigh-saintly Mr. Moore. Deputy Clyde Bates attended to the “general talk,” and the consensus, he said, linked the killing of Harry Moore to the Groveland case.
    At one point, while mourners paid their respects to Moore before a makeshift shrine—a stack of shattered planks that had been the front porch—a young black boy, who had crawled under the house, was beating the underside of the first floor with a stick. He caught the eye, or ear, of Special Agent Robert Nischwitz of the FBI, who asked the boy what he was doing under there. “Trying to scare the rats away” was the boy’s reply, in which Nischwitz found an apt metaphor for the situation in Mims. “Certain” that the Klan was responsible for the blast when he had arrived at the scene, the agent noted that Klansmen, too, “were all over the place, like rats.” Like rats, they’d have to be beaten out of hiding.
    Harriette Moore, meanwhile, remained in shock at Fernald-Laughton. She had begun to regain the strength to talk, but Dr. Starke worried that she might not survive the severe internal injuries she had suffered. The next week would be crucial; the doctor gave her a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. When Harriette was informed that her husband was dead, however, her mood darkened. She let go of hope. “There isn’t much left to fight back for,” she told a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel . “My home is wrecked. My children are grown up. They don’t need me. Others can carry on.” Asked her thoughts as to who might have committed the bombing, Harriette replied, “I have a couple of ideas who might have done it, but when people do those kinds of things they have someone else do it.”
    On the morning after the blast, the New York Times ran a front-page story, “Bombing Kills Negro Leader,” that stated plainly what many Floridians—and perhaps Harriette Moore—thought when it linked Harry Moore’s murder to Willis McCall in its lead paragraph:
    MIMS, FLA., Dec. 26—A Negro crusader who led a campaign to prosecute a white Sheriff for shooting two handcuffed Negroes was killed last night and his wife was seriously injured by a bomb blast beneath their bedroom. Harry T. Moore, 46 years old, . . . was the third Negro to die in the state by violence believed resulting from the 1949 Groveland rape case.
    The Washington Post made the link between the killing and the sheriff even plainer in an editorial titled “Terror in Florida,” which stated, “When state officers flout the law, it can be scarcely surprising that the lynch spirit should spread.”
    Harry T. Moore became the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States when he was killed on Christmas night in 1951. Shortly after the bombing Eleanor Roosevelt warned, “That kind of violent incident will be spread all over every country in the world, and the harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold.” Indeed, stories in newspapers as far off as Asia and Africa reported the “violent incident,” and editorials in the world’s most influential newspapers condemned it.
    Moore’s killing unsettled Thurgood Marshall profoundly. In his travels across the South his hosts always attended to his safety in his comings and goings to court, on his social visits, and even in his sleep. Although in conversation he generally downplayed the danger and his fear, so as not to worry his family and associates, in a statement he made in 1951 he admitted to the terror he felt every time he set foot in the hostile environment of the South. “I can testify,” he said, “there’s times when you’re scared to death. But you can’t admit it; you just have to lie like hell to yourself. Otherwise, you’ll start looking under the bed at night.” Marshall could empathetically imagine, then, the hostility, the menace—the “pressure”—that locals like Harry Moore bore on a daily basis, year in and year out,