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

occasion. Standing before his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, he made it clear that the medal was “an award coming to one person in recognition of the work of a large group of lawyers who have always worked together in a spirit of wholehearted co-operation and without any hope of reward other than that of seeing a job done.” After his acceptance speech Marshall introduced the lawyers he’d been working with on the Columbia case, Z. Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver, as well as Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, whose broken radio had started the riots back in February. The case had exhausted Marshall, and listening to Mrs. Stephenson onstage as she told her story reminded him of the oppressive heat and stress he had been enduring. Indeed, he’d just come from Columbia, where he’d been “carrying around a fever ranging from 103 to 104 degrees” over the last week, and the fever had not abated in Cincinnati. It was so bad, Marshall said, that he “was only able to be out of bed two or three hours a day.”
    After the convention, when Marshall returned to New York, he could not get out of bed at all. Seeing his condition as critical and even “grave,” Walter White was worried. He wanted to avoid sending Marshall to Harlem Hospital—a place, he noted, that had earned such a reputation for the “callous and inadequate treatment” of black patients that it inspired a folk saying: “When any member of your family goes to Harlem Hospital, telephone the undertaker.” White thus reached out to some of his society friends and associates in an attempt to have Marshall admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital. It was not to be. Citing red tape, overcrowded conditions, and the inability to “build a room” for Marshall on such short notice as the excuses offered by the hospital, White concluded that Marshall, in his hour of need, was not admitted because of his race.
    So it was that Marshall found himself in Ward 2D at Harlem Hospital, where the doctors could not figure out the cause of his illness. They first suspected a tumor, or “cancer of the lung,” and White, alarmed at the critical nature of Marshall’s prognosis, notified the NAACP’s board of directors that the lawyer’s condition was “due solely to the fact that he has worked himself almost to death without any thought of self.”
    Marshall had hoped to keep the news of his admission to Harlem Hospital quiet, but it wasn’t possible, especially when the hallways began to buzz over the large plant and cards that Marshall had received from Eleanor Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was First Lady, she had been drawn to the cause of racial justice, and as a board member and activist for the NAACP, she had lobbied her husband on many race-related issues from civil rights to the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his part, was less than enthralled with his wife’s alliance with the NAACP, and the White House attempted to maintain a distance between the president and Eleanor’s activism on behalf of blacks. Marshall himself had felt the president’s chill when Attorney General Francis Biddle phoned FDR to discuss the NAACP’s involvement in a race case in Virginia. At Biddle’s instruction, Marshall picked up an extension phone to listen in, only to hear FDR exclaim, “I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor’s niggers. Call me one more time and you are fired.” Marshall later recalled, “The President only said ‘nigger’ once, but once was enough for me.”
    Eleanor Roosevelt nonetheless continued her work with the NAACP during and after the FDR administration. Appalled by the riots in Columbia, Tennessee, she worked closely with Marshall to get a reluctant Justice Department involved. A plant and cards simply betokened her esteem and admiration for a man at the front lines in the country’s civil rights battle. Roosevelt, however, wasn’t the only one who had learned that Marshall had checked into Harlem Hospital. Marshall’s wife, Buster, was at home in Sugar Hill one day in July when a Railway Express man showed up at the apartment on Edgecombe Avenue with a package from the men Marshall was defending in the Tennessee riot case. “You know,” the deliveryman told Buster, “I’m from Tennessee, and from the smell I know what’s in here, and I would sure like to have some of it.” Inside the box was a “twenty-pound, country-cured ham” and a letter that read, “Dear lawyer . . . The wives all