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

wanted to send you flowers, but we knew what you’d rather have.”
    The doctors at Harlem Hospital continued to run tests. Marshall, still unable to get out of bed, did not show any improvement. It had been determined that Marshall did not have a tumor, and eventually the doctors settled on a diagnosis of a mysterious, pneumonia-like virus—“Virus X,” as Marshall called it. The diagnosis afforded the thirty-eight-year-old little comfort. Just a few years before, Fats Waller, whose exaggerated facial expressions and mannerisms Marshall often affected while telling a story, had died of pneumonia on a train down south shortly before his own fortieth birthday. The doctors ordered that Marshall be confined to bed for six weeks without visitors, and if he then showed any improvement, he would be allowed to return to work, but “not more than three hours a day every other day.” After a month Marshall slowly began to regain some of his strength. He was no longer running a high fever, but his doctors refused to allow him to return to work. White visited him in mid-July and noted that Marshall was “far from out of the woods yet.” White also noticed that Marshall’s spirits nonetheless seemed to be rising, as he’d asked White to deliver a message to the NAACP staff: “Give them the bad news that I’ll live,” Marshall said.
    By early August, Marshall’s doctor, Louis T. Wright, the first black surgeon at Harlem Hospital and himself a Spingarn medalist in 1940, had “ordered” Marshall to leave the country; Wright felt that the lawyer would benefit from an extended leave, preferably in a tropical climate, where he could relax and recover. From NAACP donors, White secured five hundred dollars for Marshall’s medical bills, and sent Thurgood and Buster to stay with William H. Hastie, another fellow Spingarn medalist and one of Marshall’s former professors at Howard University Law School. Hastie had just been appointed the first black governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands by President Truman.
    Marshall rested for a week in the Virgin Islands. For no longer than that could he resist working on the proposed budget for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Against doctor’s orders, he was also on the phone each night with Looby so that they could discuss legal strategies and the day’s proceedings in the Columbia Race Riot case. He reported to White, however, that he was “taking it more than easy” and the only exercise he was getting was from losing money at poker, which “is no effort for me.”
    By mid-August Marshall had nearly recovered. Taking advantage of the excellent climate, he and Buster visited Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. “I will have a difficult job to persuade Buster to leave,” Marshall wrote to White. “I am not too anxious to leave myself, but I understand that my welcome is about worn out, so I better leave before being run out.” He told White not to pay attention to the “deliberate falsehoods” that Hastie had been spreading about Marshall’s “descent upon the Virgins,” despite the fact that White thought it would take a “month of steady explanation” to answer Hastie’s accusations.
    Months would pass before Marshall regained full strength, but he nevertheless returned to Columbia, despite his doctor’s warnings. In November he won in Tennessee, but more important, he survived not only a mysterious virus but also a lynching party. Walter White, in his autobiography A Man Called White , wrote, “It is doubtful whether any other trial in the history of America was ever conducted under more explosive conditions.” But White wrote those words in 1948, one year before Thurgood Marshall became involved in his most deadly and dramatic case ever. It would far surpass the Columbia Race Riot trials in its explosive conditions, and its consequences would have an impact on the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and its staff for decades to come.

CHAPTER 3: GET TO PUSHIN’

    Willie Padgett rests his foot against his 1940 Ford sedan as he shares a laugh with Deputy James Yates. ( Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images )
    N ORMA LEE WORE a pink farm dress on the worst night of her life.
    Blond and seventeen years old, she pushed the wedding ring back onto her finger; tossed a compact, powder, and perfume into her purse; and sauntered outside her daddy’s house to where Willie was waiting beside his run-down 1940 Ford. He opened the door for her and Willie’s eyes