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

about it. “I knew I was taking a chance,” he told the Post reporter, “but if I had gotten justice like I should have . . .” Irvin’s voice faded. He did not complete the thought, but before he was led back to his cell, he added, “What can I say? I’m not guilty. And I still believe I have a chance.” That chance did not materialize for weeks, for months, as he waited for word from the NAACP.
    By March 6, Florida law enforcement had made little progress in the investigation into the murders of Harry T. Moore and his wife, but in New York City the “NAACP’s Great Night” benefit to honor them was drawing fifteen thousand people into Madison Square Garden. Cohosted by Lena Horne and Oscar Hammerstein II, the gala featured some of the greatest names in the 1950s entertainment industry, among them Henry Fonda, Harry Belafonte, Tallulah Bankhead, Ed Sullivan, and Jimmy Durante as well as the NAACP’s own great Thurgood Marshall. Among the performances in the program were a dramatic sketch, “Toll the Liberty Bell,” which included a piece celebrating Moore’s life, and “The Ballad of Harry Moore,” a poem written by Langston Hughes and set to music by Sammy Heyward. During the intermission, with charisma and rhetoric, Franklin Williams, who had been flown in from the West Coast for the occasion, made a dramatic appeal for funds. The show raised more than fifty thousand dollars for the NAACP. Later in the year, Rosa Moore accepted the 1952 Spingarn Medal, which was being awarded posthumously to her son, Harry.
    March 1952 also took Thurgood Marshall back to the South, this time to Clarendon County in South Carolina, where he was continuing the battle against school segregation in Briggs v. Elliott . The case—built upon the fact that public spending on the education of white children totaled four times the amount allocated to blacks—had already been argued by Marshall in the U.S. Supreme Court, where it had been vacated and remanded to a three-judge panel in federal district court in South Carolina. It was progressing much the way Charlie Houston had said it would, and the possibility of public school integration in the South was moving closer to becoming a reality. Marshall, as Houston’s disciple and successor in the education cases that would ultimately constitute Brown v. Board , was feeling pressure from within his own ranks and, more negatively, from his opponents. For Clarendon County afforded Marshall no escape from the atmosphere of menace he had experienced the month before in the counties of central Florida. In the postwar forties in the Clarendon County courthouse, the NAACP had tried unsuccessfully to prevent the state of South Carolina from executing George Stinney Jr., a ninety-pound fourteen-year-old boy convicted of murder. Rushed to the electric chair within months of his conviction, Stinney became the youngest person ever to be executed in the United States in the twentieth century. Racist sentiment had scarcely abated by 1952; at the end of the Briggs proceedings in the same county courthouse Marshall was delivered a stern warning by one of the opposing white lawyers: “If you show your black ass in Clarendon County ever again, you’re a dead man.”
    In April, the executive board of the NAACP appointed Marshall head of the Legal Defense Fund, and the position of special counsel became director-counsel. With the change in Marshall’s title came a change in status for the LDF, which was established as a subsidiary corporation; so Walter White was no longer Thurgood Marshall’s boss. In the summer the LDF moved into its own offices three blocks away from NAACP headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The Times Square building offered the LDF lawyers more space, if also a seedy foyer and gated elevator that reeked of urine. The building apparently did not provide much security; on more than one occasion, the staff found themselves without typewriters, as with little difficulty burglars could scale the fire escapes and pry open the windows under the cover of night.
    Despite its tax-exempt status, the LDF was always short on funds. As Marshall said, “We could only move when we had the money,” and to raise money, the lawyers frequently went on the road on speaking tours. Jack Greenberg attributed the success of this funding program largely to Marshall’s “charisma,” which the director-counsel wedded to the charity of the audiences at the LDF speaking engagements. Greenberg