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

himself delivered between ten and twenty fund-raising speeches every month in the two years leading up to Brown in 1954, and Marshall did more. Apparent to them, as they prepared the appeals on behalf of Walter Irvin, was the especial “fund-raising and organizing potential” of the Groveland case. The story of Walter Irvin and the Groveland Boys riveted audiences across the country. On one occasion, in Richmond, Virginia, Greenberg simply read the statement given by Irvin from his hospital bed after he’d been shot by Sheriff McCall and his deputy; it was punctuated by gasps and sobs among the fifteen hundred people in the audience. That Greenberg had to ad-lib when he realized a page was missing from the text hardly mattered. The audience was in every way generous. Ultimately, the Groveland Boys story accounted for the LDF’s recovery of a thirty-nine-thousand-dollar shortfall, but not from the usual wealthy donors like Marshall Field III or from the significant annual donations that Thurgood was able to garner from associations like the black Masonic order, the Prince Hall Masons. Rather, it was collected from “black people of no great means” moved by a tale of cumulative injustice and heroic perseverance.
    Throughout the summer and fall of 1952, legal setbacks would continue to impede LDF progress on Walter Irvin’s case; his situation would become more desperate. Marshall had counted more than twenty errors in the prosecution of the second Groveland trial, and he had retained Alex Akerman and Paul Perkins to handle the appeals. Marshall and his team of lawyers had decided first to ask an established, well-connected Jacksonville lawyer to file an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, petition to explore the legality of procedure when a law enforcement officer kills a witness for a defendant in a capital case. In November 1952, the Florida Supreme Court denied the petition. Greenberg continued preparing the appeals while at the same time writing the first draft of the Brown brief.
    After the Thanksgiving weekend, Marshall checked into Washington’s Statler Hotel; it was the first time that he had visited the nation’s capital and not been required by law to stay in Jim Crow accommodations. He turned his suite into a war room in advance of his sixteenth appearance before the Supreme Court. Over the next ten days the most prominent black lawyers in the nation would be marching in and out of Marshall’s suite as they helped him prepare for battle in Briggs v. Elliott . He was edgy, irritable; he had been for months. “He’s aged so in the past five years,” his wife, Buster, had noted around the time he was working on the retrial in the Groveland Boys case. “His disposition’s changed—he’s nervous now where he used to be calm. This work is taking its toll of him. You know, it’s a discouraging job he’s set himself.” William Hastie, who had hosted the Marshalls in the Virgin Islands when Thurgood was recovering from his mysterious “Virus X” in 1946, noticed that the lawyer, once again, appeared to be exhausted “beyond the limits of the human anatomy.”
    On December 9, Marshall argued Briggs v. Elliott before the U.S. Supreme Court. Near the end of his argument—to Greenberg’s surprise, for in Florida he had seen Jesse Hunter use the same ploy—Marshall flashed the secret Masonic distress signal to his fellow Mason, Justice Robert Jackson, who responded in kind. Marshall returned to his seat with a grin.
    That same December day, in South Florida, regarding the Carver Village bombings in Miami, a federal grand jury indicted three Ku Klux Klan members for lying under oath to both the FBI and the grand jury. Having previously also indicted seven Klansmen for perjury in the matter of the high-speed chase that ran two NAACP lawyers and two black reporters out of Lake County, the FBI claimed to be making progress against KKK violence in Florida. The murders of Harry T. Moore and his wife, however, remained unsolved.
    The months had passed into another year for Walter Irvin on death row. Depressed as he was for a want of reading material and a radio in his cell, he still believed in the chance that lay with Thurgood Marshall working on his appeal. Fellow inmates on death row meanwhile continued to take their last walk down the corridor to the electric chair. In June 1953, as Marshall had expected, the Florida Supreme Court reaffirmed the Marion County verdict of February 14, 1952. While the