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

justices cited several of Judge Futch’s lax rulings on prosecutor Jesse Hunter’s “irregular” and “improper” remarks, they deemed them to be essentially harmless errors; they thus did not find them significant enough to warrant reversal. One month later, Paul Perkins argued before the Florida Supreme Court for a stay of execution, and that, too, was denied, although the state court did grant the defense a ninety-day stay in which to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
    The defense team in New York was otherwise swamped that summer. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court were requiring more clarity in the five school segregation cases now included in Brown v. Board , and had ordered all five of them to be reargued in terms of the authors’ intent in drafting the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, so as to determine whether the abolishment of segregation in public schools fell under the powers of Congress or indeed of any federal agency. To build the case, Marshall enlisted more than two hundred lawyers and historians nationwide. He traveled up, down, and across the country to consult with them in marathon conferences, and when he returned to New York, where he met in seminar-style discussions with his LDF team of lawyers, prominent associates, and scholarly experts, he strove to keep the out-of-town attorneys and historians abreast of developments by telephone and telegraph. No one on Marshall’s legal staff took a vacation day that summer, or fall; secretaries not only worked double shifts but worked them six and seven days a week—everyone in the LDF offices was busy making history. Marshall himself seemed never to leave his desk. Disheveled, his tie loosened and top shirt buttons undone, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he might suggest, come the middle of the night, “Why don’t we take a fifteen minute break.” So the scholar John Hope Franklin, then of Howard University, remembered on one occasion when they had worked into the hours of the early morning, except that Franklin had left Marshall to his fifteen minutes in the office while he stole back to his room at the Algonquin Hotel and slept through what was left of the night. He found Marshall still at his desk the next morning.
    Marshall was relying upon historians like John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins University to address the Supreme Court’s concerns about desegregation and congressional powers by placing the rationale for Brown convincingly in a social and political context. The task, Marshall repeatedly reminded the historians, who were sometimes given to academic speculation regarding possible Court opinions, was solely to “present a case so persuasive that the Court would be compelled to rule in our favor.” To that end, Marshall had his LDF team introduce research from psychologist Kenneth Clark’s study of the effects of segregation on the mental attitudes of black children, as in his “doll test,” into the Brown v. Board of Education brief and summation. (Clark’s research confirmed what Marshall had himself concluded from conversations with black children, as when he’d ask boys what they wanted to be when they grew up and—heartbreakingly, to Marshall—even the brightest among them would reply, “I’m going to be a good butler” or “I hope I might be able to get in the post office.”) For months Marshall’s team worked and reworked the Brown brief. They incorporated the results of their legal research with those of the historians’ examination of political and social issues germane to the case; they supported arguments with sociological data and the evidence of Clark’s psychological studies. They produced, in 235 pages, a manifesto for equality, its language, depth, and persuasiveness exceeding all expectations, said Franklin. Another historian noted, “It deserves a place in the literature of advocacy.”
    Hours before day dawned on December 7, 1953, blacks were lining up outside the Supreme Court in the hope of witnessing history being made. The morning had broken cold when Thurgood Marshall arrived with his wife and mother, Buster and Norma, who were escorted to their reserved seats. Marshall sat in the well of the court. Before oral arguments began, he glanced over the team of NAACP lawyers who for months, for years, had worked assiduously on the five education cases in Brown v. Board of Education , and: “I realized there wasn’t a single one of them who