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

hadn’t been touched by Charlie Houston. Either taught by him, or friendly with him, or guided in their careers by him. Every one of them, including me.” To Charlie Houston, his mentor and friend, Marshall might have dedicated this day—their day—in court.
    For three days Marshall and his lawyers argued Brown ; they were not expecting a decision until the spring. In January 1954, however, they did have word from the Supreme Court regarding another matter: Walter Irvin’s appeal had been denied; the Court had declined to hear the Groveland case. Jack Greenberg had thought the illegal search and seizure of Irvin’s pants and shoes might have supported a reversal of the verdict (it would have seven years later, when the Court determined that a defendant could not be convicted by illegally obtained evidence), had not Dellia Irvin testified that she had retrieved the evidence in question and given it to Deputy James Yates. Greenberg filed a petition for rehearing the Groveland case , which the Court also denied. Irvin’s lawyers had no further judicial recourse to pursue. They could only focus now on staying the date of Walter Irvin’s execution.
    The Supreme Court, Marshall knew better than most, could be wildly unpredictable, especially in criminal cases. He had argued thirty-two cases before the Court, and though he had lost only three decisions over his career, two of them had been death penalty cases. The third had been the 1944 Lyons v. Oklahoma case, in which the black sharecropper W. D. Lyons confessed to murder after being repeatedly beaten and then presented with a pan of the infant victim’s charred bones. Marshall had prepared the brief for the case with William Hastie, and Marshall himself had established the precedent regarding coerced confessions in criminal trials four years earlier, when he had argued Chambers v. Florida before the Supreme Court. He had every reason to believe he stood on solid ground for a reversal. Yet the Court had upheld Lyons’s conviction. There was speculation that Justice William O. Douglas, who had till then consistently voted to reverse in coerced confession cases, might have cast his vote to let the conviction stand because it was possible that he might be chosen to be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate and he wanted, therefore, not to offend the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Or, as the Supreme Court had done in cases before Lyons , it might have upheld the Oklahoma court’s decision to credit the state for the progress it had made in the conduct of criminal trials involving race. After all, the defendant had not been rushed to trial, he had not been sentenced to death, and he had certainly been represented by competent counsel. Nonetheless, Marshall found the Court’s decision to be wrongheaded. Over the next decade, he continued to pressure the state for Lyons’s early parole. He also corresponded with Lyons in prison and sent Lyons money from his own wallet.
    On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in the most important civil rights case of the twentieth century. The Court had found, just as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had observed on their tour of the South twenty years earlier, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” State laws that established separate public schools for blacks and whites were thus ruled unconstitutional, in violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
    The ruling was just cause for celebration in the LDF’s New York offices. Champagne flowed. The staff was boisterous; the din and laughter were thunderous. Marshall playfully chided Walter White for taking the credit for the abolishment of segregation in public schools. The party moved on to the Blue Ribbon, where lawyers and staff and consultants toasted each other and Marshall with dark beer as they shared platters of pigs’ knuckles with their director-counsel. Thurgood’s wife did not attend—she’d been ill and sometimes bedridden the past few months with chest pains and a persistent viral infection in the lungs—and in the early morning hours, when the party was breaking up, more than one of Marshall’s colleagues noticed that he had left the Blue Ribbon with Cecilia Suyat, Gloster Current’s secretary. “Thurgood was very discreet about his affairs,” said John Aubrey Davis, an academic researcher who had worked on Brown . “There was never an