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

grant a review of Irvin’s conviction. In the forty-five days between then and January 4, when Governor-elect LeRoy Collins took office, Marshall had no doubt that Governor Charley Johns would deliver Irvin to the electric chair the first chance he got. Nor did Marshall doubt that if he could somehow stretch out the judicial process until Johns had vacated the statehouse in Tallahassee, the likelihood that he could rescue Irvin from execution would increase significantly.
    An affable man at forty-five, the Tallahassee lawyer LeRoy Collins came from “Old Florida,” and like most Southern politicians, he condemned the Brown decision. Even though Marshall did not yet know what to expect from Collins, he knew too well where Johns stood. On November 20, Marshall made a fourth appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to review Irvin’s conviction. Florida had thirty days to reply, at which time the Court would decide whether to hear the case for argument and opinion. Marshall had reset the clock ticking off the time between Irvin and the electric chair. Better yet, he had gotten Charley Johns’s hand off the switch.
    Another clock was ticking at 409 Edgecombe. Buster came home from the hospital for Thanksgiving. She and the doctors had kept the bad news from Thurgood, but time now was short. The chest pains, the virus: it was cancer. Remorseful, reproaching himself for the constant travel, the cases, the endless hours at the LDF offices, the indiscretions, Marshall took a leave of absence from the NAACP. He barricaded himself in the apartment, and at Buster’s bedside, attentive and tender, Thurgood spent the final weeks in the quarter century of their marriage: a marriage that may have years ago lost its intimacy but that had never wanted for love. Suffering with her, as if he could suffer for her, Thurgood pined. His body seemed to be mirroring hers. “He had become cadaverous,” Jack Greenberg observed on one of Marshall’s rare visits at the office. In midwinter, on February 11, 1955, her forty-fourth birthday, Vivian “Buster” Burey left Marshall. It had been nearly ten years ago that she had traveled with Thurgood to the Virgin Islands when he was recuperating from his mysterious illness. Marshall had not taken a vacation since. The NAACP sent him on a cruise, all expenses paid, and Marshall—“morose and unhappy . . . in very bad shape,” as Greenberg noted—sailed sadly off to Mexico.

    U NLIKE ANY OTHER state in the Deep South, Florida was undergoing a large-scale, transformative demographic shift in the mid-fifties. From the end of World War II until LeRoy Collins took office in January 1955, industrial activity in the United States had increased by nearly 11 percent; in Florida it was up more than 50 percent. During Collins’s first year as governor, more than five million tourists would visit the Sunshine State, and from 1950 to 1960 Florida’s population would grow by almost 80 percent. The state was enjoying an economic boom that stood, as Collins said, on “three sturdy legs. Tourism. Industry. Agriculture.”
    At Collins’s inauguration on January 4, thousands gathered at Capital Park in Tallahassee to hear the address of the newly sworn-in thirty-third governor of Florida. Conservative politicians shifted uncomfortably in their seats under the bright sun when Collins adopted a combative tone and promised that the days of a “ward-heeling, back-scratching, self-promoting political system” were over. “Government, too, must have qualities of the spirit,” Collins told the crowd. “Truth and justice and fairness and unselfish service are some of these. Without these qualities there is no worthwhile leadership, and we grapple and grope in a moral wilderness.”
    Marshall took notice. He made sure that a new host of letters and telegrams, thousands of them, brought the case of Walter Irvin to the new governor’s attention when he took up his post. Marshall had also enlisted Tom Harris, the executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times , in the cause. The Times ’s coverage of the original Groveland Boys trial had drawn the ire of Willis McCall for having the gall to question the evidence against the defendants, and once again the newspaper began publishing articles and editorials questioning procedures and protocol in the court. Times reporters who had worked diligently on the case, the paper noted, “were never convinced of the guilt of the four defendants” and indeed