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

associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court for about a year and a half, and Walter Irvin had been free on parole four months less than that. For eighteen years Irvin had been imprisoned at Raiford, but Marshall had at least been able to keep his promise to Dellia Irvin—he’d kept her boy out of the electric chair.
    The day before the letter arrived, Marshall had voted with his fellow justices at the Court to overturn a conviction of another sort, in Brandenburg v. Ohio . Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg’s speech against “dirty niggers” and “Jews” at a Klan rally had been captured vividly on film, on which evidence he’d been charged with advocating violence, convicted in a state court, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that on First Amendment grounds the government could not punish abstract inflammatory speech. The Constitution was the Constitution, and Justice Marshall did not struggle with his vote.
    For a quarter century the younger Thurgood Marshall had fought in lower courts and argued in the highest one for constitutional rights, though not ever for white supremacists. At the NAACP the special counsel had championed politically disenfranchised and socially oppressed—and like Irvin, falsely accused—blacks in Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. The train rides south, the stifling courtrooms with their Jim Crow balconies, the vanes of fans rotating slowly overhead, the iron gates clanging, black men in shackles, men like Irvin, with bumps on their heads, welts on their arms, as they shamble shoeless to the defense table—with an article and a letter and a name, Walter Irvin, the past comes back: a sheriff and his deputies share a joke and a laugh with the judge as they turn their squinty eyes toward the no-good NAACP lawyers from up north.
    It all changed—and in his way, with the Groveland Boys, Marshall had helped to change it. “There is very little truth to the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality,” Marshall posited in a 1966 White House conference on civil rights. “Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.” In Groveland, Mabel Norris Reese had come round. So had Jesse Hunter. Governor LeRoy Collins had done the right thing. Maybe, too, that young juror with an honest face, the one who’d been listening so intently to Marshall’s summation at the retrial in Ocala, had fixed his mind on a different kind of future for the South. Marshall’s civil cases, the long battles for voting rights and school desegregation, unquestionably effected lasting social changes, but the criminal cases more immediately brought justice. They “did the most immediate good, because they saved people’s lives,” Marshall said.
    Mabel’s article did more than stir Thurgood’s memories. He picked up the phone, and just as he had done twenty years before, when the Groveland Boys story and the name Walter Irvin first crossed his desk at the NAACP in New York, he called the director of the FBI. From J. Edgar Hoover he learned that at the present time, no, the bureau was not conducting an investigation into Irvin’s death, presumably of natural causes, but the director would have all the materials relevant to the case delivered straightaway to the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Marshall thanked the director and hung up the phone. Willis McCall would soon be hearing from Hoover’s men, again.
    Natural causes. There was room enough in that conclusion for reasonable doubt. When it came to the sheriff whom Marshall had long referred to as “the sonofabitch,” nothing would surprise him, least of all the murder of a Groveland boy.
    Marshall set aside Mabel’s article on Walter Irvin’s death for his files. Before he clipped the letter to it, he read the carefully handwritten words again. They were dated March 7, 1969.
    My dear Mr. Justice,
    Enclosed please find clipping which I believe needs checking.
    I have thought of this poor man often over the years. I was shocked to read this over my morning coffee.
    McCall is a disgrace to the law of this wonderful country of ours.
    I have lived in Holly Hill, Florida for 18 years. I am Catholic, I am white, married and have a son 16 years of age.
    I am proud of you.
    Sincerely,
    Mrs. Ruth N. Starr

A NOTE ON SOURCES
    There were many excellent works that were especially valuable in my