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

Stacy strung up by his neck on a Florida pine tree that haunted him most when he traveled at night into the South. It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body, that caused Marshall, drenched now in sweat, to stir in his sleep. It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race. “I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice,” Marshall said of the dream.
    Seventeen-year-old Norma Lee Padgett had that look—chin held high, lips pursed—when in her best dress she slowly rose from the witness box to identify for the jury the three Groveland, Florida, boys whom she had accused of rape. Like the “sworn truth” of the fictitious Mayella Ewell, the white teenage accuser in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , Norma Lee’s dramatic testimony against the Groveland Boys tore a county apart. Her pale index finger extended, it dipped from boy to boy as she spoke out each name, like a young schoolteacher counting heads in class, and her breathy cadence sent a chill through the courtroom.
    “ . . . the nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee . . .”
    And like Harper Lee’s heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, Thurgood Marshall found himself at the center of a firestorm. It would bring the National Guard to Lake County, Florida, where mob violence drove hundreds of blacks from their lives in Groveland, and in the aftermath it would prompt four sensational murders of innocents, among them a prominent NAACP executive. Despite the fact that Marshall brought the Groveland case before the U.S. Supreme Court, it is barely mentioned in civil rights history, law texts, or the many biographies of Thurgood Marshall. Nonetheless, there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story. The case was key to Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer , willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials, and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes—even if it killed him. And Groveland nearly did.
    By the fall of 1951, Marshall had already filed and had begun trying in lower courts what would become his most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education , when he was again riding the rails toward Groveland. It was on such a journey to the South that one of Marshall’s colleagues noticed the “battle fatigue” setting in on the lawyer. “You know,” Marshall said to him, “sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul.” Battling personal demons as well as the devils who brought bullets, dynamite, and nitroglycerin into the Groveland fray, the lawyer saw death all around him in central Florida. So intense did the violence in Groveland become that on one of Marshall’s visits, J. Edgar Hoover insisted that FBI agents provide the NAACP attorney with around-the-clock protection. Usually, though, Marshall negotiated Florida alone, despite the number of death threats he daily received.
    A fellow NAACP lawyer thought of Marshall as a “suicidal crusader,” because he involved himself in such explosive criminal cases in the South at an exceptionally crucial time in the history of the blacks’ struggle for equal opportunity. Suicidal or not, Marshall was unquestionably irreplaceable in the mission of the burgeoning civil rights movement. And Marshall’s colleague too got swept up in the enthusiasm and commitment. “Thurgood says he needs me,” the NAACP associate told his wife. “If he needs me, I’m going. If I get killed, I get killed. But I gotta be on that train. . . .”
    Marshall would later say, “There is very little truth in the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality. Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.” Thurgood Marshall might never have