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

research into the life of Thurgood Marshall. Jack Greenberg’s Crusaders in the Courts (1994) is highly engaging, and provided an indispensable firsthand account of his years spent working for Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund. I made considerable use of Juan Williams’s authoritative biography, Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary (1998), in my research. Williams did an extraordinary amount of legwork, and his interviews with Marshall helped shed a bright light on the life and career of the civil rights lawyer.
    Carl Rowan’s Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993), Mark Tushnet’s Making Civil Rights Law (1994), and Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice (1975) were also exceptionally useful in helping me put the pieces of Thurgood Marshall’s life together. There were two other books that were most valuable companions to have at my side. Gary Corsair’s exhaustively researched book, The Groveland Four (2004), was most helpful, and anyone interested in learning more about the Groveland Boys would be well served to read Corsair’s thorough account of the case. And Ben Green’s Before His Time : The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (1999) is an engrossing and highly readable biography of Moore that deservedly spotlights one of the forgotten heroes of the pre–civil rights movement.
    Helpful to me in its own way was An Autobiography of Willis V. McCall, Sheriff of Lake County , published by Willis V. McCall, a copy of which I received from the University of Florida Libraries, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History.
    The majority of the research for this book was compiled from the vast and unredacted Groveland FBI case files, which were released to me following my filing of a Freedom of Information Act request. These files had been sealed for sixty years, and their content provided an abundance of rich material and interviews that were essential to my understanding of the case. When former Florida attorney general Charlie Crist released the results of the state’s investigation into the murder of Harry and Harriette Moore in 2006, the FBI files from that case revealed further interviews and bureau reports relating to the Groveland case and the Ku Klux Klan that were most enlightening.
    I relied heavily on the personal papers of Franklin Williams at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, as well as the papers of the NAACP and the papers of Thurgood Marshall, both at the Library of Congress. The Workers Defense League Collection at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University provided much insight into the relationship between the NAACP and the WDL, and was where I discovered the journal entries of Miss L. B. De Forest.
    Gaining access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files at the Library of Congress was by far the most challenging part of this research, and I continue to be grateful to Ted Wells, Debo Adegbile, and especially Jeffrey Robinson at the LDF, who went above and beyond his call of duty to carefully vet this material so that I would be able to examine it.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
    Aberjhani and S. L. West. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance . New York: Facts on File, 2003.
    Andrews, M., and J. Robison. Flashbacks: The Story of Central Florida’s Past. Orlando, FL: The Orlando Sentinel, 1995.
    Arsenault, R. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
    Ball, H. A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998.
    — — — . “ ‘Thurgood’s Coming’: Tale of a Hero Lawyer.” Jackson Free Press , May 13, 2004.
    Barnes, J. Florida’s Hurricane History . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
    Bedau, H. A., C. E. Putnam, and M. L. Radelet. In Spite of Innocence: The Ordeal of 400 Americans Wrongly Convicted by Crimes Punishable by Death. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
    Berg, M. “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
    Berry, B. Almost White. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969.
    Black, Elizabeth, and Hugo L. Black. Mr. Justice and Mrs. Black: The Memoirs of Hugo L. Black and Elizabeth Black. New York: Random House, 1986.
    Blackmon, D. A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II . New York: