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

beside a pasture fence. They hadn’t hurt him too badly, and he’d had it coming, but this was Lake County, and they could see the picture. Cross a white man wrong in these parts and you’re like to find your own black self lying dead in a ditch. Norma Lee Padgett, still clutching the near-empty bottle of whiskey, steadied herself on the sand and clay. Bathed in the bright moonlight and the glow from the Mercury’s headlights, she knew. She knew nothing good would come of this. They all knew.

CHAPTER 4: NIGGER IN A PIT

    Charles Hamilton Houston. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    H ER NICKNAME WAS “Big East,” and, like her friend Thurgood Marshall, she was a force to be reckoned with. Nearly six feet tall, exotic-looking, athletic, and graceful, Evelyn Cunningham was a black reporter and columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier , and was known around New York for her “high heels, red hair, mink coat and attitude.”
    “When Evelyn Cunningham entered a room, you knew it,” said Charles Rangel, the congressman from New York, longtime Harlem resident, and former desk clerk at the Hotel Theresa. Cunningham’s other nickname, “the Lynching Editor,” stemmed from her days as a stringer for the Courier , when she traveled through the South to cover the same racial atrocities and trials that claimed the attention of Marshall and the NAACP. “I wanted to do hard news,” Cunningham said, “and he [the Courier editor] started worrying about me and I said, ‘Well, I get killed somewhere it’s not your fault. Can’t nobody sue you ’cause you weren’t even there. Chicken!’ ” Like Marshall, Cunningham loved the travel and the excitement of working for a cause she believed in—civil rights. “I think I did my best writing during that period of danger,” she said. “Went to jail a couple of times, I was threatened, I was almost raped, all the bad things . . . really bad.”
    Cunningham claimed she conned her editors into assigning her to the dangerous stories she wanted to report. “I said, ‘You know, they don’t lynch women. I got an advantage being a woman. Everything they’re doing, they’re doing to men.’ And they bought that!”
    Hard as Marshall and Cunningham worked on the road, in New York they found occasion to play. One night they decided to visit an illegal after-hours club that didn’t open until three in the morning. It was filled with smoke, sultry bebop music, and the “not particularly savory” people that Marshall usually steered clear of. But after a few drinks, the lawyer loved being in the middle of it. With a cigarette dangling from his lips and a drink in his hand, Marshall was enjoying himself, Cunningham recalled. They were having a great, noisy time when, suddenly, police descended on the club from all directions. It was a raid. The music stopped; people screamed and scattered. Thinking quickly, Cunningham accosted a cop she recognized, telling him, “You can’t arrest this man. He is very, very important, he’s with the NAACP, you’ve got to let him go.” The officer permitted Cunningham to lead Marshall through a side door, out to the street. Big East was trying her best to get him away from the scene as fast as possible, but Marshall apparently wasn’t ready for the night to end. Cars rolled by, with horns honking, as police jostled men into waiting wagons. Espying his fellow club patrons in handcuffs and custody, the boisterous, slightly inebriated lawyer spun around in his tracks and bellowed, “I would like to defend these guys—these cops got no right doing this!” Big East grabbed him by his coat sleeve and dragged him away. “Time to go home,” she said, convinced that Marshall would have surely gotten himself arrested. “He was a bit high,” she recalled.
    That he was out so late at night in New York while living at 409 Edgecombe was no surprise to friends, who observed that Marshall’s relationship with his wife had “become distant and lifeless.” Buster had by now become accustomed to Marshall’s constant travel and days, or weeks, away from home. They had been married only a few years in 1933 when Marshall was in his final year at Howard University Law School and his professor Charles Hamilton Houston approached his prize student with a proposition. Houston had been asked by the NAACP to defend George Crawford, a Virginia man accused of murdering two white women, and