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

Houston invited Marshall to assist with the case. It was an opportunity Marshall could not pass up. He assisted Houston more than diligently, working long hours in the Howard law library. He also caught the eye of Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, who observed a “lanky, brash young senior law student” who was always present. “Amazed at [Marshall’s] assertiveness in challenging positions taken by Charlie and the other lawyers,” White recognized young Thurgood’s “great value to the case in doing everything he was asked, from research on obscure legal opinions to foraging for coffee and sandwiches.” The opportunity not only to study under Houston but also to work alongside the legal giant was a life-changing event for Marshall. Although they were unable to win an acquittal for Crawford, they did together prevent a death sentence. That in itself was worth celebrating, for both men knew that when blacks were charged with killing whites in the South, a life sentence was a victory. “You’ve won,” Marshall later said, “because normally they were hanging them.”
    The following summer Houston had another proposition for Marshall, who had just graduated as valedictorian from Howard University Law School. The NAACP was sending Houston on a fact-finding mission to study and document the inequalities in schools for both black and white children in the South, and Houston wanted his young protégé to accompany him. It was something Marshall had to talk over with Buster first. They’d been living together with Marshall’s parents in a small house on Druid Hill Avenue in Baltimore, patiently waiting for the day when Marshall would graduate from law school, hang a shingle, and start making a name for himself. Buster had meanwhile been selling bread in a Jewish bakery and women’s hats in a clothing store, among other jobs, to help make ends meet. Complicating the decision was a scholarship offer from Harvard Law School for Marshall to study for an advanced law degree. Marshall, however, could not resist the opportunity to travel with his mentor. He’d study for the Maryland bar exam when he returned.
    Having packed Houston’s six-cylinder Graham-Paige with their luggage and bags of fruit, the two men set off from Washington, D.C., on a journey that took them through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Traveling not as lawyers but as journalists and social scientists, they documented public facilities and schools for blacks in rural areas of the South that, to both men, seemed to have been lost in time. With a still camera as well as a rented, handheld silent movie camera they compiled a visual record of the poverty they encountered. An endless string of ramshackle schools on dusty roads, where children sat on floors of tiny classrooms with broken windows and potbellied stoves, demonstrated indisputably that the segregationist states were by no means meeting the “separate but equal” standard established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the nocuous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. “Motion pictures,” Houston wrote, “humanize and dramatize the discrimination which Negroes suffer much more effectively than any corresponding amount of speech could do. . . .”
    Riding alongside Houston in the car, Marshall smoked cigarettes and typed observations on a well-worn Remington portable that he balanced on his knees. “Conditions,” Marshall wrote, “were much worse than we heard they were”—conditions like streets with human waste running through poorly drained ditches, because there was no plumbing in the black parts of town. The trips—they made two of them—had a profound impact on Marshall. Not only had he now seen with his own eyes the “evil results of discrimination” that his mentor had tried to describe to him in classrooms, but the course of his life had been significantly altered. Houston’s incessant credo took hold of the impressionable young man: “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”
    Marshall went back to Maryland, where he passed the bar, then struggled to find paying clients at his own private practice during the Depression. Most blacks in Baltimore had little money, so Marshall mostly practiced poverty law for the lowest of fees. The more successful blacks were reluctant to hire black lawyers, as they thought their suits would be better represented by white lawyers who had relationships with