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

Time, so I take my pen in han as you must be the man I have been lookin for all these yers.
    You see Mr. Turgood I has great trouble an goin to church don’t seem to make it better. The Courer say you has scared the white folks down hear in the South and has them on the run. Well, maybe so but you has them runnin after me and I am ritin to try to get you to make them run in the other road away from me. They is shootin and beating and tarfeatherin all around here getten closer to me all the time just las week over in the next county and I hop you will come quick because these white folks down hear don’t ack like they heard of Supreme court or any court or anything. They is runnin wild and we shure could use the No. 1 negro of all time or somebody to stop them from mistreatin us.
    You all is in Harlem an if the goin get tough you can duck in the next basement an nobody no wher you has gon, but down here aint no place to hide they just grabs you and yore number is up or down. Please Mr. Turgood if you are No 1 of all time you can do it you are the one we ben watin for since I was born please help these white folks is mighty mean and mighty close on my heels
    yours for a little while anyway
    Charles Jones X
    PS Mr Turgood I rite this for Charlie he cant read or rite but he got real good sense. His wife Essie Mae
    Gloria Samuels was Marshall’s secretary in 1949. She acknowledged the use of first names at work as Walter White had observed, as well as occasions of laughter, but the fourth floor was not typically so casual as the executive secretary seemed to believe. The workload was far too heavy to be abandoned in laughter, and productivity was no just cause for White’s worry.
    “Mr. Marshall was very dedicated and careful,” Samuels said. “He always wore a suit and tie every day, and he was surrounded by serious young lawyers doing important work. We worked late whenever we had to. Even Saturdays. That was part of the job.” Mildred Roxborough confirmed Samuels’s observations. “When he was working, you didn’t joke,” she said. “You didn’t waste time. You had an assignment he gave you and he expected it to be completed. It was inviolate that you did that work and you produced and you performed.”
    Constance Baker, a black woman who was in her last year at Columbia Law School when she was hired by Marshall as a law clerk in October 1945, thought Marshall was ahead of his time in his hiring practices. Baker, who married in 1946 and became Constance Baker Motley, remembered Marshall’s “total lack of formality” during her interview, in which he mostly told stories about women lawyers he had known and admired, especially black women who had mustered the courage to enter the white-male-dominated legal profession. That same year Marshall also hired a white woman, Marian Wynn Perry, as an associate counsel, no matter that in 1945, as Motley noted, “nobody was hiring women lawyers.” Marshall’s hiring practices were not a conscious attempt to achieve diversity on his staff: he just didn’t think about it, said Motley, noting that Marshall’s mother, Norma, who taught at a segregated elementary school in Baltimore, was one of the first black women to graduate from Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College. She pawned her engagement and wedding rings to help fund Thurgood’s law school education at Howard University (his brother Aubrey went to medical school). Marshall had nothing but respect for serious women who were committed to achievement. “His mother was a professional,” Motley said. “So the idea of a woman in a professional job, he didn’t see anything wrong. In fact, there were women in his class at law school. He didn’t think anything strange of a woman being a lawyer.”
    Evelyn Cunningham, who later became a noted Harlem columnist and feminist, referred to her friend Thurgood Marshall as one of the “first feminists.”

    B Y THE LATE 1940s, Marshall was logging some fifty thousand miles each year as he swooped into cities and towns across the South, usually alone. The postwar years marked the beginning of a more violent era in the American South, and Marshall’s willingness to ride into a hornet’s nest of racial conflict in pursuit of his well-stated goal—to dismantle Jim Crow—only cemented his growing legacy as a crusader for justice. Marshall relished his role as Mr. Civil Rights—it suited his gregarious, larger-than-life personality—and he was