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

acutely aware that when he stepped off the train, his only sword was “a piece of paper called ‘The Constitution.’ ” He had grown into a celebrity, and wherever he went he was treated like one. Men respected him and wanted to drink with him and listen to his stories; women simply fawned over him. More and more frequently, after conferences on the road, he did not return home to Harlem, and Buster. To avoid crisscrossing the country, Marshall found it reasonable not to detour back to Manhattan—“no sense in coming back to New York,” as he wrote in a letter—and his correspondence vaguely hinted at a need for privacy. On most of his business trips he stayed with friends or associates, but on one occasion he wrote to West Coast civil rights attorney Loren Miller, stating, “I do not want to burden you and Juanita again,” and asking for “a suggestion as to a good place near Los Angeles as to where one can go and rest and hide.”
    Daniel Ellis Byrd, the handsome and extroverted former member of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team who went on to become field secretary with the NAACP in Louisiana, worked on several desegregation suits with Marshall. The two were close friends and Byrd liked to tease Marshall about his predilection for the ladies. Byrd once wrote to inform Marshall that he had to rearrange the lawyer’s itinerary, since he had scheduled Marshall to give a speech on Mother’s Day in New Orleans. Byrd wrote, “It has been suggested, however, that since you are not an authority on making a Mother’s Day Address, that you would be much more successful, and the occasion would prove more pleasant for you, if you were permitted to ‘undress’ someone’s fine Mother, on Mother’s Day (smile).”
    In New Orleans, Marshall usually stayed at the home of A. P. Tureaud, a Creole attorney who had also studied law at Howard under Charles Hamilton Houston. At one time the only black attorney in Louisiana, Tureaud filed countless equal pay and desegregation lawsuits in parishes around the state on behalf of the NAACP, and he spent decades fighting nearly every one of them in court. Tureaud lived in the Seventh Ward, a largely Creole section of New Orleans, and around the corner from his home was one of Marshall’s favorite restaurants, Dooky Chase’s, where he and Tureaud often conducted business over gumbo and fried chicken in the upstairs meeting room. Otherwise they’d work, as they were doing one evening when, in Tureaud’s French Quarter office, Marshall decided he needed a break and headed for the bar downstairs to get a drink, although he knew the bar was closed to blacks. It was the kind of behavior that had earned Marshall one of his nicknames, “Nogood.” Tureaud and Byrd continued working and as the hours passed without Marshall reappearing, they began to worry. They worried even more when they could not find Marshall in the bar or anywhere else. Disheartened, they returned to the office, only to find Marshall sitting at the desk going over briefs. The next day on the stairway, Tureaud ran into the strapping white owner of the bar, and his heart jumped. “Say, where’s that big tall black fellow that came into my place last night?” Tureaud said that he didn’t know. “Well,” the owner said, laughing. “If you see him and he ain’t busy, ask him to stop by again tonight. He sure had some funny stories.”

    I N FEBRUARY 1949, with the volume of criminal cases coming through the NAACP threatening to paralyze the LDF, Marshall issued a memorandum that established three rules to be applied “to the types of criminal cases we accept . . . (1) That there is injustice because of race or color; (2) the man is innocent; (3) there is a possibility of establishing a precedent for the benefit of due process and equal protection in general and the protection of Negroes’ rights in particular.”
    The memo also addressed a “misunderstanding” that had arisen when one of his LDF attorneys, Marian Wynn Perry, argued against “limit[ing] ourselves on the second point” and Marshall had to remind her that the NAACP was not a legal aid society. Although he acknowledged that a defendant’s innocence was a matter of judgment, he also reasoned that “any experienced lawyer reading the record in a case can usually detect whether a man is obviously guilty or whether he is apparently innocent.” He further exhorted his staff to “put no more credence in a convicted defendant’s