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

protestation of innocence than we do a confession of guilt. Neither is sufficient in itself for either point.” Perry ultimately agreed that she would “obey orders.”
    Marshall’s core strategy for the LDF in education, equal pay, or transportation cases hinged upon the careful selection of the plaintiffs, as the aim was to try their cases in favorable courts in order to establish precedents, usually through the appeals process. So it was absolutely imperative that the organization not be embarrassed by any defense they mounted. They could ill afford any mid-trial setbacks or surprises. While Marshall expected to lose criminal cases before juries, he also expected the LDF’s cases to firmly establish grounds for appeals on record. The LDF would thus have strong equal protection cases that it could appeal to the higher courts. To Marshall, it was therefore essential that his lawyers strongly believe a potential client had been wrongly accused. On occasion, prisoners who’d escaped from chain gangs in the South would show up at the NAACP offices, and Marshall was adamant about turning them away, lest the organization be charged with “harboring an escaped felon.” Sometimes a lawyer would nonetheless listen to a convict’s horrific story and attempt to persuade the governor of the state from which the prisoner had fled “not to sign extradition papers.”
    In the summer of 1949, Jack Greenberg, a twenty-four-year-old Jewish kid with a cherubic face and a buzz cut who had recently been hired by Marshall as a staff attorney for the LDF, sat at his desk listening to a black woman’s shocking tale: Her son had just been sentenced to ten years in a Richmond, Virginia, prison for stealing a bag of peanuts. The sentence seemed exceedingly harsh to Greenberg, who suspected that race had played a role. Though he had grown up in an area of the Bronx where “no blacks lived anywhere nearby” and his family was not involved in civil rights, his parents had instilled in him “an abiding concern for those who are disadvantaged.” Astounded by the woman’s story, Greenberg marched into Marshall’s office and urged his boss that they take the case. Marshall was nonplussed. He nodded at Greenberg, then telephoned an attorney he knew in Richmond and asked him to look into the situation. A little while later Marshall called Greenberg back into his office to tell him that, as it turned out, the bag of peanuts was “one of those enormous burlap bags, the size of a flatbed truck.” As Greenberg digested this new information, Marshall added one more detail. With “pursed lips and a raised eyebrow,” Marshall noted that the defendant had “hijacked the truck along with it.”
    I N DECEMBER 1940, Eleanor Strubing, a thirty-two-year-old housewife, socialite, and former fashion model from Greenwich, Connecticut, claimed that her Negro butler and chauffeur, Joseph Spell, had kidnapped her, written a ransom note, tied her up, then raped her four times before dragging her to a car and driving to Kensico Reservoir in adjacent Westchester County, New York, where he’d thrown her off a bridge into the water and then pelted her with rocks. The newspaper coverage was predictably sensational. The front page of the New York Daily News featured a picture of Strubing in a bathing suit adjacent to a photo of Spell, arranged so that the brooding butler appeared to be staring straight at the vulnerable socialite. The provocative story led to rumors that “panic-stricken Westchester families were firing their black servants.”
    The then thirty-two-year-old Marshall interviewed Spell in the Greenwich town jail. He left convinced that the butler was telling the truth when he claimed that Strubing had not only consented to but also initiated a sexual liaison one evening when her husband was out of town. The sexual encounter began in the living room, until Strubing became worried that someone might see them through the window, at which point they retreated to the garage. They proceeded to have sex in the car, but “the sex stopped” as Strubing’s fears of pregnancy loomed. The two then did go for a drive, only again Strubing panicked and ordered Spell to stop the car. She then walked home by herself. She did not report the alleged crime to police for hours.
    “He was supposed to have raped this woman four times in one night,” Marshall recalled. He recalled, too, the incredulity at the LDF when the story hit the newspapers: “All