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

the secretaries, all of ’em, came and said, ‘Hey, defend that man. We want to see it. Four times! Ha ha. Ha ha. Four times in one night. Yeah, bring him in here, let us see him.’ I told ’em, get out of my office.”
    The case was important, Marshall said, because winning Spell’s freedom would strengthen the security of “thousands of Negro domestics, chauffeurs, maids and butlers throughout the country whose jobs are jeopardized by this case.” After presenting his findings to the NAACP, Marshall announced that the organization would defend Spell “to the limit of our resources.”
    Once the trial began it was revealed that police had found neither the rope nor the ransom note; nor had a Greenwich doctor found any evidence of rape. Strubing herself seemed out of sorts when questioned on the stand, stating, “I’m sure he raped me three times. But I can’t remember now. On a stone floor—or something. It’s so confused.” The facts of the case were confused enough that the prosecution offered a plea bargain. Marshall, however, argued that Spell was “not only innocent, but [in] a position where everyone else knows he is innocent.” With a possible thirty-year sentence hanging in the balance, Spell put his faith in the advice of his lawyer.
    In his closing argument, the state’s attorney asked that the “lust-mad Negro” be convicted lest “shame and disgrace” fall upon Mrs. Strubing. The all-white jury of six men and six women deliberated from noon until nearly midnight on February 1 and voted unanimously to acquit Joseph Spell of all charges. Very little uproar followed the verdict, aside from the reaction of some of Strubing’s society friends, who telegraphed the governor to state they “resent bitterly this acquittal which casts such an unfair slur on her character.” Spell could muster only “What a relief!”
    Thurgood Marshall appreciated that the rape accusations against the butler might afford the LDF secretaries some amusement, but the vast majority of cases that crossed Marshall’s desk were painful, often horrible tragedies that he would never even consider showing to the women in the office. The most unsettling involved teenage and preteen girls from black communities who were raped and often beaten or killed by advantaged, even prominent white citizens and law enforcement personnel in the South. Frequently the accused men would not be indicted, or else they’d stand trial (on reduced charges of unlawful carnal knowledge) before a jury of their peers, who were not about to take the word of poor blacks over that of white policemen, doctors, insurance collectors, or plumbing contractors. Most frustrating to Marshall was the fact that the NAACP did not have sufficient funds to provide legal assistance; also, many of the rape cases simply did not fit the criteria that Marshall himself had defined for the LDF. Outraged by the inhumanity of whites who abused their power or authority, and moved deeply by the suffering of their poor black victims, Marshall could only apologize that he and the organization could not do more, in the affectively written letters he sent to regional NAACP personnel, as well as to the families of raped, beaten, and sometimes murdered adolescent girls.
    Limited though the NAACP was in its ability to force prosecution on those who perpetrated crimes against defenseless blacks, the legal arm of the organization had more options available when it came to defending black men charged with rape upon white women. W. J. Cash, in his seminal exploration of Southern culture, The Mind of the South , wrote that while “the actual danger of the Southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro has always been comparatively small . . . much less, for instance, than the chance that she would be struck by lightning,” it was “the most natural thing in the world for the South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held off.” In Cash’s estimation, the Southern rape complex “had nothing immediately to do with sex,” but rather with the feeling among Southerners that if blacks were to advance beyond their severely circumscribed social station, they might “one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage.” Thurgood Marshall understood perfectly the mind of the South, and he knew he had