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

to act fast when it came to rape cases in the South, because a lynching could quickly turn the defense of the accused into a plea for the prosecution of his murder.

    A T THE CONCLUSION of Joseph Spell’s rape trial in Connecticut, Marshall returned home to Harlem barely long enough for a meal with Buster before he was back at Pennsylvania Station, his bags packed for a three-day train ride to Oklahoma. Buster could do little more than shrug when Marshall had told her he’d be going back on the road, and in the coming decade his absences would become only more frequent. Buster, for her part, would come to rely on the constant assurances from fellow NAACP wives and 409 Edgecombe neighbors like Gladys White and Minnie Wilkins that Thurgood was safe, in good spirits, and heading homeward soon.
    The long train trip to Oklahoma gave Marshall the opportunity to bone up on briefs from his next criminal case—a gruesome one, in which he’d be defending a sharecropper who had confessed to a savage mass murder that had shocked all of Oklahoma. A year earlier, a young white couple, Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Rogers, and their four-year-old son, Elvie Dean, were butchered to death on New Year’s Eve in their home in Choctaw County, Oklahoma, before their farmhouse was burned to the ground. Almost immediately after the crime a white convict who had been out on furlough confessed to the murders. Newspapers reported that the prisoner had also visited bars and brothels in the area, and both the prison warden and Governor Leon Chase Phillips were severely criticized. To stem the controversy, the governor had the warden fired, then sent a special investigator to Hugo, the Choctaw County seat, to defuse the increasing political fallout. Despite the prisoner’s confession, the investigator arranged for him to leave the state for Texas. Two weeks later the investigator announced that he had found the “real” killer: a Negro sharecropper named W. D. Lyons.
    Under the supervision of the governor’s aide, Special Investigator Vernon Cheatwood, Lyons was beaten over his head and body with a blackjack while Cheatwood and other police officers interrogated the prisoner for several days. Despite the beatings, Lyons refused to admit his involvement in the murders—until Cheatwood produced a pan of bones. He placed the pan in Lyons’s lap and growled, “There’s the bones of the baby you burned up.”
    The sleep-deprived Lyons was forced to scrutinize the teeth, bones, and charred remains of the young child and his mother. It proved to be too much for the superstitious sharecropper to bear. Lyons confessed, in his words, because “they beat me and beat me until I couldn’t stand no more, until I gave in to them. . . . ”
    A confession in hand, Cheatwood and the police then chauffeured Lyons back to the farmhouse, where one of the murder weapons—an ax that had somehow escaped notice in prior investigations—was found in the ashes. Threats of being burned and beaten with a pick hammer prompted a second confession from Lyons at the crime scene.
    Marshall’s appetite for a coerced confession case was buoyed by his recent victory at the U.S. Supreme Court the year before. In Chambers v. Florida , Marshall argued that the confessions used to convict four transient blacks in the murder of a Florida man should have been ruled inadmissible because they had been “extorted by violence and torture,” in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a unanimous decision, the nine justices overturned the Florida court’s convictions, thus handing Marshall his first win before the Supreme Court. In delivering the opinion of the Court, Justice Hugo Black wrote an eloquent passage that, his widow later recalled, he “could never read aloud without tears streaming down his face.”
    Today, as in ages past, we are not without tragic proof that the exalted power of some governments to punish manufactured crime dictatorially is the handmaid of tyranny. Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement. Due process of law, preserved for all by our Constitution, commands that no such practice as that disclosed by this record shall send any accused to his death. No higher duty, no more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating