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

into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution—of whatever race, creed or persuasion.
    Marshall was cautiously optimistic that he could at least establish on record that Lyons’s confessions were coerced and, if nothing else, take the case (now with precedent) before a sympathetic Supreme Court on appeal. First, however, he had to navigate the dangerous and highly charged atmosphere in Oklahoma. On this trip—unlike his trips to the South with Houston, which were essentially fact-finding missions involving little conflict or even contact with whites—Marshall was coming to Choctaw County to fight. Word of his imminent arrival had already spread through town; the situation grew only more volatile, and for Marshall, perceived by whites as the enemy, more dangerous. As a deputy sheriff said in the court hallways at one of Marshall’s Tennessee trials, “We are going to teach these Northern Negroes not to come down here raising fancy court questions.” The law may have been on Marshall’s side, but law enforcement wasn’t.
    Upon his arrival in Choctaw County after a six-hour bus ride, Marshall was whisked away by blacks who felt it necessary to hide him under armed guard and to move him from place to place during his stay. For word had gotten out that “a Nigger lawyer from New York” was trying the case, and the small black community feared for Marshall’s life. An aged, obstinate widow fearlessly took him in. Marshall noted that she serenely proclaimed, “I ain’t scared,” and snored all night while he lay awake, sweating, afraid. “I think I remembered every lynching story that I had read about after World War One,” he recalled. He was unable to sleep; the ghastly photographs appeared, and Marshall pictured himself in each one—his crumpled body dumped in a ditch at the center of town, or hanging from a tree—the white children in their Sunday clothes, pointing, grinning, and rejoicing.
    Marshall became convinced that Lyons had been made a political scapegoat in the governor’s attempt to avoid the fallout he’d face if it was shown that furloughed prisoners had been responsible for three murders in his state. The yearlong delay before trial only confirmed Marshall’s suspicions that prosecutors were “scared to try the case,” because usually, when blacks confessed to murdering whites, justice was swift and unmerciful.
    As the trial was getting under way, Marshall wrote to Walter White in New York, telling him that the courthouse was jammed with more than a thousand people, many of whom had come in trucks and wagons, to see “a certain Negro lawyer—first time in this court—so sayeth the bailiff.” Marshall added that white schoolteachers had even brought their classes to court, the judge remarking that it was good for children to be able to witness such “a gala day.” “Imagine it,” Marshall wrote, “a Negro on trial for his life being called a ‘gala day.’ ” He noted that the “jury is lousy. . . . No chance of winning here. Will keep record straight for appeal.”
    Before the first day of testimony, Marshall appeared before an “informal” county judge who smoked a big cigar as he announced that there were “two nationalities” involved in this case and that he did not want any disorder. He did not alleviate Marshall’s unease about the reception a black New York lawyer might expect in Oklahoma. The Lyons case was called, and Marshall was introduced; he took a seat at the counsel table and, as he told Walter White, “the building did not fall and the world did not come to an end.”
    After the noon recess, however, the crowd “about doubled” and “the fireworks started,” as Marshall moved to have the first confession excluded from evidence because police officers had beaten the defendant. All morning the officers had maintained, under oath, that Lyons “was not struck, or injured in any manner.” But when the county prosecutor called Lyons to the stand, the defendant shocked everyone in the courtroom by testifying that the prosecutor himself had witnessed the torture—a charge the prosecutor denied before the judge. The court went silent as the normally reticent sharecropper met the prosecutor’s eyes. “Oh, yes, you were there,” Lyons said. The prosecutor’s face reddened. “Why,” he stammered, pushing a finger in Lyons’s face, “I