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

spoken those words if he hadn’t defended the Groveland Boys. The case made a lasting impact on both him and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. It also became the impetus behind the NAACP’s capital punishment program, which eventually led to the Supreme Court ruling that capital punishment was unconstitutional as well as to the Court’s later decision to invalidate the death penalty for rape.
    The victories came only after many train rides to towns where no hotels or restaurants accommodated people of Marshall’s race. Local blacks would welcome him, though, with hospitality and tears of gratitude. They’d clean their houses spotless for his stays. He’d join his hosts at their dinner tables and tell them stories from his travels that brought laughter to the night. He’d eat their modest offerings of salt pork and poke salad with such aplomb you’d think he was dining on his favorite she-crab soup over drinks with friends back in Harlem. The women would have lunches packed and delivered to him at court each day. Broken-down cars would get “glued together” to taxi him back and forth. Later in the day, word would spread: “Men are needed to sit up all night with a sick friend.” You’d hear it whispered everywhere. They’d all know what it meant. They were lining up armed guards to keep Marshall safe from night-riding Klansmen while he slept.
    Alice Stovall, Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP, recalled the effect Marshall had on blacks when he showed up at courthouses in small Southern towns. “They came in their jalopy cars and their overalls,” she recounted. “All they wanted to do—if they could—was just touch him, just touch him, Lawyer Marshall , as if he were a god. These poor people who had come miles to be there.”
    Southern juries might be stacked against blacks, and the judges might be biased, but Thurgood Marshall was demonstrating in case after case that their word was not the last, that in the U.S. Supreme Court the injustice in their decisions and verdicts could be reversed. He was “a lawyer that a white man would listen to” and a black man could trust. No wonder that across the South, in their darkest, most demoralizing hours, when falsely accused men sat in jails, when women and children stood before the ashy ruins of mob-torched homes, the spirits of black citizens would be lifted with two words whispered in defiance and hope:
    “Thurgood’s coming.”

CHAPTER 1: MINK SLIDE

    Interior of the Morton Funeral Home, Columbia, Tennessee, showing vandalism of the race riots in February 1946. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    November 18, 1946
    I F THAT SON of a bitch contradicts me again, I’m going to wrap a chair around his goddamned head.”
    One acquittal after another had left Tennessee district attorney general Paul F. Bumpus shaking his head in frustration over the NAACP lawyers, and now Thurgood Marshall was hoping to free the last of the twenty-five blacks accused of rioting and attempted murder of police in Columbia, Tennessee. The sun had been down for hours, and the start of a cool, dark night had settled over the poolrooms, barbershops, and soda fountains on East Eighth Street in the area known as the Bottom, the rickety, black side of Columbia, where, nine months earlier, the terror had begun. Just blocks away, on the news that a verdict had been reached, the lawyers were settling back into their chairs, fretfully waiting for the twelve white men on the jury to return to the Maury County courtroom. They’d been deliberating for little more than an hour, but the lead counsel for the defense, Thurgood Marshall, looked over his shoulder and knew immediately that something wasn’t right. Throughout the proceedings of the Columbia Race Riot trials, the “spit-spangled” courtrooms had been packed with tobacco-chewing Tennesseans who had come to see justice meted out. But the overall-clad spectators were equally intrigued by Marshall and his fellow NAACP lawyers: by the strange sight of “those niggers up there wearing coats and talking back to the judge just like they were white men.”
    Marshall was struck by the eeriness of the quiet, nearly deserted courtroom. The prosecution’s table had been aflutter with the activity of lawyers and assistants throughout the trial, but none of them had returned for the verdict. Only the smooth-talking Bumpus had come back. All summer long he’d carried himself