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

stopped them from whipping you.”
    The response in the courtroom was tremendous. The spectators erupted in a noisy buzz; the county judge rapped his gavel on the bench in an effort to bring order to his court. Marshall moved quickly, making certain that the court record showed the prosecutor had conceded that Lyons was beaten while in custody. No one in the courtroom had ever seen anything like it before: a black man in a Jim Crow state standing up in court and talking to powerful white people without the slightest form of deference—all the while looking them straight in the eyes. And he wasn’t done.
    With Special Investigator Vernon Cheatwood on the stand, Marshall asked him about his interrogation of W. D. Lyons, to which Cheatwood replied that he had questioned Lyons for “six or seven hours but never raised his voice, never cursed him, and positively never struck him with anything.” The special investigator admitted to putting the pan of bones in Lyons’s lap, but went on to deny owning a blackjack or any kind of club.
    After a hotel clerk testified that Cheatwood had instructed him to “go up to my room and get me my nigger beater,” Marshall saved his best for last. He called two white relatives of the slain woman, including Mrs. Rogers’s father, who testified that Cheatwood had shown him his blackjack and admitted that he’d beaten Lyons for “six—either six or seven hours . . . [saying] I haven’t even got to go to bed.”
    One Oklahoma newspaper reported that after Marshall’s grilling, the special prosecutor stepped down from the witness stand “shaking as though suffering from palsy.” Marshall himself noted, “Boy, did I like that. And did the Negroes in the Court-room like it. You can’t imagine what it means to those people down there who have been pushed around for years to know that there is an organization that will help them. They are ready to do their part now. They are ready for anything.”
    Marshall was exhilarated by the theatrics that criminal cases before a packed courtroom could summon. He’d committed himself and the NAACP to chiseling away at the apartheid systems of the South, but the work was painstakingly slow, and victories in voting rights and interstate transportation cases generated little cause for attention outside the East Coast conference rooms of lawyers and editorial writers. Cases in criminal courtrooms, though, generated immediate excitement, and so did the Negro lawyer from the North who could bring spectators to their feet with his words. Not just black spectators, either; for whites, too, “stopped us in the halls and on the streets to tell us they enjoyed the way the case was going and that they didn’t believe Lyons was guilty.” Marshall reported to Walter White that “90% of the white people by this time were with Lyons. One thing this trial accomplished—the good citizens of that area have been given a lesson in Constitutional Law and the rights of Negroes which they won’t forget for some time. Law enforcement officers now know that when they beat a Negro up they might have to answer for it on the witness stand. All of the white people in the Court room passed some mighty nasty comments after the officers lied on the stand. Several told the officers what they thought of them out on the halls.”
    The white people in the courthouse halls might have believed that Lyons was innocent, but the whites on the jury were not prepared to say so. After five and a half hours of deliberation, they returned with a guilty verdict. Marshall was not surprised. “We are in a perfect position to appeal,” he stated, noting that the prosecution had asked for the death penalty, whereas the jury’s sentence of Lyons to life imprisonment for a crime that resulted in “three people killed, shot with a shot gun and cut up with an axe and then burned—shows clearly that they believed him innocent.”
    The Lyons case reaped a harvest of publicity, which was augmented by the statement of E. O. Colclasure, the father of the murdered white woman. He told the press that he did not believe W. D. Lyons was guilty; he opined further that the Oklahoma police and prosecutors had conspired to frame the sharecropper. Moved by Thurgood Marshall’s argument in court, the still grieving father joined the NAACP.
    Confident he could reverse the verdict on appeal, Marshall boarded a train for the long trip back to New York. Despite the loss, he was becoming more