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

Klux Klan.”
    A steady Florida rain had begun to fall as the dispirited Bay Lake vigilantes returned to their cars and trucks with their rifles and ax handles. McCall decided that now would be a good time to talk to the young boy who was the third suspect in the rape of Norma Padgett. He rode the slow elevator in the courthouse up to the jail on the top floor.
    For both Sheriff Willis McCall and Charles Greenlee, their evening of fear was far from over. And their weekend would be anything but quiet.
    B Y THE SUMMER of 1949, Walter White, who had been suffering from a heart ailment, had become the focus of a damaging controversy within the NAACP. After admitting to an affair with Poppy Cannon, a white South African socialite, White divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Gladys, a black woman, and married Cannon in June. The interracial marriage did not sit well with the black press, and the distraction was causing a rift within the NAACP, where “all hell broke loose.” Roy Wilkins, editor of the Crisis , the organization’s official organ, and, like Marshall and White, a resident at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, thought it best that White not attend the NAACP’s annual convention. White had become a lightning rod for criticism among those who had previously viewed him as a race leader, and the blond-haired, blue-eyed Negro who “dressed like a tweedy English country squire” and was known as “Mr. NAACP” did not make things any easier for himself that summer. He wrote a provocative piece for Look magazine’s August issue, “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” in which he pondered the benefits of hydroquinone, an antioxidant that could be used to remove melanin from human skin, and wondered whether the ability to turn dark skins pale might “solve the American race problem.”
    For his part, Marshall felt White was entitled to marry “whomever he wished provided she consented,” but that did not stop White from considering Marshall “obstreperous” and even “mean-spirited” at the time. Marshall had never shied from confronting White about his lack of a law degree, and he bristled whenever the executive secretary attempted to exert his influence in the LDF’s legal affairs, especially when White began traveling to Washington to observe Marshall’s arguments before the Supreme Court—during which proceedings White would sit “within the rail,” a section reserved only for members of the Supreme Court bar.
    “Now look,” Marshall told him, “you’re not supposed to be in there, and they know you’re connected with me, and one of these days they’re going to find out you’re not a lawyer. And I’m gonna get blamed for it. And it’s going to affect my standing. And I don’t believe in letting anything affect my standing in the Supreme Court. So I’m telling you, don’t let me catch you sitting there again. If you do, I’m going to tell the guard.”
    “You wouldn’t,” an indignant White replied.
    “Try me,” Marshall said.
    Not long after that exchange, Marshall spotted White again within the rail. Marshall quietly approached a guard and, pointing to White, whispered, “See that fellow over there? I don’t think he’s a member of the bar.” The guard politely requested White to move to the spectators’ section in the rear of the court.
    The next time Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court he was pleased to note that White had chosen not to defy him. That is, until he discovered the executive secretary even more exclusively seated. At White’s behest, Justice Hugo Black arranged for him to sit as a guest in the judge’s box. Marshall could only shake his head. “So he won, anyhow,” he said.
    Despite the fact that White still had the full support of Eleanor Roosevelt, he ultimately decided to take a leave of absence in the summer of 1949, leaving Marshall and Wilkins, now the acting secretary, responsible for day-to-day operations at the NAACP. Aside from the teachers’ pay, voting, education, and transportation cases that constantly occupied the LDF in its multipronged legal attack on Jim Crow, a steady stream of capital rape cases continually flooded its offices. Marshall had long been aware that such charges raised serious human rights issues, since the death penalty for rape was “a sentence that had been more consistently and more blatantly racist in application than any other in American law.”
    Since sex cases involving race were complicated and