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

brutality, and then pressuring politicians into action. Without pay, he’d worked for the black people’s cause on weekends and in whatever spare time he could manage outside his teaching job in the Brevard County school system. Both he and his wife, Harriette, also a teacher, were forced out of the jobs they’d held for twenty years because Harry was deemed, in the summer of 1946, a “troublemaker and Negro organizer.”
    Insightful yet quiet, unassuming, and mild-mannered, Moore composed his public speeches with passion and focus, but his delivery, soft-spoken and understated, reflected the manner of the man and contrasted sharply—and for evangelistic Southerners, unfavorably—with the customary fire-and-brimstone, church-pulpit rhetoric. Moore, however, was not about to allow an uninspiring delivery to impede the urgent messages he wanted to spread. Recruiting his teenage daughter to speak on his behalf, every night after dinner he would rehearse her delivery of his words, which she had memorized, so that she could dramatically place a pause or drive home a point to stirring effect. Evangeline was nearly paralyzed with fear the first time she spoke at a Baptist church in Lake County, but she finished the speech as perfectly as she had practiced it. Moore began traveling the state with his family in their blue Ford sedan, with Evangeline dividing her time between homework and the demanding work of the NAACP.
    The Moores lived in a three-bedroom, one-story wooden frame home that Harry had built in 1926. Approximately forty-five feet long and twenty-two feet wide, it was propped up on wooden blocks nearly two feet off the ground. The house had a large front porch that stood behind four wooden columns at the end of a white sand driveway off Old Dixie Highway. Orange, grapefruit, and palm trees brightened up the landscape close to the house. Whereas most of the black laborers in Mims lived in wooden shacks on small parcels of scrub, the Moores’ house sat on nearly eleven acres of land and was set deep in an orange grove. Whites referred to it as the place where “that rich Professor Moore” lives. Though far from rich, a family with two educated, working parents in a home packed with books was no doubt more exceptional among the blacks in Mims.
    Harry’s political activism continued to render him unemployable, but after nearly two years of job searching, in May 1948 Harriette was offered a teaching position in Palm Beach County, about two hours south of Mims. The Moores decided to rent a bedroom in a private home in Riviera Beach during the school year so that they could keep the house in Mims. Still, they had some financial belt-tightening to do, especially with two girls enrolled at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. While Harry had always planned to live off his grove when he retired, he had not been planning to retire in his mid-forties. Nor was he planning, whatever his circumstances, to retire from the cause he had dedicated his life to: the civil rights of the Negro in Florida.
    Born in Florida in 1905, Harry T. Moore was just three years older than Thurgood Marshall, and both men had started working for the NAACP, though at a distance of a thousand miles from each other, before their thirtieth birthdays. Moore founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP in 1934, the same year that Marshall began assisting Charles Hamilton Houston in civil rights suits. What introduced Moore to Marshall three years later had its roots in the Margold Report, a study commissioned by the NAACP that would ultimately lay out a legal strategy for racial reform.
    In 1930, the NAACP hired the Harvard-educated lawyer Nathan Ross Margold to study areas in which legalized segregation might be most vulnerable to attack in the courts, and finding discrimination in the financing of public schools to be especially assailable, Margold advised the NAACP to “boldly challenge the constitutional validity” of black schools that were systematically underfunded in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause; for in every case, when states exercised their discretion to spend public funds designated for elementary and high schools, appointments to white schools significantly exceeded those to black schools. After studying the report, Houston devised a long-term plan whereby the NAACP would establish over a number of years a series of precedents in courts across the South regarding inequalities in