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

mills in nearby Culleoka (where the Flemings lived) began arriving at the square, and more volatile World War II veterans joined them. Rumors that rope had been purchased had reached the Bottom, and Julius Blair, a seventy-six-year-old black patriarch and owner of Blair’s Drug Store, had heard enough. He’d seen firsthand what white mobs in Columbia were capable of in recent years, around that courthouse down the block. He’d been there when they’d taken one man out of jail and lynched him back in ’27, and more recently, there was young Cordie Cheek. The community was still raw over Cordie’s killing. The nineteen-year-old had been falsely accused of assaulting the twelve-year-old sister of a white boy he had been fighting with. The boy paid his sister a dollar to tell police that Cordie had tried to rape her, but a grand jury refused to indict and Cordie was released and abducted that same day by county officials, who took him to a cedar tree and hanged him. Julius Blair was well aware that it was Magistrate C. Hayes Denton’s car that had driven Cordie to his death; yet, undeterred, Blair marched into Denton’s office and demanded that Gladys and James Stephenson be released. “Let us have them, Squire,” Blair told him. “We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County.”
    Blair managed to convince the sheriff to release the Stephensons into his custody and arranged for them to be dropped off at his drugstore early that evening. By then, though, blacks in the Bottom had gone past being intimidated by the hooting and honking of armed whites circling the area in cars; they weren’t going to stand passively by this time while another Cordie Cheek lynching unfolded. More than a hundred men, many of them war veterans, took to the streets with guns of their own, determined to fight back at the first sight of a mob moving toward the Bottom. Armed and angry, they told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that they were ready if whites came down to the Bottom. “We fought for freedom overseas,” one told him, “and we’ll fight for it here.”
    True to his word and hoping to avoid any more trouble, the sheriff released the Stephensons that evening, and Blair arranged for the two of them to be whisked out of town, “blankets over their heads” for their protection. “Uptown, they are getting together for something,” Blair told them.
    The nearby white mobs meanwhile did not disperse, and blacks in the Bottom were growing more fearful as the night progressed. Drinking beer and circling in cars, whites fired randomly into “Mink Slide,” as they derisively referred to the Bottom. Blacks, drinking beer on rooftops, were also firing in response and by bad chance hit the cars of both a California tourist and a black undertaker. When half a dozen Columbia police eventually moved into Mink Slide, a crowd of whites followed behind. They were welcomed by shouts of “Here they come!” and “Halt!” and then, in the confusion, came a command, “Fire!” and shots were exploding from all directions. Four police were struck with buckshot before they retreated.
    Reports of the skirmish roused whites around town. Columbia’s former fire chief headed toward Mink Slide with a half gallon of gasoline and the intent to “burn them out,” but he was shot in the leg by Negro snipers as he stole down an alley. With the arrival of state troopers and highway patrol reinforcements, the whites finally outnumbered the blacks and moved into Mink Slide, where they ransacked businesses until dawn, fired machine guns into stores, and rounded up everyone in sight. “You black sons of bitches,” one patrolman shouted, “you had your-alls’ way last night, but we are going to have ours this morning.”
    Just after 6 a.m., gunfire from the street rained into Sol (son of Julius) Blair’s barbershop. “Rooster Bill” Pillow and “Papa” Lloyd Kennedy, hiding in the back, saw armed officers coming and were said to have fired a single shotgun blast before they were overpowered and taken into custody. They were stuffed with other blacks from the Bottom into overcrowded cells at the county jail and interrogated without counsel for days. Two prisoners were shot dead “trying to escape.”
    Mary Morton had watched helplessly as state patrolmen barged into her family’s funeral home on East Eighth Street and arrested her husband. From the street she heard the sound of breaking glass and the building being