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

(anticommunist) patriotism. At the same time, Marshall’s gravitas and popularity with the press exerted pressure on Hoover to reshape the image of the FBI as a government agency with no commitment to the civil rights of blacks. Each man uttered his public statements about the other’s organization with politic caution.
    Behind the discreet public statements, though, lay decades of tension. Marshall had seen, time and again, the FBI arrive at the scene in the aftermath of a lynching, and time and again leave without any suspects. Moreover, Marshall had learned, the bureau’s agents in the aftermath of a lynching evinced so much antagonism toward the black victims and witnesses that the latter simply would not talk to the FBI, out of fear that any information they provided would be relayed to local law enforcement and thus put their lives in danger. Marshall had aired his complaints against the FBI in an appearance before the President’s Committee on Civil Rights: “You don’t investigate a lynching in the same way you investigate a hot automobile. . . . You have more local feeling to overcome. You have more unwillingness of people to talk.” Agents, he said, needed special training, and most important, Marshall stated, they must “themselves believe in the enforcement of civil rights.”
    After a black army veteran, Isaac Woodard, had been beaten and blinded in South Carolina in early 1946, Marshall seethed when he was yet again informed that an FBI investigation had been unable to acquire sufficient evidence to pursue the case further. That summer had borne witness to a rash of lynchings across the South—all of which had gone unsolved (if not uninvestigated)—and a frustrated Marshall wrote a letter to Tom C. Clark, asking the attorney general to investigate the bureau itself. “The FBI has established for itself an uncomparable [ sic ] record for ferreting out persons violating our federal laws. . . . [This] extends from the prosecution of vicious spies and saboteurs . . . to nondescript hoodlums who steal automobiles and drive them across state lines. On the other hand, the FBI has been unable to identify or bring to trial persons charged with federal statutes where Negroes are the victims.”
    Clark, in turn, forwarded Marshall’s letter to Hoover. Furious, the FBI director fired back, “I have found from previous dealings with [Marshall] that he is more careless to the truth and facts in the charges which he makes against the FBI.” He added, “I believe that Mr. Marshall’s obvious hostility to the Bureau dominates the thinking of his associates in the legal operation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Hoover then challenged Marshall to provide specific names of Southerners who believed they had been wronged by the FBI—a challenge Marshall refused to meet.
    By all accounts, Hoover cringed at the start of every civil rights investigation, before “rushing pell-mell” into them at the urging of “vociferous minority groups.” Satisfied that the FBI had put together a very strong case for prosecutors, with “clear-cut, uncontroverted evidence of conspiracy” in lynchings, Hoover himself became apprehensive of Southern courtroom justice when all-white juries either acquitted defendants or refused to indict suspects altogether. For it was the bureau that bore the brunt of criticism in such cases, not the prosecutors or juries who chose to ignore sound evidence. In Hoover’s estimation, such cases, perceived by the public as losses, weakened the FBI’s reputation.
    When Walter White attempted to arrange a meeting between Marshall and Hoover in the hope that they might come to a truce, Marshall was not optimistic. “I . . . have no faith in either Mr. Hoover or his investigators,” he wrote to White, “and there is no use in my saying I do.” Hoover simply refused to meet. White persisted, however; in the face of the mounting anticommunist fervor he felt the NAACP needed to be viewed by the FBI as a bastion of democracy, not as a target. In April 1947, putting together an NAACP anticommunism position pamphlet, White requested a patriotic encomium from J. Edgar Hoover, who replied that it would be his “pleasure.” Hoover offered: “Equality, freedom and tolerance are essential in a democratic government. The NAACP has done so much to preserve these principles and to perpetuate the desires of our founding fathers.” A few months later, White