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

been on the bus with Woodard; the student identified Shull as the arresting officer. With that the NAACP immediately began publicizing Woodard’s story. When Walter White met with President Harry Truman during “that terrible summer of 1946” after several high-profile lynchings of black soldiers in the South had caught the nation’s attention, Truman “exploded” on being informed that the state of South Carolina had simply dismissed the Woodard incident. Truman ordered the Justice Department to investigate; the indictments of Shull and his officers followed shortly thereafter.
    The blinding of Isaac Woodard enraged the public. Orson Welles campaigned on his radio broadcasts for punishment of the police officers; Woody Guthrie recorded “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” To raise awareness further, the NAACP sent Woodard on a national tour with Franklin Williams to speak about the soldier’s beating and blinding at the hands of police. The pair made an unforgettable impression. Woodard, who had begun to regain his memory, was initially terrified to address an audience he could not see, but from the outset of the tour his account of the pride he felt at serving his country in the Pacific, which earned him a Battle Star and a Good Conduct Medal, deeply stirred his audience, as did the poignant rendering of his anticipation as he boarded the bus, believing he was only hours away from seeing his wife, and then his desolation over the loss of his memory and sight. The soldier was “a good platform person,” according to Williams, who would follow Woodard’s story with a passionate appeal for funds.
    Williams was good on the platform, too. Thin and handsome, with a chiseled face and dark, deep-set eyes, he dressed in sharp, tailored suits, often with a bow tie and fedora. What he lacked in experience the urbane young lawyer more than made up for in confidence, and his substantial intelligence matched his forceful presence. Williams perfectly projected the NAACP’s desired public image. As the newest attorney on a staff that included Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, and Constance Baker Motley, Williams was proving himself a worthy addition in his tireless advocacy on behalf of Isaac Woodard. When Woodard and Williams appeared at Harlem’s Lewisohn Stadium, at a rally cochaired by heavyweight fighter Joe Louis, twenty thousand people attended, and the event pulled in more than twenty-two thousand dollars for Woodard’s aid and an “antimob violence fund.”
    The case against Woodard’s attackers was less successful, and Williams witnessed Southern justice as he sat beside Isaac Woodard in court. The judge in the trial, a proponent of civil rights, was so outraged by the U.S. attorney’s inept and uninspired efforts to make a case against the defendants that he declared it “disgraceful.” Adding insult to injury, Shull’s defense lawyers outright shouted racial epithets at Woodard in the courtroom. The jury needed not even a half hour to find Shull and the police not guilty on all charges; the gallery burst into applause.
    Williams could barely believe what he had witnessed. Marshall had always returned from his trips down south with colorful stories of crazy sheriffs, violent mobs, and vicious death threats, and Williams had laughed at Marshall’s mockery along with the rest of the legal staff in the comfort of the NAACP’s midtown offices. But Williams could find nothing funny in his acquaintance with that Southern landscape. The stories he could tell of his experiences with Woodard below the Mason-Dixon Line would, Williams said, “make your hair stand on end.”
    Still, Williams was beginning to appreciate Marshall’s strategy in regard to criminal cases in the South, where local law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and juries all guaranteed that the scales of justice would tip in favor of white supremacy. You fought, as Marshall repeatedly reminded his staff, so that you lived to fight another day, whether by filing an appeal to a higher court or simply by recognizing that when an all-white jury handed a black defendant a life sentence instead of the death penalty, you had in a sense won, because the jurors believed your client to be innocent. For Marshall, the fight was never over with a jury’s verdict. For him the Supreme Court was as level a playing field as you’d find in the land: that was the courtroom he wanted to fight in. Williams, too.
    Yet here Williams was, on a plane, heading