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

ransacked. A short time later she saw the same officers, laughing and joking, return to the street. Once they were out of sight, Morton went inside to discover the parlor furniture broken and slashed, clothes torn to pieces, and the entire interior doused with embalming fluid. With horror, she laid eyes on a defaced casket. Photographed soon after, the image of that casket would be published in newspapers across the country and ultimately come to symbolize the Columbia riot of 1946. Across its lid, in large letters, “KKK” was crudely scrawled in chalk.
    Mary Morton tried to pick up the phone, but patrolmen caught her, cursed her, and threatened to throw the phone out on the street. Police had declared war on the black citizens of Columbia, and the highway patrolmen, instead of trying to bring order to the town, had joined in with vigilante mobs. The Tennessee State Guard had cordoned off the area, but they did nothing to stop the destruction and violence in Mink Slide. The Maury County jail had become a deadly destination for Mary Morton’s husband and other leaders of the black community. Officials would soon shut down telephone service into and out of Mink Slide, but not before Mary Morton managed to make her call. After the police moved on, she phoned a friend in Nashville. She implored him to get word to the NAACP immediately.
    Nine hundred miles north, in New York, a lanky lawyer in suspenders was called into a meeting. He grabbed his coffee and settled into a chair. He heard another all-too-familiar story of violence and cruelty in the South, and he knew that once again order would be restored, as always, with blacks’ “blood running in the gutters.” An editorial in the Columbia Daily Herald proclaimed that the “situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. . . . The white people of the South . . . will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be.” In Marshall’s early days at the NAACP, emergency meetings would sometimes end with the unfurling of the ill-omened black flag, alerting New Yorkers that yet another man had been lynched. The flag’s gloomy stain over the city usually meant that Marshall would be back on a train, alone, again riding toward trouble.
    And nine hundred miles south, in Columbia, Tennessee, where the town’s blacks were holed up in their homes and jail cells, there rose whispers of relief: the lawyer was coming.

    T HE TWELVE whitemen on the jury took their seats in the box, and the foreman rose to announce the verdict against Rooster Bill Pillow for shooting and wounding a state highway patrolman. The courtroom was still.
    “Not guilty.”
    Marshall, Looby, and Weaver sat in quiet shock. In the last acquittals, Weaver had loudly slapped a defendant’s knee in excitement and leapt from his chair to shake hands with jurors who appeared to be just as stunned as everyone else in the courtroom. “This makes me proud to be an American!” he’d shouted. Marshall wanted no celebratory outbursts this time.
    Papa Kennedy’s verdict was next. Marshall was expecting Kennedy would be going to jail, for unlike Pillow, Kennedy had been surly and impudent throughout the trial—at one point telling Bumpus to “shut up” in open court. But the jury rejected the charge of attempted murder and convicted Kennedy on a lesser count that enabled him to leave the courthouse free on bail.
    Marshall and his lawyers rose from their seats, wanting nothing more than to leave town quickly. Because of the constant threats and concerns for his safety, Marshall had been staying in Nashville, almost fifty miles to the north, and driving back and forth each day with Looby and Weaver. Tagging along was reporter Harry Raymond, who’d been covering the trial for the Daily Worker , a New York newspaper published by the Communist Party of the USA. He described the moments after the verdict as tense, and he expected “something serious, something of a violent nature, to happen.” On his way to telegraph the verdict to his newspaper, Raymond noticed one agitated, heavyset spectator rushing out the doors and declaring that something must be done about the failure of the jury to convict.
    Raymond knew the NAACP lawyers had been threatened with lynching, and had been told their