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

ammunition to red-baiting southern congressmen and senators, who would have loved nothing better than to paint us pink.” For all that, neither McCarthy’s list nor the HUAC’s unduly upset Marshall, who later said, “If you were a Negro and you were not on both of those lists, you should blow your brains out.”
    That the eyes of the nation were fixed on Paul Robeson and the Peekskill riots late in the summer of 1949 afforded Marshall some relief, for it kept the CRC more fully occupied with its own affairs and thus less disposed or able to insert itself into the Groveland case as it had in the trials of the Scottsboro Boys. Supposedly, “Franklin Williams had falsely accused [the CRC] of trying to steal the case” in Groveland. The accusation may have been false but Williams’s suspicions would have been justified, for it would not by any means have been the first case the CRC had tried to steal from the NAACP.
    In May 1949, seven young black men in Virginia confessed to the rape of a white woman, and in a series of six trials over a period of eleven days, each one of the “Martinsville Seven” was convicted and sentenced to death. Only after the trials did the NAACP enter the case, at the request of relatives to the condemned men. Sensitive though Marshall was to the fact that the NAACP did not function as a legal aid society, he was equally attuned to opportunities for the establishment of important legal precedents through the process of appeals. The death sentences of the Martinsville Seven offered apparent grounds for appeal in that since 1908, when the state of Virginia instituted use of the electric chair, all forty-five of the men executed for rape had been blacks convicted in attacks on white women. Problems arose when one of the wives of the Martinsville Seven agreed to allow the CRC to represent her husband in an appeal. Marshall was livid.
    Marshall and Patterson were deeply divided in their philosophies on both legal tactics and civil rights. Marshall particularly resented the CRC’s strategy in high-profile capital cases, which, he believed, “was to go into the local community, spit on the door of the courthouse, cuss at the judge and raise holy cain—and, incidentally, get the men electrocuted.” In Marshall’s eyes, the CRC existed and operated primarily to raise money, lots of it, for the communist cause—by calling attention to racial and economic oppression under American capitalism and “giv[ing] foreign governments something they can yell about.” Unlike the NAACP, the CRC did not apply the bulk of the funds it raised for the actual defense of its clients, what with the production of leaflets, advertising on billboards, and fashioning of “high-powered petitions that the jury will never read” commanding significant expenditures. Patterson, for his part, maintained that nationwide awareness was vital and that “only the movement of the people as a whole guarantees a victory.” Nonetheless, Marshall contended, a noisy mass campaign led by an organization that had been cited as subversive and communist by the Truman administration could only be detrimental to the defendants in appeals to higher courts. Ultimately, Patterson pulled the CRC from the defense of the Martinsville Seven. He chose instead to maximize publicity for the case—and raise consciousness of the communist cause—without risking a possible loss in court.
    There was no love lost between Marshall and Patterson, personally or professionally. They exchanged letters, and on occasion they attended meetings held by interested third parties hoping to broker a treaty between their two organizations—a futile effort, as both men were equally entrenched in their positions and fiercely committed to their opposing principles. Their relationship was further strained, since both men happened to live at the same address, 409 Edgecombe, in Harlem, although Marshall’s demanding travel schedule limited possibilities of chance encounters, or contention, with Patterson in New York. Of course, Patterson did his own share of traveling, and that late summer of 1949 he was more than contemplating a trip to Groveland. Marshall issued a warning to his neighbor: “These cases, the Groveland cases and any other cases under the jurisdiction of this Association will be carried forward in a lawfullike [ sic ] manner with the lawful machinery of our Government. We have never been convinced that the Civil Rights Congress is primarily