Devil in the Grove

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm old enough that I became aware of Thurgood Marshall first as a Supreme Court justice--one of the two stalwart liberals on the court in the '80s. At some point (college?) I learned that he was also the lawyer who won Brown vs. Board of Education, which amazed me as it seemed like enough accomplishment for a lifetime, not a precursor to a long career.

This book goes back a step earlier in his career, pre-Brown, when he travelled the country as a senior NAACP lawyer, taking not only desegregation cases but also being one of the few men who would stand up in court for black criminal defendants being railroaded. It opens with him somehow getting an acquittal for black defendants accused after a riot, then getting out of town without being killed--a real danger in this case. Because their remit was not to be a general legal aid society, and because they had limited resources, he and his colleagues took only cases in which they believed the accused were innocent. Sadly there was no shortage of those in the late '40s, and the main narrative in the book centers on an egregious one in Florida.

The above makes it sound like this book is mostly about Marshall, which is what I thought when I started reading it. But it is at least as much about the corrupt sheriff Willie McCall. The book is written as such a gripping narrative that telling much about the case would feel like giving away spoilers for a seventy-year old series of events. But I will say I'm so used to civil rights narratives being framed as a story of triumphant progress that it took me a long time to realize, quite horribly, that the George Martin quote applied here: "If you think this is going to have a happy ending, you aren't paying attention." It has it's lighter moments and successes, and it's a story of an underdog fighting for justice, grippingly told, but it's not a feel-good book.

My only complaint is the flip side of it being such a good read--it's often written as a breathless you-are-there-narrative, not history. You read about what Marshall was thinking when he faced a probable lynching (roughly "It is never a good thing for a black man in a police car when the officers turn onto a dirt road at night") but it to get the source you need to look up the footnote (Marshall himself, in this case) and there's certainly no discussion about whether I should completely believe the story or maybe 90% believe it because maybe Marshall told a different version another time?

But this is a quibble. Even if you discounted everything that wasn't a matter of public record or agreed to by unsympathetic witnesses there's enough of interest and outrage to make this a phenomenal read.