Gilbert King

[Devil in the Grove] is a nonfiction book that takes place in Florida the 1940s-50s. It follows a case where four young Black men were accused of raping a white woman when she and her boyfriend find themselves in a broken down car along the side of the road. It is absolutely obvious from the very beginning that these Black men had nothing to do with raping her or injuring the couple in any way. In fact only two of the accused were even on the scene at all - they had stopped briefly to see if show more the couple needed help - but the other two were honestly just the closest Black men at hand to round out the 4 needed to support the woman's accusation. One of the 4 Black men that they try to arrest runs and is killed. The other three will stand trial in Lake County, Florida.

The NAACP gets involved in this case, and Thurgood Marshall as well, so the book includes some detail about Marshall's life. But mainly, the focus is on the trial and the brutal conditions for Black people living in Lake County, Florida. The police brutally coerce confessions from some of the accused men through some of the worst torture you can imagine. The community burns down the family home of one of the accused, Samuel Shepard. They were one of the most successful Black families in the county. During the trial, any evidence that would stand against the prosecution's case is blatantly hidden and not introduced and the local judge supports all of it. Supporting evidence is obviously fabricated. The NAACP defense knows that their only chance is to try for an appeal.

This book also briefly describes other similar trials around the country to show that this is not only happening in Florida. There is a nationwide focus to the book and there are other cases making their way to the Supreme Court concurrently with this case. These parts give a little break to the reader to catch your breath from all the horror happening in Florida.

One of the most evil people (with plenty to choose from in this book) is the Sheriff of Lake County, Willis McCall. There is no way to view this man without complete disgust. I found it unbelievable that he didn't die until 1994 - when I was a sophomore in high school. It's so easy to think about the Jim Crow South as existing in a different era, but that fact connected it to me. These things were happening when my grandparents were adults and my parents were just being born. It's not the distant past. I think books like these make it so obvious why we are still where we are today - with police brutality against Blacks and inequalities in our schools, just to scratch the surface. It's only been 70 years since lynchings were commonplace and there were no rights for Black people in the courts.

Despite this rather long review (for me), I didn't even scratch the surface of what actually happened in this trial or the outcomes for these accused. I think every American should read this book. I think it's vital for us to acknowledge what life was like for Black people in the South in the not so distant past, both because it's part of our history and because it informs what is happening in our country today. show less

This masterful and riveting non-fiction book, subtitled “Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” is about some of the bravest men in the history of this country. It is a useful corrective to anyone who thought (from reading The Help, for instance) that Jim Crow America wasn’t so bad. Or worse, those who thought that what was described in The Help was as bad as it got!

Gilbert King, who has written about U.S. Supreme Court history for both The Washington show more Post and The New York Times, argues that by the mid-1940’s, Thurgood Marshall, the grandson of a mixed-race slave, “was engineering the greatest social transformation in American since the Reconstruction era.” With a rhetorical facility (“benighted towns billeting hostile prosecutors”) that transcends the sobering subject matter, King allows you to forget you are reading non-fiction, but he never allows you to forget you are reading a genuine horror story.

Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues in the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP traveled throughout the South in the 1950’s, trying to fight white supremacy using the weapon of the Constitution. Marshall knew he could not win cases at the local or state level, so his goal became to establish firm grounds for appeals on record. If favorable rulings on equal protection could be obtained in higher courts, these precedents could then be used as additional building blocks for the rights of blacks.

The story of Marshall’s battle is told by a focus on one particular case, that of the Groveland Boys, which was, according to King:

"…key to Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer, willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials, and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes – even if it nearly killed him.”

And he was nearly killed a number of times.

The case of the Groveland Boys made national news at the time, and also had a significant impact upon the NAACP’s goals for future litigation. It took place in Florida, a state that somehow escaped the bad reputation attributed to Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana even though it had a higher per capital lynching rate. King notes that

"In the postwar decade Florida would…prove to be a state with a boundless capacity for racial inhumanity, even by measure of the rest of the South…”

In Groveland, the Klan was populated by lawmen, and blacks had no hope of protection. So it was that when four young black men were arrested for the rape of a young white girl, in spite of the fact that no semen was found in her, or that two of the boys weren’t even in the area that night, a conviction and death penalty for all four boys was a foregone conclusion. Two of the young men were in the area, and they were World War II veterans, the object of particular rancor among white southerners since these veterans no longer were acting subservient enough.

The book describes the horrific events that surrounded this case, including the beatings of suspects and murder of three of them by the sheriff, who managed to remain in office until 1972 when he was finally suspended for kicking to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell; the personal risks with their lives taken by all the defense lawyers; and the jaw-dropping injustice in the courtroom. It also enumerates the pressures on Marshall, who was simultaneously working on arguments for Brown v. Board of Education to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. While desperate stays-of-execution were filed in the Groveland Case, Marshall was forced to respond to the Supreme Court’s order that all five of the segregation cases coalesced into Brown v. Board had to be reargued in terms of the statutory intent of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

It’s an amazing story, and my respect for Marshall increased tremendously as a result of it.

Evaluation: This is a book that should be required reading. This horrifying, edge-of-your-seat tale really happened, and not that long ago. Its repercussions helped make the country what it is today. The author, who unearthed FBI files under seal for sixty years, has done an outstanding job in telling this story which manages to be heart-breaking, inspiring, infuriating, and admirable all at once. show less

Thurgood Marshall is a prominent figure in the Civil Rights world. Most know he was the lead attorney who argued the Brown vs. Board of Education case that changed the face of racial integration in schools. But most don't know his early work for the NAACP, much of which was focused on racially significant criminal cases. This book highlights the case of three men falsely accused of raping a white woman in Florida, and the racial unrest that surrounded it. The level of racism and violence in show more Florida in mid-century America was stunning. Everyone hears about Mississippi and Alabama, but somehow Florida doesn't get the infamy it deserves. While the underlying case and Marshall's work require notice, the book is too disconnected because Gilbert King loops the chronology of events back around several time to pick up contextual information, some of which is not strictly necessary to understand the narrative. Not a bad book, but I can think of others I'd recommend before this one that highlight stories of the Civil Rights Movement. show less

(7) This was an excellent and chilling portrait of Jim Crow Florida. I had read about this case through the J Edgar Hoover biography I read last year which is what prompted me to get this Pulitzer-Prize winning narrative non-fiction. This was an exploration of the Groveland case and Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's role in defending the accused men. It takes place in central Florida, amid the orange groves, in the 1940's when segregation was the law and order. Enforced by show more extra-judicial threats and lynching by the KKK which often contained many of the citizens that were supposed to protect the community. Four black men, 2 of them veterans, one a teenager are accused of raping a white girl - a capital crime given some creepy fetish of exalting Southern white women's purity.

The book does an excellent job setting the scene and trying to recreate events although he never tries to present anything he doesn't know for sure as fact leading to certain gaps in the story of the night in question. The men are hunted down, confessions are beaten out of them, evidence manufactured, there is an attempted lynching and later in the book certainly a murder by law enforcement that goes unpunished due to the complicity of cracker white supremacy. It is truly sickening.

One of the worst parts of this book are seeing the attitudes reflected in the people of today. I have family that lives in that part of Florida. I hear the things the State's politicians say - "where woke goes to die." It seems a chilling echo of this legacy. As one of the NAACP lawyers says in the book - "They have just taken their hoods off."

The book escapes a higher rating from me only because it felt long. I really enjoyed learning more about Thurgood Marshall and the other cases he tried, but some parts about the NAACP politics etc were a drag. At times the book was not engaging.

Anyway, this book is deserving of its Pulitzer Prize and I think should be required reading in any US History course. The one thing I do know is that I never want to step foot in the State of Florida again. I'll be damned if if ever give them another dime of my vacation budget. show less