Reading Between the Lines
Historic court case gives rise to legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
by Chuck Wisman
Thurgood Marshall ultimately argued the Groveland case twice before the U.S. Supreme Court—a case that ultimately helped set the stage for the nascent civil rights era. Image credit: Amazon.com
“Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” by Gilbert King, is a gripping page-turner even as a work of historical nonfiction. It was a New York Times bestseller (2012) and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, as a “distinguished and appropriately documented book of nonfiction by an American author.”
The book chronicles the story of four young Black men falsely accused of rape by a young white woman in the Jim Crow South, specifically the orange groves of Lake County in central Florida. The story begins in 1949 when Lake County was in the grip of an active Ku Klux Klan and a racist county sheriff, Willis V. McCall, and his deputies. Often, at that time and in that place, the line between membership in law enforcement and the KKK was blurred or nonexistent. Sheriff McCall viciously ruled over Lake County on behalf of the citrus farm owners who enriched themselves on the backs of Jim Crow labor.
Minorities were drawn to the area for the abundant field work, picking oranges and other crops. Under the prevailing laws of Jim Crow, “separate but equal” prevailed in 1949 and well into the 1950s and beyond. Segregation in restaurants, housing, courts, health care, education, and society at large was strictly enforced. Although separate, it was anything but equal. In this atmosphere and environment, three Black men stopped to assist a young white couple who had car trouble late at night. The encounter dramatically changed the lives of four Black men—two of whom were army veterans—as well as the lives of many others after the woman, Norma Lee Padgett, falsely accused the men of rape.
Gilbert King writes an engrossing story of extrajudicial murders, torture, bombings, mob rule, arson, and rampant racism. Into this maelstrom waded a young attorney, Thurgood Marshall. You may remember him from your history books, as Marshall later became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the case of the Lake County trial, Marshall refused “to shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him.”
The author uses passages like the following to describe what occurred at the subsequent criminal trial in Lake County:
“[Padgett] had that look—chin held high, lips pursed—when in her best dress [she] slowly rose from the witness box to identify for the jury the three Groveland, Florida, boys whom she had accused of rape. Her pale finger extended, it dipped from boy to boy as she spoke out each name, like a young school teacher counting heads in class, and in her breathy cadence sent a chill through the courtroom.‘… the nig— Shepard … the nig— Irvin … the nig— Greenlee …’”
King also made this now famous comparison: “And like Harper Lee’s heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, Thurgood Marshall found himself at the center of a firestorm.”
Marshall ultimately argued the Groveland case twice before the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s fair to say this case helped set the stage for the nascent civil rights era.
“Devil in the Grove” contains numerous photographs of the participants and various aspects of the criminal case, which help bring the reality of the story to life. It is a depiction of one of our most legendary Supreme Court justices in the pursuit of justice on the cusp of one of his most famous cases as a young attorney—the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
This book is both compelling and provocative, and highly recommended. Be forewarned, readers will confront the N word liberally in quoted court testimony and the speech of KKK members and law enforcement officials of the time. Many events described in the book are most certainly disturbing, yet they accurately depict the reality of race relations in central Florida at the time.
While reading “Devil in the Grove,” readers would do well to recall the old quote, “If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.”
Note: Read the book to find out why four men were accused but only three were tried. The book is available through the Stockbridge Library.
Chuck Wisman still resides locally on the family farm and is retired from state government after almost 40 years of service.
