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Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Gilbert King
Harper Perennial
April 2013
On Sale: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 0061792268 EAN: 9780061792267 Kindle: B005MMO0IY Hardcover / e-Book
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Thriller True Crime | Non-Fiction History
Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth
century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the
landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S.
Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and
deadly case that threatened to change the course of the
civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus
barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To
maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall,
a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous
resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl
cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young
blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond
the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled
into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and
chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the
young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.” And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood
Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the
deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to
wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was
irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but
the lawyer would not shrink from the fight—not after the
Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates
involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual
threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material,
including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well
as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund
files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights
crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the
heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice
Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one
of the worst menaces to American justice.”
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