Devil in the Grove
| Author | Gilbert King |
|---|---|
| Published | 2012 |
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America is a 2012 non-fiction book by the American author Gilbert King. It is a history of the attorney Thurgood Marshall's defense of four young black men in Lake County, Florida, who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. They were known as the Groveland Boys. Marshall led a team from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Published by Harper, the book was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Pulitzer Committee described it as "a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice."
In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of African-American laborers, who worked under Jim Crow laws, had been disfranchised by the state constitution since the turn of the century, and struggled for justice in the white supremacist state. The planters relied on Sheriff Willis V. McCall to keep order in Lake County, where he was known for his harsh actions against blacks. A white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl said she had been raped by blacks, and McCall soon arrested four young African-American men.
Thurgood Marshall, known as "Mr. Civil Rights", and one of the most important American lawyers of the twentieth century, entered the fray, representing the suspects for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The US Supreme Court overturned the convictions and returned the case to the state for retrial. Members of the Ku Klux Klan came to town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, intent on lynching the young men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys". The Ku Klux Klan initiated a wave of violence, shooting two of the defendants and killing one.
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