Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

AuthorGwynn, Ellen B.
PositionBook review

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

By Gilbert King

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Between 1946 and 1952, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall spent a lot of time working on a criminal case in Lake County, Florida, where four black men had been falsely accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. Her despicable act set in motion a racist firestorm that would kill two of the defendants, terrorize the many African-Americans who lived in the area, and summon a remarkable amount of courage in the attorneys and civil rights activists who labored to ensure that the defendants were given a fair trial. They never were.

Lawyers who read this riveting book, which recently won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, will be ashamed of the role played by law enforcement and the courts. They did not simply fail to preserve the integrity of the justice system for these defendants, but acted in concert to deny the defendants any pretense of a presumption of innocence and due process. The critical nature of some of the evidence excluded from the trial or never made known to the defense, the ridiculous nature of some of the evidence admitted, the prosecutorial misconduct permitted, the collusion between law enforcement, state government, the trial judge, and the coroner, etc., show that the rule of law did not exist in Lake County for the Groveland Boys. The redeeming facets of this otherwise heartbreaking story are the slow but steady victories scored by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, and the cracks in the edifice of racism shown by some of the participants who began to realize that the system was rotten and the...

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