Devil in the Grove: the Groveland Boys and
the Dawn of a New America by
Gilbert King. Library Call Number: KF224.G76K56 2012.
From
the liner notes: In 1949, Florida's orange industry was
booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland
girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young
blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan
rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps.
So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known
as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the 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 and Marshall had endured 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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