This superb book recently won a Pulitzer. It is subtitled 'Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America'. Half of it is the background story of the life of the hard-driving, hard-living son of a railroad porter who changed American legal history. He graduated from Howard Law School and had won his first case for the NAACP before the Supreme Court at the age of 32. He was famous for and was the mastermind of the NAACP's assault on Plessey v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that allowed 'separate but equal' to be the legal foundation of the Jim Crow south. Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund that he supervised spent over a decade in their challenges and eventually prevailed in May, 1957 in Brown v. Board of Education.
Concurrent with that civil effort was a career spent traveling south and representing blacks in criminal matters. The depth of prejudice in the southern judicial system was such that obtaining a life sentence in a capital case was considered a victory. It was a judicial system in which it was common for the defendants and lawyers to be referred to as boys or niggers. When he arrived for a trial, the local blacks would shuttle him from home to home to protect him from the KKK and others.
The story told in this book is of the prosecution and persecution of four blacks in Lake County, Florida in the late 40's and early 50's. A young white woman, of relatively low repute, asserted after a night of drinking with her dissolute, on-again, off-again husband, that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint and raped by four blacks. She had not been raped and two of the four were not even within miles of her and her husband. The local sheriff, Willis McCall, got his boys together, busted up the shanties the local black fruit-pickers lived in, and arrested two local men and a young boy. After merciless beatings, they confessed. The fourth was tracked down, shot in a swamp, and his body dropped in a river. Justice was miscarried throughout a kangaroo trial, with a hanging judge who overruled every defense motion and objection, while he whittled on the bench. Marshall joined the appeal and had the conviction overturned. The second trial was now a national news phenomenon that ended with the same result. Years later, a Florida governor, with an eye toward northern tourism, would commute a death sentence to life. The beatings, the bigotry, the hatred, the bombing and murder of interested parties, the shot 'while trying to escape', the intimidation of witnesses and journalists, the threats, the cloaking of it all in legality, the sheer stupidity of it all is not what shocks. It's the fact that it happened all on one case, not in isolated instances. And the sheriff who did all of this between 1948 and 1955, ignored the FBI, evaded justice and wasn't voted out of office until 1972. There are moments in this book, when you almost think the author is making it up. I highly recommend it.
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