Just Finished Reading Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

I just finished reading Gilbert King's historical work Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.  Published in 2012, it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year.  It's an account, earlier in Marshall's career before his tenure on the United States Supreme Court, of when he was an NAACP lawyer defending blacks across the country, and of a case in Jim Crow-segregated central Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s where four young black man were framed in a white supremist justice system for a rape that probably never happened.  Called the Groveland Four case after the southern Lake County town at the epicenter, King examines the deeply entrenched racism of the white community there at that time, with an extremely corrupt, racist sheriff and deputy who would stoop to any level to see to it that Charles Greenlee, Earnest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin would be executed for their alleged crimes.  If Marshall represented the virtuous, rescuing hero of this story then Sheriff Willis McCall would be the archvillain, closely tied in with the Ku Klux Klan and illegal gambling operations in the area.  On one evening outside Groveland, a poor rural white married couple, the Padgetts, got their car stuck in the mud...Shepherd and Irvin were together driving by, and stopped to help them get their car free.  Unsuccessful, the husband, Willie, got angry at them and after insulting them got on the short end of a fist fight with Shepherd.  That was the incident that later was turned into a gang rape allegation...the other two eventual defendants were nowhere near at the time and were sucked into the case by McCall.  Thomas, hearing that he was being accused of this capital offense, fled to the north Florida woods while the other three, while in detention, were beaten and whipped into forced confessions by deputy Yates and his partner...with McCall looking on.  I'll save relating the fates of these four innocent black men, two of them brave, returning World War II veterans, in case you decide to read or research the case for yourself.  Instead I'll discuss how the author chose to present it...

Gilbert King split his analysis of the Groveland Four case into sections whereby he described Thurmond Marshall's philosophy of defense and his different partners and associates within the NAACP, as well as his communications and relationships with the FBI, Florida governors, and the judges and prosecution.  The endemic racism of the South...and of Lake County, Florida in particular...of that time was emphasized as King related incidences of previous horrific lynchings of blacks.  This was crucial to the story as it showed the defense strategy Marshall would employ in trying to save his clients from the electric chair.  The citrus growers would use cheap black prison labor in their groves...Sheriff McCall would see to it that he provided the necessary bodies. The author also presented the corruption and ties to the KKK of the local law enforcement as well as the inherent racism of the local justice system at the time through the principals involved.  And of course, the sequence of events that first led up to the arrests and what followed to the end was revealed through the course of the book.  This is not one of your "whitewashed" Yankee Doodle Dandy American history texts that paint our past in generally idealized terms, but rather is an important testament to the underlying reasons for the racial divisions still plaguing our society in this Black Lives Matter era...I recommend it although its content is very disturbing and pulls no punches about the extreme violence that happened: if you're white and grew up in Lake County back then you most definitely enjoyed a much different experience than if your skin had been of a darker hue...