Devil in the grove
Subtitle: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the dawn of a new America
By: Gilbert King
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Harper; Harper Perennial
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 434
ISBN-13: 9780061792281; 9780061792267; 9780062097712
Subjects: Race relations; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Discrimination in criminal justice administration; Civil rights; African Americans; Rape; HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
Description: 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 the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader against a heroic backdrop.--From publisher description.
Table of contents: title: Prologue; title: Mink slide; title: Sugar Hill; title: Get to pushin'; title: Nigger in a pit; title: Trouble fixin' to start; title: A little Bolita; title: Wipe this place clean; title: A Christmas card; title: Don't shoot, white man; title: Quite a hose wielder; title: Bad egg; title: Atom masher; title: In any fight some fall; title: My own curiosity; title: You have pissed in my whiskey; title: It's a funny thing; title: No man alive or to be born; title: All over the place, like rats; title: Knows more law; title: A genius here before us; title: The colored way; title: A place in the sun; title: Epilogue.