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

Winner
of the Pulitzer Prize

"A must-read, cannot-put-down history." -- Thomas
Friedman, New York Times

Arguably the most important

American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of

bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before

the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to

change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

In 1949, Florida's orange

industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow

labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with

murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall

pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the

groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who

came to be known as "the Groveland Boys."

Associates thought it was

suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the

young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats

against him.

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,

Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.