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

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Call Number: Black Studies 305.896 Ki, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Social Science / Race & Ethnicity / King, Gilbert
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Black Studies 305.896 Ki	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Social Science / Race & Ethnicity / King, Gilbert	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Social Science / Race & Ethnicity / King, Gilbert	4-week checkout	Due 05-22-2024

Prologue -- Mink slide -- Sugar Hill -- Get to pushin' -- Nigger in a pit -- Trouble fixin' to start -- A little Bolita -- Wipe this place clean -- A Christmas card -- Don't shoot, white man -- Quite a hose wielder -- Bad egg -- Atom masher -- In any fight some fall -- My own curiosity -- You have pissed in my whiskey -- It's a funny thing -- No man alive or to be born -- All over the place, like rats -- Knows more law -- A genius here before us -- The colored way -- A place in the sun -- Epilogue.
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.

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Phenomenal submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on August 22, 2015, 8:36pm I feel like I win for getting this on my book club's reading list! LOL (They asked for nonfiction ideas, I offered this, and enough people liked the idea for it to make it onto the list for September.)

Here is what I absolutely love about this book: as a society, we (well, especially White folks) are mostly taught that the Civil Rights movement happened in the 1960's. We learn about Rosa Parks and MLK. (See, the Civil Rights movement was about *individuals*!) If we learn a few more names, we might know who Emmett Till and Medgar Evers were. Maybe we are educated a little further and know about the organizations, and know a little about SNCC and the SCLC. But it was still all Mississippi and Alabama and the 1960's, right?

It wasn't. The fight for equal rights in this country started decades earlier, and spanned a much wider area. It was ordinary people who were treated extraordinarily horribly, day after day, year after year. It was a business model that needed downtrodden laborers, and used fear and violence to keep them in their place. It was Black servicemen who returned from WWII and had experienced life with something closer to equality, and believed, rightfully, that they deserved this in the country they fought for as well. It was communities of Whites that "had" to place blame when something went wrong, and any Black body nearby was good enough to serve as justice.

Civil Rights as we know it started in the 1940's and '50's, and one of the hotbeds was Florida. This book lays out one compelling and horrifying legal journey and makes it come alive. It gives enough background that we understand the broader picture. It fills in enough drama that it's hard to put down. The players were real. The writing was well done.

If you have any interest in Florida, history, Civil Rights, the legal system, or simply a compelling human interest story, I highly recommend this.