Devil in the Grove

Gilbert King reconstructs the 1949 case of the Groveland Boys, four young Black men in Lake County, Florida accused of raping a white woman on evidence that quickly collapses under scrutiny, and the campaign Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund waged to save them from a legal system determined to convict regardless. King draws on previously unpublished FBI files and NAACP archives to reconstruct events that local authorities had every reason to keep buried: a coerced confession, a rushed trial, and Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who later shot two of the defendants while transporting them between jails, killing one and leaving the other permanently wounded, and claimed he was defending himself against an escape attempt.

King sets this single case against the wider, often violent machinery of Jim Crow Florida, including the Ku Klux Klan's open intimidation campaign in Lake County and the 1951 bombing that killed NAACP organizer Harry T. Moore and his wife in their own home, a killing for which no one was ever charged, though a Florida state investigation named four Klansmen, all long dead, in 2006. Running alongside the Groveland case is Marshall's own ascent within the NAACP, the personal toll of a legal career built almost entirely on cases the system was rigged against him winning, years before he would argue Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court he later joined.

King writes the book with the pacing of a courtroom thriller while staying anchored to primary documents throughout, and the Christian Science Monitor called the result suspenseful and historically meticulous at once. It suits a reader drawn to civil rights history told through one specific, largely forgotten case rather than through the more familiar landmark decisions, and to the men who fought it while the country's legal machinery worked against them at every turn.