By Vermont Interfaith Action
Dear VIA leaders and friends,
You are cordially invited to hear a talk by Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America on Wednesday, April 24. Mr. King is coming to Vermont to describe his experience writing about the institutional racism in America’s judicial system and to have a larger conversation about racism in America.
You will have two opportunities to hear Mr. King on Wed, April 24th:
- At the Statehouse in Montpelier from 12 to 1 pm in the Senate Chamber
- At UVM’s Waterman Building in Burlington from 6:30-8 pm in the Memorial Lounge
Both events are free and open to the public. They are not sponsored by Vermont Interfaith Action, but we are making information about them available as a courtesy to an ally.
More information about Mr. King’s book:
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
By Gilbert King
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 an explosive and deadly 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. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.”
And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the deadly 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 involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual 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 unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”