I've been reading the 2013 Pulitzer winner, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King. It centers on a 1949 case in Florida similar to the Scottsboro boys in Alabama, at a time when any white person's word was taken over any black's, and a white woman crying rape would almost inevitably lead to a lynching. The trouble also sprang from the economic conditions at the time: Citrus growers depended on peonage, with the KKK and violent lawmen like Lake County's sheriff, Willis McCall (who held that elected office until 1972), to keep local black labor in line. The book covers Marshall & the NAACP's efforts to keep the falsely accused Groveland Boys out of the electric chair and to advance civil rights in general.
King tracked down unredacted FBI files and much other material that hadn't till now seen the light of day, to write a suspenseful & chilling account of this incident & the great Thurgood Marshall, rightly known as Mr Civil Rights.
King tracked down unredacted FBI files and much other material that hadn't till now seen the light of day, to write a suspenseful & chilling account of this incident & the great Thurgood Marshall, rightly known as Mr Civil Rights.