The other two were badly beaten many times but no one was ever charged with the beatings. Sheriff McCall killed two of the men while in his custody. King’s research shows that there was no physical evidence and two of the Groveland Four were not even within a day’s drive of the area Padgett claimed the rape took place. The book is about four black men falsely accused of raping Normal Lee Padgett, a 17 year old white woman in Groveland Florida in 1949. He documents in detail the reign of terror conducted in Lake County by the KKK and Sheriff Willis McCall who is portrayed as a ruthless brutal man. Gilbert King did a lot of research to write the story he goes into painstaking detail about the tactics used by Thurgood Marshall (future Supreme Court Judge) and his co-NAACP attorney Franklin Williams to chip away at the foundations of the Jim Crow Law.
“Devil in the Grove” won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys".Īssociates 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.ĭrawing 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. When a White 17-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young Black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. 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. Board of Education before the US Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and to cost him his life. “A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” (Thomas Friedman, New York Times )Īrguably the most important American lawyer of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v.
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