On Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King was a gripping true story of disturbing injustice to black residents of Florida. The book places heavy focus on then-civil rights lawyer, now-known-as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in his role as special counsel to the NAACP. I’ll note that, while these events took place in the late 1940s/early 1950s, a posthumous acquittal was issued as recently as 2021.  

This story is made all the more haunting by its verity. It’s also a scary reminder of the descent towards hate our state has come to and is spiraling towards. 70+ years ago, Florida had a record high of lynchings nationwide: “Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana….a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country,” (p127). It makes you wonder why most Floridians don't know this shocking truth.

An important note here is that the racism we talk about today is discussed as isolated racism, not white supremacy. But it is. It is not just about color, it’s a grotesque idea of genetic superiority by white Christians above anyone who is not both of those. Furthermore, today’s political pundits on the far right/those who use dog whistles to normalize white supremacies rhetoric use similar language the murderer and eight term Sheriff Willis McCall used when describing civil rights advocates: “part of the Communistic element trying to tear down racial relations; trying to separate the races instead of bringing them together,” (p219) going so far as to say the “Grand Dragon of the Southern Knights of the KKK had declared a war on ‘hate groups’, most notably the NAACP and B’nai B’rith,” (p315); no families in Orlando were willing to risk a Jewish lawyer spotted at its address (p269). It was 1951 when the FL Governor received letters from KKK leaders who were also officers, electeds, etc., saying “The Jew wishes to invade the South” (p315). To contextualize this time period, just after World War II and as Holocaust survivors needed a safe place to live, many found Florida.  As we look back into history and think about the civil rights movement and its martyrs, we often think of Martin Luther King Jr. However, it was the NAACP Florida Secretary, Harry T Moore to be the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the US, murdered in a bombing at his own home in Mims, FL (p329). Additionally, church leaders who worked with Thurgood Marshall in desperate appeals to save the life of Walter Irvin, by mid 1950s the only living and still-on-trial alleged criminal, actually mentored Martin Luther King Jr. while he was in school. All of the segregation and intergenerational trauma associated with vitriolic racism, white supremacy, and violence, is recent. A raw wound must be addressed to heal. This book is essential reading.

Miscellaneous quotes: 

Referring to a photo of a lynched man, it wasn’t the man…”it was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as their posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race,” (p6) 

“Black farmers [like the father of one of the murdered victims, Samuel Shepherd] threatened by their example, the whole system of servitude and force labor which is the base of the local economy.” (p115)

 

I posted this one a few weeks after I finished the book. 

Thank you Commissioner Wilson for this incredible recommendation.