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A review by sintari
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
5.0
I have a degree in American history, so I thought I knew a lot about Jim Crow. I was wrong.
I thought I knew a lot about the power of the black church and the NAACP in the Civil Rights Moment. I was wrong again.
I've written papers on lynching. I thought I understood the horrors of getting spirited away in the middle of the night, of cross burnings of little children in their Sunday school best posing with a hanged and mutilated man. I knew nothing.
This Pulitzer-prize winning masterpiece's main theme was how Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund defended the rights of black Americans in everything from rape charges to school desegregation, told through the lens of one trumped-up rape trial in Lake County, Florida. The frame of this book is a story of the law and one leader known as "Mr. Civil Rights," but the real beauty of King's work is how he captures the day-to-day lives and tensions - from cordial to uneasy to downright cruel -between black and white people living in the South during Jim Crow. and it's not pretty, folks. My stomach churned in many parts of this book. I ended up reading it during the day instead of before bed because I was losing sleep.
While this is a history book, it's written like a thriller so I won't give away any spoilers. But I can tell you that, much to my shame, I, at one point, willed one of the black men in this book, to "Please don't do that. You know they're just going to be harder on you for that." And then I immediately realized that's the kind of attitude that led to all of these atrocities in the first place. "Evil prevails when good men do nothing." I won't think like that again.
I love my South, but we've always had an uneasy relationship with our past. A passage from a newspaper account, excerpted in the book, sums it the reign of terror in this book (that, by the way, was never actually about "The Flower of Southern Womanhood"):
"You watch her [a white woman accusing four black men of rape] on the witness stand. You listen to her story. You note the righteous ferocity with which the prosecution defends that story. You note the timidity with which the defense challenges it. You count the dead... Ernest Thomas... Sammy Shepherd... maybe Walter Irvin... and you realize that it's perfectly all right to starve a Southern white woman and deprive her of education and make her old before her time, but by God, no damned outsider is going to dare question the sanctity of her private parts, the incontrovertibility of her spoken word."
I thought I knew a lot about the Civil Rights movement. But this book brought the day-to-day realities of your common people living in this time and fighting for basic rights home in a sustained way that I've never experienced before. "Devil in the Grove" requires that the reader bear witness to our recent, uncomfortable past.
I thought I knew a lot about the power of the black church and the NAACP in the Civil Rights Moment. I was wrong again.
I've written papers on lynching. I thought I understood the horrors of getting spirited away in the middle of the night, of cross burnings of little children in their Sunday school best posing with a hanged and mutilated man. I knew nothing.
This Pulitzer-prize winning masterpiece's main theme was how Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund defended the rights of black Americans in everything from rape charges to school desegregation, told through the lens of one trumped-up rape trial in Lake County, Florida. The frame of this book is a story of the law and one leader known as "Mr. Civil Rights," but the real beauty of King's work is how he captures the day-to-day lives and tensions - from cordial to uneasy to downright cruel -between black and white people living in the South during Jim Crow. and it's not pretty, folks. My stomach churned in many parts of this book. I ended up reading it during the day instead of before bed because I was losing sleep.
While this is a history book, it's written like a thriller so I won't give away any spoilers. But I can tell you that, much to my shame, I, at one point, willed one of the black men in this book, to "Please don't do that. You know they're just going to be harder on you for that." And then I immediately realized that's the kind of attitude that led to all of these atrocities in the first place. "Evil prevails when good men do nothing." I won't think like that again.
I love my South, but we've always had an uneasy relationship with our past. A passage from a newspaper account, excerpted in the book, sums it the reign of terror in this book (that, by the way, was never actually about "The Flower of Southern Womanhood"):
"You watch her [a white woman accusing four black men of rape] on the witness stand. You listen to her story. You note the righteous ferocity with which the prosecution defends that story. You note the timidity with which the defense challenges it. You count the dead... Ernest Thomas... Sammy Shepherd... maybe Walter Irvin... and you realize that it's perfectly all right to starve a Southern white woman and deprive her of education and make her old before her time, but by God, no damned outsider is going to dare question the sanctity of her private parts, the incontrovertibility of her spoken word."
I thought I knew a lot about the Civil Rights movement. But this book brought the day-to-day realities of your common people living in this time and fighting for basic rights home in a sustained way that I've never experienced before. "Devil in the Grove" requires that the reader bear witness to our recent, uncomfortable past.