How Justice for All Becomes More Than a Slogan

The Pulitzer Prize description of 2013 General Non-Fiction winner Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King: "a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice in the Florida town of Groveland in 1949, involving four black men falsely accused of rape and drawing a civil rights crusader, and eventual Supreme Court justice, into the legal battle."

Should one be driving on a warm spring night to Groveland, Florida in the late forties with the windows down, a stunning wave of intense floral sweetness might suddenly shock the car, the product of millions of unseen orange blossoms exuding their exotic fragrance in the darkness. Such spontaneously appearing clouds of unimaginable nocturnal loveliness, infusing passing vehicles, belied the human condition residing in surrounding communities. 

Racial unrest in midpoint 20th century Lake County Florida throbbed like skin under a torn scab, as it did in many areas of the south following the civil war. The KKK was well represented, and seething crowds of white men with shotguns could be raised, as word spread of the latest imagined violation of a white woman by an accused black man. Such mobs would head, often at night, toward the local jailhouse where young black men were being held on charges of unproven crimes. Long lines of vehicles evinced only by successive pairs of lit headlamps snaked down narrow rural roads seeking retribution, too impatient for litigation to take its course. It was “justice” as starkly white as the sands on Siesta Key. 

Rushed judgements of mobs often meted out nighttime sentences including death, torture, beatings, hangings, and burning homes, farms, businesses, churches and crosses. It might be a bomb under the floorboards of a frame house, or fuel filled bottles suddenly shattering their glass and windows on impact, as a bloom of fire quickly engulfed curtains in flames. It might include 90 mile an hour car chases down winding country roads. Participants cared not if victims were innocent or if associated with the defense. Defense attorneys and accused shared equally the wrath of white communities who railed against the prospect of “not guilty” verdicts. Security strategies were as important as legal ones; their success or failure held both life and death in the balance. 

Norma Padgett, alleged victim of the Groveland Four, was described by locals as a “bad egg.” She bore no physical evidence of a rape, and her demeanor did not reflect that of a trauma victim. Her family seemed to bear no ill will toward the young men arrested for the “rape.” The kangaroo court of the times denied defense motions and objections, the prosecutorial overreach and misbehavior were excessive, while white deputies yielded power like tinhorn tyrants. 

Author King writes, “The defense dared not to question in any way either the purity of the Flower of Southern Womanhood, however indelicately she might be represented by Norma Lee Padgett, or her probity in the ‘contention that she [had] been ravished’ by four savage blacks. Should the defense dare to tread upon a white Southern woman’s honor, not only would the jury fail to acquit a black man of a rape charge, but they would also most surely deliver him a death sentence.”

The riveting story plays out as Thurgood Marshall, defense attorneys, investigators, and supporting journalists walked a tightrope of conduct where one false step meant rapid descent into local waters swirling with southern societal piranhas. It transports readers into a narrative of breathtaking scope, an unwavering racial reality check on the boomer decades, fixing its laser like focus on the past, illustrating the courage it takes to undo wrongs and champion justice for all, not merely as a slogan, but to ensure its survival as an enduring truth, inextricably woven into the fabric of our republic.