http://www.amazon.com/Devil-Grove-Thurgood-Marshall-Groveland/dp/B00B9ZF1NG

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth
century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown
v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in
an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil
rights movement and cost him his life.

In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on
the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to
Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous
resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was
fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for
themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled
into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into
the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the
Groveland Boys.”

And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man
known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was
suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was
irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not
shrink from the fight—not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP
associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats
that he would be next.

Drawing 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, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights
crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of
a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the
best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize,
http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/General-Nonfiction

GENERAL NONFICTION, GILBERT KING, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the
Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” (Harper) Mr. King, 51, said he
had become fascinated by what he called “lost cases in civil rights history,”
cases that were on the front pages of newspapers at the time but had been mostly
forgotten since then. “They got glossed over,” he said. “I started looking into
them and found these untold stories. Thurgood Marshall was this amazing trial
lawyer and his life was threatened constantly. He wasn’t just about
reconstructing the American dream. He was out there fighting for people’s
lives.” Finalists Katherine Boo, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and
Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”; David George Haskell, “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s
Watch in Nature.”

http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Lynching-Saga-Groveland-ebook/dp/B0082RDMJ4

First and only comprehensive analysis of the infamous Groveland,
Florida rape case based on first-person interviews and extensive research. The
true story (finally!) of a tragedy that began when a poor white girl accused
four black men of rape.

I'm thrilled that Gilbert King got the Groveland story in front of mainstream
America. Devil in the Grove is certainly a good read but it is misleading. While
King must be commended for gaining access to the NACCP Legal Defense Fund files
and thoroughly researching Thurgood Marshall's career, his research was far from
exhaustive. For the whole story, do as he directs and read The Groveland Four
(recently re-released as Legal Lynching: The Sad Saga of the Groveland Four),
which I wrote eight years before Devil In The Grove. You'll see that Thurgood
Marshall was basically a figure-head during the Groveland proceedings. In fact,
there's no proof he ever set foot in Lake County. The real heroes of this drama
was lesser-known attorneys Franklin Williams, Alex Akerman, Jack Greenberg, Paul
Perkins, Horace Hill and William Fordham. They faced Sheriff Willis McCall, they
found the alibi witnesses, they interviewed and dealt one-on-one with the
defendants. Devil in the Grove is largely based on Marshall's files; Legal
Lynching: The Sad Saga of the Groveland Four is based on interviews with people
who LIVED the Groveland rape case.