Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

issue of self-defense during the trial, but the judge had refused to allow it. Now Looby spoke his mind: he wasn’t leaving without Marshall, he said. Livid, the deputies and police conferred to the side. Whatever the plan had been, there were now too many witnesses, and there was sure to be another riot if things got out of hand with the lawyers. The police returned to the car and made a loop back up to the main road, with Marshall’s eyes lingering on the lynch party waiting by the river, while Looby, the man Marshall called a Rock of Gibraltar, followed close behind with Weaver and Raymond. This time the police drove Marshall back to the courthouse in Columbia, where he was pointed toward a magistrate’s office.
    “You go over there,” one of the policemen said. “We’ll be over.”
    “No, you won’t. I’m going with you,” Marshall replied, reminding the police that they had placed him under arrest. “You’re not going to shoot me in the back while I’m ‘escaping.’ Let’s make this legal.”
    “Smart-ass nigger,” one said, and they shuffled Marshall up to the second floor of the courthouse, with Weaver trailing behind to serve as Marshall’s lawyer. Once there, they met Magistrate Jim “Buck” Pogue, a small, bald man not more than five feet tall.
    “What’s up?” Pogue asked police.
    “We got this nigger for drunken driving,” one officer told him.
    Weaver was fuming. He accused the officers of being “frame-up artists” and demanded that Pogue examine Marshall.
    Pogue looked Marshall up and down. “He doesn’t look drunk to me,” he observed.
    “I’m not drunk,” Marshall exclaimed.
    “Boy, you want to take my test?” Pogue asked.
    Marshall paused and looked quizzically at the magistrate. “Well, what’s your test?”
    “I’m a teetotaler,” Pogue said. “I’ve never had a drink in my life. I can smell liquor a mile off. You want to take a chance?”
    Marshall stepped forward. “Sure,” he said, and leaning his tall, lanky frame down to Pogue till his mouth was just an inch from the magistrate’s nostrils, Marshall blew so hard he “almost rocked this man.”
    Pogue took a deep whiff and exploded at the police. “Hell, this man hasn’t had a drink. What are you talking about?”
    The arresting officers quickly filed out of the office.
    “What else is there?” Marshall asked.
    Pogue told him that there was nothing else and stated that those officers had come to the wrong man if they wanted to frame Marshall. He said he was the one magistrate in Columbia who had refused to sign warrants for the arrests of Negroes during the February trouble, and then he extended his hand to Marshall, saying, “You’re free to go.”
    Marshall quickly left the courthouse for the second time that day. He noticed again that the streets were deserted. This time, however, he understood why. “Everybody,” Marshall realized, “was down at Duck River waiting for the party.”
    He and Weaver hurried over to the Bottom, where Looby and Raymond were waiting at Sol Blair’s barbershop. They made sure Marshall was okay, but they also suspected Marshall wasn’t out of danger just yet. The officers, they figured, had probably been hoping to bring Marshall before Magistrate C. Hayes Denton, who surely would have locked Marshall up for the night. Then, in “the pattern of all recent Maury County lynchings,” it would only have been a matter of storming the jail with some rope and finishing the job.
    Looby thought it likely the officers might not yet be ready to give up on their party. He came up with a plan of his own. “Well, Thurgood,” he said, “we’ll put you in another car.”
    They decided to send a decoy driver out with Looby’s car, which would head toward Nashville, while Marshall and Looby in a different car sneaked out of town on back roads. Sure enough, Marshall watched members of the mob turn the corner and follow Looby’s car; then he and Looby drove off in another direction. He would later learn that Looby’s car was indeed pulled over, and when the pursuers discovered that Marshall wasn’t in it, “they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.”
    In another car, Maurice Weaver made it back to Nashville that evening along with Harry Raymond, who immediately began typing his story for the Daily Worker . “I am certain . . . a lynching was planned,” he wrote. “Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.”
    Walter White was