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

police let the lawyers return to their vehicle, and this time Looby took the wheel.
    “You weren’t driving this car, were you?” one cop asked Looby.
    “I’m not answering your question,” Looby replied.
    The cop then looked to Marshall, who said, “I’m not answering your question, either.”
    Confused about what to do next, the police argued over who had been driving the car when it was stopped. “That’s the one! The tall yaller nigger!” one of them insisted with certainty, and the officers approached Marshall, who was asked to show his license.
    The cop took one look. “Get out,” he said. “Put your hands up.”
    Marshall was dumbfounded. “What is it?” he asked.
    “Drunken driving,” the officer responded.
    “Drunken driving? You know I’m not intoxicated,” Marshall said. “I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four hours!”
    “Get in the car,” one of them said.
    With guns drawn and flashlights glaring, four men hustled Marshall into the backseat of a nonofficial sedan.
    “Keep driving,” they shouted back to Looby and Weaver as they placed Marshall under arrest. With Marshall wedged into the backseat, the car sped away, back toward Columbia. As they picked up speed, the four law enforcement agents were quiet and all business. They drove into the darkness. Walter White had warned Marshall, as had Looby and Weaver, about these Tennessee men and their “Master Race preachments.” Marshall knew that the Ku Klux Klan in Columbia was deeply entrenched in the local police; he knew its members served as sheriffs and magistrates. He had read the NAACP reports. This wasn’t the Klan of “cowardly hood,” rather, it “wears cap and visor, and shining badge. . . . It is the LAW. It arrests its stunned victims, unlisted.”
    Marshall had no idea where they were going. For years his dark humor had horrified young lawyers and assistants when he would go into great detail about what Southern police or the Klan did with uppity Negroes in the woods. Now Marshall was the uppity Negro, alone, and he wasn’t in a joking mood. Looking out the window of the sedan, he could see the cedar trees as the headlights flashed across them. It was under a cedar tree just down the road that hundreds of townspeople had gathered around young Cordie Cheek in his last living moments. They had watched and cheered as officials pulled down Cordie’s pants and castrated him before forcing him up a stepladder and hanging him. Pistols were passed around the crowd; they were fired until all the bullets were gone.
    The car began to slow. The lawmen were quietly mumbling and pointing; then the driver turned left down a dirt road, toward “the famous Duck River.” Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads. He knew that the bodies of blacks—the victims of lynchings and random murders—had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.
    The sedan was lumbering forward, bouncing down the dirt road, when Marshall caught his first glimpse of the men waiting down by the river. The headlights illuminated their stern faces. The car slowed, then stopped. Suddenly headlights appeared behind them. Had word spread about the lynching of the NAACP lawyer? Glimpsing the glare of the lights behind them, one of the policemen in Marshall’s car stormed out of the sedan to confront the driver of the second car. Marshall craned his neck to see; he recognized the limp.
    It was Looby!
    Instead of driving to Nashville as the police had ordered, Looby had spun a U-turn and followed the police sedan. As soon as it turned left off the main road, he knew Marshall was in trouble. He’d been teaching at Fisk University, just down the block from where the Maury County officials “arrested” Cordie Cheek, threw him into a sedan, and drove him to these same woods along Duck River. Well, they’ll have to kill me, too, Looby thought. He wasn’t going to leave Marshall to the devices of murderous law enforcement officers.
    Once again the policemen ordered Looby to leave the scene. Waiting to be arrested, or worse, the slight, gimpy lawyer stood his ground; he refused to budge. He’d had these same police and town officials on the witness stand, and he’d wanted to question each one of them about the lynching of Cordie Cheek so that he could rightfully raise the