Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
The electric chair is a specialized device used for capital punishment through electrocution. The condemned is strapped to a custom wooden chair and electrocuted via electrodes attached to the head and leg. Alfred P. Southwick, a Buffalo, New York dentist, conceived this execution method in 1881. It was developed over the next decade as a more humane alternative to conventional executions, particularly hanging. First used in 1890, the electric chair became symbolic of this execution method.
Groveland is a city in Lake County, Florida, United States. The population was 18,505 at the 2020 census. It is located at the intersection of State Road 19 and State Road 33/50.
Columbia is a city in and the county seat of Maury County, Tennessee. The population was 41,690 as of the 2020 United States census. Columbia is included in the Nashville metropolitan area.
Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947), is a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court was asked whether imposing capital punishment a second time, after it failed in an attempt to execute Willie Francis in 1946, constituted a violation of the United States Constitution. The issues raised surrounded the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, and the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, as made applicable to the State of Louisiana via the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Willie Francis was an American teenager known for surviving a failed execution by electrocution in the United States. He was a convicted juvenile sentenced to death at age 16 by the state of Louisiana in 1945 for the murder of Andrew Thomas, a pharmacy owner in St. Martinville who had once employed him. In the modern day, Francis's guilt has been disputed. He was 17 when he survived the first attempt to execute him, as the chair malfunctioned. After an appeal of his case taken to the Supreme Court of the United States failed, he was executed in 1947 at age 18.
Gene Miller (1928–2005) was an American investigative reporter at the Miami Herald who won two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting that helped save innocent men on Florida's Death Row from execution. He was also a legendary editor, mentoring generations of young reporters in how to write crisp, direct, and entertaining stories. When he died of cancer in 2005, the Herald called him "the soul and the conscience of our newsroom."
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Harry Tyson Moore was an African-American educator, a pioneer leader of the civil rights movement, founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Florida, and president of the state chapter of the NAACP.
Willis Virgil McCall was sheriff of Lake County, Florida. He was elected for seven consecutive terms from 1944 to 1972. He gained national attention in the Groveland Case in 1949. In 1951, he shot two defendants in the case while he was transporting them to a new trial and killed one on the spot. Claiming self-defense, he was not indicted for this action. He also enforced anti-miscegenation laws and was a segregationist.
Walter Lee Irvin, a United States Army veteran of World War II, was one of the so-called Groveland Four—four young African-American men of Lake County, Florida who, in a racially charged case, were accused of raping and assaulting a white woman. Three of the young men were convicted: Irvin was sentenced to death, as was another of the defendants; the third, a minor, was sentenced to life in prison. The fourth had fled after being accused, but a few days later and 200 miles away, was found by a posse of 1,000 white men who, on July 26, 1949, shot him over 400 times while he was asleep under a tree. No one was arrested for his murder.
The Groveland Four were four African American teens, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping a white woman and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Florida. The oldest, Thomas, tried to elude capture and was killed that month. The others were put on trial. Shepard and Irvin received death sentences, and Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. The events of the case led to serious questions about the arrests, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment, and the unusual sentencing following their convictions. Their incarceration was exacerbated by their systemic and unlawful treatment—including the death of Shepherd, and the near-fatal shooting of Irvin. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and Irvin in 1968. All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2021.
James Cordie Cheek was a 17-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob in Maury County, Tennessee near the county seat of Columbia. After being falsely accused of attempting to rape a young white girl, Cheek was released from jail when the grand jury did not indict him, due to lack of evidence. The county magistrate and two other men from Maury County abducted Cheek from Nashville, where he was staying with relatives near Fisk University, took him back to the county, and turned him over to a lynch mob. The mob mutilated Cheek and murdered him by hanging. A grand jury declined to indict anyone for the murder of Cheek.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America is a 2012 nonfiction book by the American author Gilbert King. It is a history of the attorney Thurgood Marshall's defense of four young black men in Lake County, Florida, who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. They were known as the Groveland Boys. Marshall led a team from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Published by Harper, the book was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Pulitzer Committee described it as "a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice."
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about inequities within the U.S. criminal justice system. The Marshall Project has been described as an advocacy group by some, and works to impact the system through journalism.
Theodore Roosevelt Augustus Major Poston was an American journalist and author. He was one of the first African-American journalists to work on a mainstream white-owned newspaper, the New York Post. Poston is often referred to as the "Dean of Black Journalists".
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. A university investigation found numerous unmarked graves for unrecorded deaths and a history into the late 20th century of emotional and physical abuse of students.
Mabel Norris Reese was a civil rights activist and journalist, editor and owner of the Mount Dora Topic newspaper from 1947 to 1960. A book written about the NAACP's defense of the Groveland Four by Gilbert King won the Pulitzer Prize and discussed her mixed reporting on that event. Her induction into the Lake County, Florida Women's Hall of Fame and subsequent commemoration with a bust by sculptor Jim McNalis in 2020 memorialized the crusading journalist's fight against the Ku Klux Klan. Devil in the Grove was a nonfiction book about the 4 Groveland African-American youths accused of the rape of a white woman in 1949. The Groveland Four were pardoned by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2019.
Larry S. Gibson is a law professor, lawyer, political organizer, and historian. He currently serves as a professor at the Francis King Carey School of Law in the University of Maryland, Baltimore; where he has been on the faculty for 38 years. Gibson serves as council for the firm of Shapiro, Sher, Guinot, and Sandler. He was the principal advocate for the legislation that renamed Maryland's major airport, the Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and published Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice in 2012.
