How does Gilbert King initially characterize Norma Lee Tyson and Willie Haven Padgett? - Joe

In Chapter 3, “Get to Pushin’”, Gilbert King gives significant characterization to Norma Lee Tyson and Willie Haven Padgett, even more so than to Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irwin. Instead of demonizing Norma Lee and Willie, he gives a balanced perspective on their personalities. The two individuals’ personas are derived mostly from the judgment of others and reader sympathy.

Gilbert King constructs the personalities of Willie and Norma Lee through analyzing their relationships. There are a variety of relationships he uses to characterize them. The first relationship he uses is that between Willie and Norma Lee, the second relationship is that between Norma Lee and her father Coy Tyson, and the third relationship is that between Willie and Coy Tyson.  There is a tremendous amount of tension in each of these relationships. Willie and Norma Lee married young, but were “separated before their first anniversary” (King 34). Coy Tyson, Norma’s disapproving father, did not like that his daughter had married Willie, because of Willie’s frequent carousing and abusive behavior towards Norma. The relationship between Norma Lee and her father was further strained, because of Norma’s lewd behavior. The reader feels sympathy towards Norma Lee and Willie because of these stressed relationships and their portrayal as careless youth.

Much of what we initially learn about Willie and Norma is based on statements from judgmental onlookers. We never get a sense of what they are like from their perspective, but rather, we continue to see them described through the perspective of others. For instance, when describing Norma Lee’s lewd behavior Gilbert King writes, “her reputation around town was ‘not good,’ according to one white woman who knew her, and ‘a bad egg’ is how another local described her” (King 35). This emphasizes how Norma Lee and Willie are often negatively portrayed in the pubic eye, and foreshadows their very public position in the Groveland Boys Case.

What’s the importance of Point of View in Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove”? - Joe

Gilbert King presents the happenings of the Groveland Trail in a third person view. This is primarily interesting, because in a trial, each witness tells his or her own personalized account of the incident at question. During a trial, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty onto what exactly happened, and thus, each viewpoint is uniquely biased. Therefore, when discussing a book that details the events leading up to a trial, the perspective of the narrator is an incredibly important element to consider. The viewpoint from which the author chooses to tell the story has significant ramifications on the accuracy of the story and its believability.

Gilbert King’s extensive research and meticulous citation sufficiently cover this issue. In compiling a variety of different sources on the Groveland Trail, King is able to construct a balanced historical account of the incident. It allows him to establish a clear viewpoint from which he can tell the progression of events leading up the trial in Groveland.

Gilbert King chooses to represent these events linearly and definitively. He establishes a constant overseeing voice of truth. As a result, before the trial actually takes place, the reader has an accurate account of the incident in question. This establishes dramatic irony later in the book, where the reader knows the exact happenings of a trial, but no legal consensus has come about yet, creating suspense.

A third person narrator, like the one Gilbert King utilizes, allows for the reader to gain an accurate historical account of the incident, experience the confusion of the people involved in the trial through dramatic irony, and follow a readable linear progression. Since the reader has a voice of truth to look to, Gilbert King gains the trust of the reader, so that the reader is not constantly questioning the validity of the arguments he presents.

Also thought this was an interesting bit on McCall - Chris

What did King intend for the theme to be? - Miles

The book touches on many different themes. Racism, morality, confusion, and mainstream acceptance are just a few I can think of. But which one did King really intend to convey as the main theme for the book?

While most nonfiction books aren’t really themed, this one seems different. As we’ve discussed a bunch of times already (too many times), this book takes a historical event and approaches it in a heavily researched and almost dramaticized way. Because it’s crafted this way, it deals with the harshness and reality of racism during the forties. It also takes us through how commonplace incidents like this, where young black men were accused of crimes with little to no evidence pointing to their guilt, and were rushed through unfair trials with all-white juries and executed, unless they were lynched by vicious mobs first. To me, it seemed as though King was just trying to inform colorfully, with highly descriptive language and graphic pictures throughout the book. But it also seemed like he wanted the reader to take out of it the fact that so many people just went along with that, being told that blacks were simply inferior. One idea I had was that he may be trying to show how horrible and cruel people can be just because of a deeply rooted prejudice, and how, in the case of Sheriff McCall, they may literally not care about what they’re doing or see how bad it is. It’s not really a theme, but it’s definitely a thought that he may have been trying to convey along with the recapping of the historical event. Do you guys think he was trying to convey a theme at all, or just telling this story?

How does Dante’s “Inferno” complicate Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove”? - Joe

Dante’s “Inferno” epic has interesting parallels to Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove.” After an analysis of the two texts, clear parallels arise between them. However, it is far from an allegorical relationship. Gilbert King uses allusions to Dante’s “Inferno” in his own book in order to drive home a point.

The aforementioned, deliberate characterization of Thurgood Marshall as an everyman sets the stage for him to be represented as Dante. Most readers recognize Marshall as central figure in the civil rights movement and as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. After Marshall is characterized in the opening chapters through literary tactics involving sympathy, humor, and admiration, the readers see Marshall as a relatable individual on a quest to achieve the success they know him for; they see Marshall as an everyman.

One connection between the two texts is in the title of Gilbert King’s book: “Devil in the Grove.” As mentioned earlier in the “Title Analysis” blog entree, the title “Devil in the Grove” may directly refer to Sheriff Willis McCall, where sheriff is the “Devil” and “The Grove” or Groveland is hell. In depicting Sheriff Willis McCall as the devil, Gilbert King emphasizes that he sees the Sheriff as the focal point and origin of all evil in Groveland. The sheriff represents the core of the South’s disillusionment and corruption, and represents all that Thurgood Marshall is trying to fight.

Synthesizing these two elements Gilbert King makes a clear connection to “Inferno”. Marshall, as seen through the lens of “Dante”, seeks to achieve “salvation”, which is winning trials, advancing the position of African Americans, and saving the life of Walter Irwin. But in order to reach this, Marshall must first travel deep into the South or “Hell” via segregated train cars. Through his journey into the underworld he encounters many dangers in the form of threats against him. Eventually he confronts the “Devil” or Sheriff Willis McCall in the “inner circle of hell” or Groveland. In order to achieve the “salvation” of saving Walter Irwin’s life he must put himself directly in harms way and outwit the “Devil”.

Gilbert King uses allusions to Dante’s “Inferno” in order characterize Marshall, and emphasize the horrible injustice of the South. Dante’s Journey through Hell in order to reach salvation is a perfect metaphor for what “Marshall” had to do in his early career: travel into the most unjust and dangerous places in the South in order to serve justice and promote equality for African Americans.

To go with the comment to Miles's post about trying McCall - Chris

How has America changed since this case? - Miles

So obviously America has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. Just 150 years ago, we still had widespread slavery, a practice which made our country laughably hypocritical (Land of the Free, all men are created equal). Since 1949, we’ve passed Civil Rights Laws, and we’ve even elected an African-American President. But can we really say we’re a completely different country?

I think it’s interesting to think about both how much we’ve done and how little we’ve done as a country. While many are far more tolerant now than in 1949, racism still poses an enormous and hypocritical problem to our country. Again, we are called the nation that accepts everyone, the melting pot of all cultures, but there’s still such huge wealth distribution and race relation issues, and there is even still enormous amounts of racism in the region where this occurred. The question to consider here is, have we done more work than we still need to do to get this country to a place where everyone is equal?

Should Willis McCall be held accountable for his crimes? - Miles

Okay, this is sort of a hypothetical question, as McCall has been dead for 20 years now. But he served for almost 40 years after this case, committing who knows how many more civil rights violations towards black citizens, and the only times he was ever tried, it was against an all-white jury, and he was acquitted of all charges. Would his crimes (murder, assault with a deadly weapon, battery, civil rights violations) call for a Nuremberg trial of sorts where he gets tried years later? If you guys were in charge of this, and looked back on it fifty years later when McCall is an old man, would you still support a FAIR trial, or would you deem it too late? I feel as though some kind of demerit, be it sending him to jail in his eighties or even giving him some sort of posthumous dishonor would need to be done as a sort of justice to the families of those he abused, even though it is far too little far too late.

Importance of Photos and imagery throughout the book - Chris

I'll just say it, I'm not a big fan of books with more than a few photos in them. My opinion however, was turned on its head by this book. When discussing such a graphic topic as this it was important for King to find another medium with which to communicate the gruesome details. In a way similar to the exposure of the Vietnam War, the grim reality only provokes feelings of injustice when it is shoved in the face of the watcher or in this case the reader. A picture tended to accompany every chapter and I didn't think much of them until I came across the graphic images on pages 232-233, one of them also appears partially on the cover. The contrast in the image reinforces the injustice of the situation perfectly. Two boys lying dead and dying on the ground after being shot by the very man sworn to protect them, while he wears an expression of tired indifference and and air of superiority. The boys, innocent of the crimes they were accused of, were gunned down after they "attacked" Sheriff McCall. This act of violence directly opposes all that McCall is supposed to represent. The law should stay the law and people should not have the right to take actions that they think are just against the law. This is the thing that he defended and the beginning of the book and now that the rulings have been overturned he has decided to redefine justice himself. I'll attach the images to show their gravity. King uses them to throw the reader into the very real world of this killing and it makes his case for injustice all the stronger.

What would Thurgood Marshall say about this book today? - Miles

Gilbert King’s book details a case that occurred in 1949, years before the Civil Rights movement, the march on Washington, integration of schools, the Civil Rights Act, and long before we elected a black president. My question is, how would Thurgood Marshall (or anyone associated with this case, for that matter) look at this book today? To say racism is no longer an issue is a blatant lie, but no one can deny how much has changed since the days of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. A case similar to this one occurring today would obviously be different than the original. While blacks in the south still have horrible racism facing them, one can assume a fair trial would be held, and any harm to come to the accused would be met with justice itself. Would Marshall consider a modern trial like this to even be possible? Would he look on this case thinking that it helped spark a change in ingrained American thought, one that essentially brought blacks to equal status in the country, as the “Dawn of a New America” in the book’s title would suggest, or would Marshall simply see it as just another case? I’d never heard of the case before reading this book, it isn’t even on Marshall’s Wikipedia page (among other sources) and without a bit of digging, it would seem like it doesn’t even exist. Would this be a case still in Marshall’s mind were he still alive, or would it simply blend in with all the others?

In what ways does Gilbert King support his findings in “Devil in the Grove”? - Joe

“Devil in the Grove” is meticulously researched, artfully composed, and unconventionally narrated. Gilbert King’s eye for detail is scrupulous, and through internal citation, he supports his narrative with concrete evidence from a range of primary sources. Whether from editorial articles or court files, his inclusion of details from primary sources into the text is done with an upmost concentration to accuracy throughout the book. Acquiring unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund Files, Gilbert King was able to synthesize a comprehensive historical perspective on the Groveland Case in his Pulitzer Prize Winning Book.

I was blown away by the sheer amount of investigation that went into creating “Devil in the Grove”. Each page tends to have four to five citations correlated with it in the “Notes” section of the book. Some citations support direct quotes from external sources, seamlessly imbedded within King’s writing. Other citations denote that the author derived his dialog between multiple characters from a given source. Each style of citation serves a specific purpose.

One kind of citation Gilbert King uses is a direct citation. This type of citation is the only citation that might be directly evident to the reader while he or she is reading the text. Often it appears as a quoted phrase in a place you would not expect to see quotes, such as an area without dialog. In doing this, Gilbert King calls attention to his notes in the back of the book. Although he does not use numbered footnotes, he denotes that these directly quoted excerpts are cited in the back of the book with their unconventional placement within the text. Two examples of this are the quotes in context, on page 55, “After the noon recess, however, the crowd “about doubled” and “the fireworks started,” as Marshall moved to have the first confession excluded from evidence because police officers had beaten the defendant.” These two quotes, “about doubled” and “the fireworks started”, were stated from Thurgood Marshall to Walter White, through the NAACP, on February 2, 1941. This is simply one example of the many times Marshall seamlessly and directly imbeds quotes from primary sources into his narrative. The insertions facilitate the flow of the narrative, and give Gilbert King credibility.

Another kind of citation Gilbert King uses is more generic. Gilbert King often sites scenes or detailed dialogs between multiple characters by citing one general source that he derived the scene from. One example of this is the dialog between Sherriff Willis McCall and Charles Greenlee on page 179. In the correlating “Notes” section King cites, “179 “You lied on the witness stand?”: Moore Report, p. 288. This scene is derived from the transcript that Harry T. Moore’s biographer, Ben Green, made (July 15, 1992) from Willis McCall’s interview of Charles Greenlee. The transcript appears in the Moore Report.” It is important to note here that King writes that he “derived” the scene from a transcript, and did not say that the scene was taken from a transcript. The notion that King did so much research on the Groveland Case that the book should be read like a novel only holds up so far. At a certain point it must be acknowledged that for all the effort and meticulous research put into the creation of the book, the book is still an historical account and Gilbert King takes certain liberties in his presentation of it.

Why hadn't I heard about the Groveland Four before reading this book? - Chris

When I started reading this book my first thought was, "Hmmm ok Thurgood Marshall, Brown v Board right." I knew that Thurgood Marshall was this bringer of racial justice and that he had gone to the south to aid in the defense of African Americans. Other than that I was in the dark. I knew nothing of the Groveland Boys. One might think that a case centered around the alleged (and wrongly alleged) rape and assault of a white woman by black men in such a time and place tense with racial conflict then the unjust killing of three of the men  might be something that was remembered as one of the most infamous racial conflicts of all time. The sad truth which King helps us to see is that these conflicts and accusations were so common in the mid 20th century south that just one instance in a multitude of them gets lost. The Groveland Boys can show us that the racial injustice of the south wasn't just real, it growing, and by the time these boys were arrested, hard to keep track of.

The Heart of Darkness in Groveland - Chris

As the book progressed I became more and more interested in Sheriff McCall. King tricks the reader initially into thinking that he is this enforcer of the law in a place where law is taken into the hands of the many. He has prevented this lynching of innocent men and he deserves to be commended for it. This reminds me of the way Marlow becomes familiar with Kurtz. He is given all this information from others and is led to believe that Kurtz is the best and the brightest of their generation. When he finally meets Kurtz, Marlow finds that his brilliance has been warped and he now seems evil. This is shown when, just after he prevents the lynching, he participated in brutal and illegal interrogations. His transformation into this representation of evil like Kurtz is finalized when he kills two of the Groveland boys who sentences have been overturned thanks to Marshall. I was interested to see his transformation from a man who upheld the law to one who took the law into his own hands, in this case unjustly.

Title Analysis - Joe

What does the title “Devil in the Grove:  Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” mean, and what does it reveal about the book’s composition?

The title of Gilbert King’s thoroughly researched, biographical, and dramatic novel is off-putting. Juxtaposed on my bookshelf next to the franker and more generic historical titles “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” and “1434”, the title “Devil in the Grove” conceals deeper meaning.

To most uninformed readers, the title “Devil in the Grove” has no obvious connection to the historical accounts of which the book details. The only direct connection it has to the content of the book is to the name of the town, Groveland, Florida, where the proceedings of the book’s central trial take place. Despite this, this trial, as noted by the author in the prolog of his book, is “barely mentioned in civil rights history, law texts, or the many biographies of Thurgood Marshall” (King 4), thus most history readers would rarely recognize it. Also, although the book has a subtitle that makes mention of Thurgood Marshall and the Groveland Boys, the subtitle is significantly smaller then the main title, less artistically detailed, and off-placed on the cover of the book. It is neither referred to on the book’s binding nor on the top of the book’s pages. As a result, it is evident that the primary title emphasis is placed on the book’s main title “Devil in the Grove.”

A non-specific title, such as “Devil in the Grove”, is an uneconomical decision when it comes to history books. Often readers look to history books for information on a topic, so with regards to readers with a research objective, a nonspecific title would hinder sales. Thus, in naming the book “Devil in the Grove”, Gilbert King clearly defies a literary norm. He does this in order to make a statement about his research and about the content of his book. His decision warrants further analysis:

“Devil” connotes ideas such as hell, demon, supreme, supernatural, enemy, evil, sin, antithesis of god, tempter, trickster, origin of wrong doing, infamous, the highest power. “In” can mean both imbedded within and residing at. “The Grove” connotes words such as forest, thicket, backyard, and hedge. “The Grove” can have the negative connotations of uncertainty, loss, and fear or it can have the positive connotations of neighborly, friendly, and serene.  In deconstructing the title, a variety of possible meanings are revealed.

One standout interpretation of the title is its personification, in which the character Sherriff Willis McCall is characterized as the “Devil in the Grove”. In this interpretation “The Grove” refers to Groveland, Florida, the location he resides at. The ambiguity of the tone of “The Grove” in the book’s title alludes to the double sidedness of William McCall’s character. Gilbert King presents Sherriff Willis McCall as a man who represents, in every sense, what is wrong with the segregated South. The responsibility of a sheriff is to promote justice and uphold the law, a viewpoint of McCall, which was held by the majority of the townsmen in Grooveland, Florida. Although in reality, Sherriff Willis McCall, half attempting to act in the town’s “greater good,” resorted to unjust and often brutal measures in order to convict his victims and maintain unbalanced race relations. McCall not only abused his African American suspects into submission, but also committed acts of homicide in order to ensure his success. He represented the core of the South’s disillusionment and corruption, he represents all that Thurgood Marshall is trying to fight, and so, serves as an interesting focal point for the book.

The second interpretation is one in which “Devil” represents the idea of “sin”, “evil”, and “disorder”, related with “the Grove”, which represents the construct of “a town”, “a neighbor”, or “a familiar place”. With this interpretation, Gilbert King is calling attention to the wrongdoings of the common folk, who daily, reinforce the injustice of segregation. More directly, “The Grove” represents those who were negatively involved in the trial of the Groveland Boys and segregation in general, and “Devil” represents their “sin” in doing this. These individuals and groups include the KKK, the racist townspeople, and the biased jury in the initial conviction of Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irwin, Ernest Thomas, and Charles Greenly.

The third interpretation is more vague. “Devil” could directly symbolize the idea of “segregation”, and “Grove”, interpreted with a more positive connotation, represents the construct of a “backyard”. In the book, Gilbert King calls attention to the atrocities that occurred in Groveland, Florida, and the great deal of other cases talked about in describing Marshall’s early work with the NAACP. All of the trials that Gilbert King discusses are true and symbolic of the more encompassing idea of southern segregation. The atrocities detailed in the book occurred just sixty years ago, in our home country, an idea that is extremely hard to comprehend.