In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of African-American laborers, who worked under Jim Crow laws, had been disenfranchised by the state constitution since the turn of the century, and struggled for justice in the white supremacist state. The planters relied on Sheriff Willis V. McCall to keep order in Lake County, where he was known for his harsh actions against blacks. A white 17-year-old Groveland girl said she had been raped by blacks, and McCall soon arrested four young black men.
Thurgood Marshall, known as "Mr. Civil Rights" and one of the most important American lawyers of the 20th century, entered the fray and represented the suspects for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The US Supreme Court overturned the convictions and returned the case to the state for retrial. Members of the Ku Klux Klan came to town, burned the homes of blacks to the ground, and chased hundreds into the swamps, as they were intent on lynching the young men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." The Ku Klux Klan initiated a wave of violence, shot two of the defendants, and killed one.
Associates feared for Marshall's life during the time of the "Florida Terror" and worried that he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Marshall was determined to fight for the case. The Klan murdered one of his NAACP associates, Harry T. Moore, who was involved with the case in Florida, and Marshall received numerous threats that he would be next.
King drew on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files. He also gained unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files. He both explored the work of Marshall and set his narrative against the case that US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson decried as "one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice."[3]
