The Book Prize Index

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

Gilbert King

In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader against a heroic backdrop.--From publisher description.

Race & EthnicityRace & Ethnicity · high confidenceRace & Ethnicity81 signalsLlm Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityOpen Library: Marshall, thurgood, 1908-1993 -> BiographyOpen Library: Race relations -> Race & EthnicityBlack History & CultureCivil Rights & Racial JusticeAfrica & the African Diaspora

Award History

1 wins · 3 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Pulitzer Prize in General NonfictionMajor2013WinnerSecondary source
Dayton Literary Peace Prize: Nonfiction2013FinalistSecondary source
Edgar Awards: Best Fact Crime2013FinalistOfficial source
View all award history (3)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Thurgood Marshall86%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • McCall45%

  2. 02 Central places

    • Florida78%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    The Groveland case and Ku Klux Klan violence in 1949 Florida propelled Thurgood Marshall to enter the conflict, despite fears he was irreplaceable to the civil rights movement.

    Model confidence 60%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    45 / 100 academic

    Trade / academic crossover

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 77%.