Gilbert King

(7) This was an excellent and chilling portrait of Jim Crow Florida. I had read about this case through the J Edgar Hoover biography I read last year which is what prompted me to get this Pulitzer-Prize winning narrative non-fiction. This was an exploration of the Groveland case and Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's role in defending the accused men. It takes place in central Florida, amid the orange groves, in the 1940's when segregation was the law and order. Enforced by extra-judicial threats and lynching by the KKK which often contained many of the citizens that were supposed to protect the community. Four black men, 2 of them veterans, one a teenager are accused of raping a white girl - a capital crime given some creepy fetish of exalting Southern white women's purity.

The book does an excellent job setting the scene and trying to recreate events although he never tries to present anything he doesn't know for sure as fact leading to certain gaps in the story of the night in question. The men are hunted down, confessions are beaten out of them, evidence manufactured, there is an attempted lynching and later in the book certainly a murder by law enforcement that goes unpunished due to the complicity of cracker white supremacy. It is truly sickening.

One of the worst parts of this book are seeing the attitudes reflected in the people of today. I have family that lives in that part of Florida. I hear the things the State's politicians say - "where woke goes to die." It seems a chilling echo of this legacy. As one of the NAACP lawyers says in the book - "They have just taken their hoods off."

The book escapes a higher rating from me only because it felt long. I really enjoyed learning more about Thurgood Marshall and the other cases he tried, but some parts about the NAACP politics etc were a drag. At times the book was not engaging.

Anyway, this book is deserving of its Pulitzer Prize and I think should be required reading in any US History course. The one thing I do know is that I never want to step foot in the State of Florida again. I'll be damned if if ever give them another dime of my vacation budget.… (more)