About this item
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.
About the Author
Gilbert King is the author of Beneath a Ruthless Sun, published by Riverhead Books in 2018. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Devil in the Grove, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2013. The book was also the runner-up in nonfiction for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a finalist for both the Chautauqua Prize and the Edgar Award, and the gold medal winner in nonfiction for the Florida Book Awards. King has written about the race and criminal justice for the New York Times and the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. He's also a featured contributor to The Marshall Project. King's previous book, The Execution of Willie Francis was published in 2008. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, please go to www.GilbertKing.com
