Read Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America for Free Online Page B

flat on the ninth floor at 409 Edgecombe, where they mostly socialized on weekends with a couple they knew from their college days—eating and drinking together late into the night, and playing card games. (They called their little group “the Pokenos,” after the card game Po-Ke-No.) With Thurgood traveling so frequently and often being gone for long stretches, Buster kept herself busy with social affairs and Urban League activities in Harlem. In many ways they were living a dream life—a young, attractive, educated couple with a desirable place to call home in the greatest city on earth. In private, however, the Marshalls were struggling with disappointments. Buster had miscarried again. Married for more than a decade, she’d been unable to carry a baby to term, and sadness was turning to frustration and grief.
    “Buster had a weak uterus,” said Marshall’s secretary, Alice Stovall, adding that Buster had become pregnant “quite a few times because she said she knew how much Thurgood wanted children.” Everyone around them had children, it seemed, and Buster’s sense of self-worth had become wedded to her fertility problems and the notion that she was disappointing her husband. She was unable to shake the sadness that enveloped her.
    Thurgood compartmentalized the pain and occupied himself increasingly with work and travel. On the rare mornings when he was in New York, he’d ride the elevator down to the white-tiled lobby, where Nathan the doorman would hold open the tall glass doors as Marshall stepped onto Edgecombe Avenue. High on Coogan’s Bluff, Marshall could look out over the Harlem River to Yankee Stadium on his way to work. More impressive, though, was the view of the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants baseball team played their home games. The stadium hosted the first game of the 1946 Negro World Series, in which the Kansas City Monarchs beat the Newark Eagles, 2–1. They did so without their former star, Jackie Robinson, who had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers before the season and was lighting up the International League with the Montreal Royals in preparation for his 1947 debut, when he would break baseball’s color line by becoming the first black to play in America’s major leagues. In that 1947 season, when Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey wanted a black lawyer to help put Robinson’s financial affairs in order, he sent the rookie to Thurgood Marshall.
    Before heading downtown to the NAACP offices, Marshall would stride past Colonial Park and down Seventh Avenue to the Hotel Theresa at 125th Street, the “social capital of Negro America.” On June 19, 1946, nearly a quarter million people turned out for a parade there on 125th Street to wish Joe Louis luck in his rematch that evening with Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium. Louis was greeted all along 125th Street with music, floats, honking horns, and large signs that read, “Good Luck, Joe.” Before the fight, Louis famously said of the lighter Conn, “He can run, but he can’t hide,” and in the eighth round, before the first television audience to witness a world heavyweight championship, Louis finally found Conn, landing a vicious right-uppercut, left-hook combination that sent the Pittsburgh fighter onto his back for the ten count.
    Ebony magazine kept an office at the Hotel Theresa, Walter White did his WLIB radio show there, and just across the street from the hotel, the black newspapers the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had offices. Marshall often met with reporters or addressed women’s groups at the hotel. In Theresa’s coffee shop he sometimes sat with Joe Louis, ate mushroom omelets, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bumpy Johnson, the notorious bookmaker for Madame St. Clair. But it was Marshall who commanded the attention of the staff. A waitress there remembered that “they treated him like a movie star.” She recalled, “He was so handsome in those days.” The waitress recalled,