This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 18th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In 1949, four young black men were wrongfully accused of rape in Florida. The case of the Groveland 4 remains a powerful

object lesson in systemic racism and white supremacy. And even though all four of those

men are now dead, the state of Florida last week finally pardoned them.

It's a bittersweet ending to a story chronicled in Gilbert King's Pulitzer Prize winning book,

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

I spoke with Gilbert King this week.

I think for people who are 40 and under, maybe 50 and under, they're aware of the career of

Thurgood Marshall on the US Supreme Court and really not much else.

Right.

So part of the events that sort of led up to him becoming such a notable figure within the

law, what was his project aimed at generally in the decades in which he was doing

all these civil rights cases?

Yeah, and I think that was one of the things that was most interesting to me because I wasn't really fully aware. I knew he was a, I knew Thurgen Marshall was the first African American Supreme Court justice, and I knew he was involved in these landmark civil rights cases along the lines of, you know,

Brown versus Board, the school cases, the housing cases, the voting rights cases.

But I guess I really wasn't fully aware that he was getting involved in these death penalty cases.

These small cases that started in these very small southern cities and towns where, you know, it was just really him or maybe him and a partner showing up and being just the last line of defense in some of these important death penalty cases.

And so that was, that was quite a surprise to be and you know he was known as Mr civil rights

But you know he was really a hero to a lot of these communities that just you know they would usually get court-appointed attorneys who were basically you know white

businessmen or white lawyers in town who had business interests they weren't

so necessarily skilled at 13th 14th and 15th amendment law whereas Thood Marshall and his lawyers, that's all they did. And so it was really, I think, quite a surprise to see how

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