In July 1949, a young white couple, Norma and Willie Padgett, told police that 17-year-old Norma had been raped by four black men near Groveland, Fla., setting in motion one of the most dramatic civil rights cases of the 20th century. Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” re-creates an important yet overlooked moment in American history with a chilling, atmospheric narrative that reads more like a Southern Gothic novel than a work of history.
King, author of “The Execution of Willie Francis,” observes that Florida, despite its “boundless capacity for racial inhumanity,” was considered “south of the South”; it had somehow managed to escape the scrutiny of, say, Mississippi or Alabama (site of the similar and better-known Scottsboro Boys case of 1931) despite recording more lynchings than any other state. Within hours of the Padgetts’ claim, three suspects — World War II veterans Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin and teenager Charles Greenlee — were being held for the crime. Hundreds of men stormed the jail, clamoring for a lynching. When the mob was turned away, crowds descended upon black Groveland, shooting into houses and burning down the home of Shepherd’s father, who had managed to buy land to farm independently rather than working in the citrus groves, as blacks in rural Lake County were expected to do. A fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, escaped into the swamps, only to be later caught and killed by a large mob.
“The American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks,” King writes, and the bulk of the narrative concerns the appalling twists and turns of the legal case against the defendants, known as the Groveland Boys. Under the brutal interrogation of Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, all three were beaten and whipped until they confessed to the crime. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, having monitored the disturbing news reports about the case from the beginning, decided to become directly involved. The defense was handled first by Franklin Williams and eventually by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who was by then already a celebrity known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” With the white supremacist Sheriff McCall and the Ku Klux Klan holding a tight grip on the county, Williams, Marshall, and the other black attorneys and reporters who traveled to and from central Florida to work on the case risked their lives to do so.
Williams later described the first trial in unreal terms, as “a story that I was living through,” replete with a stiflingly hot courtroom, a judge who whittled cedar sticks throughout the proceedings, and hostile white spectators crowding the benches. To this day it is not at all clear that a rape took place, but the NAACP lawyers had to find ways to defend the Groveland Boys without ever hinting that a white woman, even one known around town as “a bad egg,” might be lying. Despite prosecutorial misconduct and extremely weak evidence, the three defendants were quickly found guilty, with Shepherd and Irvin sentenced to death.
The NAACP appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1951 overturned the convictions and ordered a retrial, calling Florida’s discriminatory handling of the case “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.” But the case took a nightmarish turn when Sheriff McCall, transporting Shepherd and Irvin from death row to their retrial in Lake County, shot the two men multiple times on a deserted back road, claiming they had tried to escape. Shepherd died instantly, leaving only the wounded Irvin to be represented by Marshall at his retrial. Irvin was promptly convicted and sentenced to death a second time, but after some dramatic maneuvering by Marshall, which included his barging in on a card game between Chief Justice Fred Vinson and President Harry Truman and convincing Vinson to sign a stay of execution, his sentence was eventually commuted by Florida’s governor.
There is much that shocks in King’s wrenching account, from the small indignities, like the prosecutor mistaking the black lawyers for the defendants, up to the monstrous crimes. These include not just the highly suspicious killing of Shepherd by McCall (who managed to continue what King calls his “reign of terror” as sheriff until 1972, despite 49 separate investigations of misconduct charges) but the subsequent murder of Harry Moore, killed along with his wife when their house was bombed. Moore, the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States, was the NAACP’s executive secretary in Florida and a tireless advocate on behalf of the Groveland defendants. Nobody was ever charged in the Moores’ deaths.
Throughout the book, the author periodically widens his focus to explore the case’s broader context, noting that the alleged rape gave McCall and his deputies “an excuse to do some heavy housekeeping with regard to black troublemakers and potential instigators.” Their list would have certainly included returning veterans like Shepherd and Irvin and independent farmers like Shepherd’s father — all viewed as “uppity” by whites who tolerated blacks in Groveland only so long as they understood their place, providing cheap labor for the white-owned citrus groves.
King also provides insight into Marshall’s long-range legal strategy of chipping away at injustice. He fully expected to lose jury trials in the South, but you fought, he explained, “so that you lived to fight another day,” by establishing grounds for appeal. Just before arguing the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall emerges as a heroic figure, facing great risk with courage and gallows humor. King writes that “there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story.” While the case, until now, has been mostly forgotten, Marshall, for good reason, never forgot it.
“The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion and DNA” spans continents and millennia but takes place largely in Colorado’s barren and impoverished San Luis Valley, which, author Jeff Wheelwright notes drily, is “not a place you would expect to find a flare-up of Jewish consciousness.” But the San Luis Valley is home to the Medinas, a large Hispano family of Spanish and Native American descent, and many of them have tested positive for the BRCA1.185delAG gene, the breast cancer mutation considered to be unambiguous evidence of Jewish ancestry.
The heart of Wheelwright’s alternately fascinating and painful book is Shonnie Medina, who was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer at age 26 and dead by 28. What fascinates is the author’s account of how the Jewish marker first came to be and how it eventually showed up among the Catholics of the American Southwest. Scientists believe that the mutation, discovered in the mid-1990s, is 2,500 years old and that it entered the Israelite gene pool via a single founder. (Unlike recessive genes like those that cause the deadly Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disease affecting Jews, this mutation acts alone, requiring only one parent to pass it down.) Wheelwright, a science journalist whose previous books were about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and illnesses afflicting Gulf War veterans, explains that in a bitter twist, some of the early Israelite strategies to survive in the face of oppression, including preserving “sacred separateness” and “blood purity,” led to genetic isolation and the concentration of the mutation. While 1 in 100 Ashkenazi Jews are thought to be carriers of 185delAG, it likely came to the San Luis Valley by way of Sephardic Jews who colonized what was then New Spain after being forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, beginning in the late 15th century.
The painful part of the book, of course, concerns Shonnie, whose DNA brought her toward her terrible fate but whose culture and temperament finished her off. “Marginal medicine” and “marginal religion,” Wheelwright writes, “swirl about the story of Shonnie Medina like two furies.” She and many of her relatives abandoned Catholicism and became Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1980s. Shonnie was passionate about door-to-door evangelizing, and the booklet she carried with her on her home visits equated original sin to “a terrible inherited disease from which no one can escape.” Wheelwright suggests that the Witnesses’ apocalyptic beliefs and distrust of secular society (Shonnie’s father, Joseph, eschewed banks, instead burying cash in jars spread all over his property) contributed to the young woman’s decision to refuse surgery and chemotherapy. Vanity also played a role — she couldn’t accept the prospect of a mastectomy. Instead, she traveled five times to Tijuana for specious herbal therapies before her death in 1999.
As part of his research, Wheelwright spent considerable time with the extended Medina clan. He sat in on a Sunday afternoon session with a genetic counselor held at Shonnie’s parents’ restaurant in 2007; the counselor drove in from Colorado Springs to explain the science behind the mutation and to urge the gathered family members to undergo DNA testing. Two years later, the restaurant again played host, this time to the Hispano DNA Project, which, led by the head of the Human Genetics Program at New York University, collected blood samples from locals in an effort to amass more information about their genetic ancestry. By then the possibility of a “crypto-Jewish” community in the Valley had aroused interest from academics and the press. While some Hispanos in the area were skeptical, others, including some distant relatives of Shonnie’s, began to plumb their pasts, recalling grandparents quietly lighting candles on Friday nights or avoiding pork.
Wheelwright seems to admire the family’s willingness to confront the dangers presented by their DNA, but he is disheartened by their persistent faith in alternative therapies. He reports that three of Shonnie’s aunts shared an expensive “Bio-Enhancement Feedback Unit” machine among their households, convinced that the machine drew toxins out of their bodies. One of the aunts, who was treated for a lump in her breast solely by a nutritionist until finally agreeing to a belated mastectomy, died not long after.
The only parts of the book that fall flat are Wheelwright’s occasional attempts at lyricism, as when, describing a coming downpour, he writes, “Thunderstorm and lightning, the sky ejaculating, the airborne ancestors writhing in dark tumult.” Such passages feel forced, as if the author believed that his topic demanded more gravitas than his journalistic style alone could supply. But that clear-eyed journalism and his deft handling of so many different, complex strands — the science, the history, the stories of Shonnie and her family, thorny issues of race and religion — are Wheelwright’s real achievement.
Now is a fitting time to reconsider the life of Margaret Sanger. The United Nations marked Oct. 31 as the day the global population reached 7 billion, a milestone greeted with both celebration and consternation around the world. Sanger would have no doubt felt the latter: After World War II, the activist who worked for decades to make contraception legal and available for women in the United States and around the globe condemned “the worldwide congestion of population which cannot continue without worldwide misery, famine, and wars.” She was, as historian Jean H. Baker demonstrates in “Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion,” tenaciously single-minded, adept at linking any social problem to the need for birth control.
Though she’s been dead for 45 years, Sanger herself made it into the headlines around the time of the UN announcement, after Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain told Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” that Sanger’s aim in founding the forerunner to Planned Parenthood was “preventing black babies from being born.” Cain’s ill-considered assertion demonstrates the extent to which Sanger’s legacy has been distorted, but one need only turn to the first page of Baker’s fine biography to discover the pervasiveness of such beliefs. Sanger, in addition to sounding prescient early warnings against overpopulation, was a visionary in her advocacy for female sexual autonomy, driving scientific research on a “magic pill” to prevent women from conceiving and exhorting women to enjoy sex whether or not its aim was reproduction. Yet Baker opens the book not with a summary of her accomplishments but with a rebuttal aimed at those who have, since Sanger’s 1966 death, dismissed her as a eugenicist and a racist. Bemoaning the “inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and sound-bite misquotations that now encrust her historical reputation,” the author marvels that even a staffer at a New York branch of Planned Parenthood — which grew out of Sanger’s American Birth Control League — admitted that he avoids any mention of Sanger.
Without giving Sanger a complete pass — Baker acknowledges that her subject’s backing of involuntary sterilization is “indefensible” — she constructs a vigorous defense of Sanger’s career as a whole, assessing Sanger’s positions on eugenics in the context of her time and noting that her support for eliminating the unfit never focused on “a specific race or religion, only genetic or behavioral unfortunates.” Baker argues that Sanger allied herself with the eugenics movement for pragmatic reasons. Up until the late 1930s eugenics enjoyed widespread approval; associating herself with what was seen as a progressive, scientific field offered increased legitimacy to her own program, which was then both marginal and shocking.
The author concludes that Sanger’s support of eugenics reveals “her passion for the cause of birth control” — indeed, that passion is never in doubt. Sanger, born in 1879, grew up poor in a large family in Corning, N.Y., and she saw her mother ravaged by the effects of a whopping 18 pregnancies (11 births and seven miscarriages) during a 30-year marriage. Later, working as a nurse on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, Sanger claimed to have been moved by a young mother — possibly a composite of several women — who, unable to care for any more children, died after a self-inflicted abortion; Sanger turned this episode into the “creation story of her movement.” (One quibble: despite calling Sanger an “adroit fabulist” and her 1938 “Autobiography” “at best incomplete propaganda,” Baker relies heavily on that book, as well as another memoir, 1931′s “My Fight for Birth Control,” to flesh out Sanger’s early life.)
From that point on Sanger worked tirelessly to promote birth control, pounding out books, periodicals and pamphlets, giving speeches around the country and then the world, organizing conferences, and opening the nation’s first free family-planning clinics for women. In 1914, she was arrested for violating the Comstock Act, which defined birth control as obscenity, for sending her journal, the Woman Rebel, through the mail. She was arrested again in 1916 for violating New York’s obscenity laws by discussing birth control methods at her Brooklyn clinic; that case, on appeal, resulted in a ruling allowing doctors to discuss contraception with any married person who required the information for health reasons, part of the slow chipping away at birth control’s illegal status.
Sanger’s all-encompassing activism left her little time to raise her three children. The book’s most heartbreaking passages quote letters from her two young sons, desperate to see the mother who had passed them off onto relatives and boarding schools; worse yet, her 5-year-old daughter died after contracting pneumonia at a radical socialist boarding school where children endured harsh conditions, including insufficient food and a lack of heat. But somehow she found time for a fascinating and tumultuous private life. In addition to being a political cause, birth control was, in Baker’s words, “a personal necessity” for Sanger, who, throughout two marriages, conducted sexual relationships with a wide variety of men. Though Sanger was not a remarkable beauty, Baker says she had a “seductive presence,” evidenced by the many ardent letters she received from smitten lovers, including H. G. Wells, whom Sanger, confiding to her diary, called a “naughty little boy man.”
Late in her career, in addition to spearheading funding and research for the pill, Sanger adopted an increasingly internationalist approach, forming the International Planned Parenthood Federation and organizing conferences on overpopulation in Stockholm, Bombay, Tokyo and New Delhi. She had always been loath to share control of her movement or credit for its accomplishments, and she became increasingly demanding and imperious. But there were some things she couldn’t control: Sanger apparently grew irritated as her son Grant’s family expanded to include six children born within 10 years. It’s difficult to resist theorizing that Grant kept procreating as payback for years of maternal neglect. One of those grandchildren, Alexander Sanger, now chairs the International Planned Parenthood Council. The debate over Herman Cain’s remarks shows that Sanger’s legacy is still contested, but her cause, in Baker’s words, “lives on.”
In the mid-1990s, David M. Kennedy spearheaded Operation Ceasefire, a series of interventions aimed at bringing down the high youth homicide rate in Boston. The project worked so well that it became widely known by another name: the Boston Miracle. In his new book, Kennedy, now a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, writes, “I always hated that name, it wasn’t a miracle, it was hard damned work.”
“Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America” is Kennedy’s passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty — healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime — Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.
Years of research showed that a very small percentage of gang members was actually driving inner-city violence – and that most of the kids joining gangs felt trapped and scared. The program Kennedy created in response involved calling them into forums with police and a host of community workers and social service providers. Gang members were told that the community cared about them and would help them, but the violence had to stop. If it didn’t, they were warned, heavy law enforcement would come down on them hard. The program left gangs intact but “surgically [excised] the violence from the mix.” In most cases, violent crime plummeted almost immediately.
Kennedy’s chronicle of his two and a half decades working on urban crime is highly readable, if occasionally repetitive. He is by turns hopeful and wry, though consistently generous to the many colleagues he’s worked with in the field. He is also bracingly honest, about everything from poisoned race relations and vicious local politics to the zigzagging emotions he experiences as he immerses himself in this important work. He writes, “I have gone from feeling, at least from time to time, pretty damned smart, to feeling deeply, profoundly humble and not infrequently ashamed.”
“Big Business Now Sweeps Retail Trade,” declared the New York Times in 1928. “Huge Corporations, Serving the Nation Through Country-Wide Chains, Are Displacing the Neighborhood Store.” While some version of that headline wouldn’t be out of place in a present-day report about Walmart, the chain that provoked the most anxiety almost a century ago was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., which in 1920 began a 43-year run as the largest retailer in the world, transforming the retail industry in ways that made Walmart possible.
In his eye-opening book “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America,” Marc Levinson covers the history of A&P, the industry it revolutionized, and the enmity it inspired, in everyone from the mom-and-pop shopkeepers it put out of business to the government trustbusters who for years made the company the target of federal investigation. He also explores the deeper unease underlying the dominance of A&P, as the growth of chains and the modernization of grocery trade seemed to threaten the very existence of small-town life.
Levinson, whose previous books include “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,” notes that technical advances — ranging from the cardboard box and the tin can in the late 1900s to the refrigerator and the automobile in the first half of the 20th century — reshaped the retail food industry. But his primary focus is on the innovations that A&P either created or, more often, exploited to great effect. Led for decades by the brothers George L. Hartford and John A. Hartford, paternalistic bosses known throughout the company as Mr. George and Mr. John, A&P mastered vertical integration: The company manufactured items like bread, coffee and milk for itself, thus eliminating reliance on the wholesalers, brokers and other middlemen who played major roles in the country’s inefficient, archaic system of moving food from producer to consumer.
Where the company did order from manufacturers, it demanded special terms, including deep volume discounts. But the corporation’s “radically new model,” according to Levinson, was its high-volume, low-price strategy, which saw A&P slashing prices in order to get more shoppers through its doors. The strategy worked, and throughout the 1920s A&P opened discount stores so rapidly, John Hartford joked that “hobos hopping off the trains got hired as managers.” There was no way for mom and pop to compete.
Levinson bookends “The Great A&P” with a discussion of creative destruction, “the painful process by which innovation and technological advance make an industry more efficient while leaving older, less adaptable businesses by the wayside.” As A&P inflicted creative destruction on the grocery trade, government intervened, with many states passing punitive taxes on chains and, in 1949, the Department of Justice finally winning criminal convictions against the Hartfords for engaging in restraint of trade. Levinson offers too much arcane detail about the antitrust suit, particularly considering that it wasn’t the government that finally brought A&P down. The extremely disciplined and visionary Hartford brothers, who had inherited A&P from their father, were childless, and they failed to cultivate outside successors; when they died in the 1950s, the company, unable to adapt to the shift of supermarket shopping to suburbia, quickly lost its way. “The speed of A&P’s decline was shocking,” Levinson writes. The company that had for so long been an agent of creative destruction at last became its victim.
The nicknames given to weeds in medieval times reveal much about how people regarded these reviled plants. Mayweed was known as “Devil’s daisy,” corn buttercup as “Devil’s claws,” ground ivy as “Devil’s candlestick,” and on and on. No less than twenty species, British naturalist Richard Mabey observes in his enchanting “Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants,” were identified during that period as tools of Satan. Though the names have changed, many continue to view them that way.
The book’s subtitle might have you bracing for a polemic, but Mabey, author of 1973′s landmark forager’s guide “Food for Free” and many books since, is too genial a narrator for that. (The U.K. edition’s more sober subtitle is “How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilization and Changed the Way We Think About Nature.”) Instead, he builds his case through a philosophical, romantic and occasionally sentimental journey through the history of weeds, including their portrayal in the Bible, Shakespeare and science fiction.
The book is peppered with fun facts — for instance, burdock, with its clinging burrs, inspired the invention of Velcro in the 1950s — but it ends up being surprisingly profound. The author emphasizes that weeds are a cultural, not a biological, category, a result of our “ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication.” Weeds can be wild plants that invade our gardens or domesticated plants that escape the garden and run rampant in the wild. Mabey holds humanity accountable not just for maligning weeds — he cites with approval the familiar definition of a weed as merely “a plant in the wrong place” — but for creating the conditions in which they thrive and occasionally run amok. Case in point: The U.S. government’s encouragement of the planting of Asian kudzu during the first half of the 20th century to help control soil erosion. The unstoppable vine, which grows with astonishing speed, is now choking 2 million acres of forest in the South.
By the end of the book, Mabey suggests that some rapprochement with weeds is possible. More and more gardeners are tolerating them rather than dousing them with chemical herbicides. In some urban areas, weeds are being allowed to “green over the dereliction we have created,” as in Detroit, where prairie weeds and vines are taking over abandoned lots and are being welcomed rather than driven out. And as more is learned about the science of weeds, which tend to be fast-growing and highly adaptable, their important role in the ecosystem can be appreciated. As Mabey explains, “They stabilize the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants, and begin the process of succession to more complex and stable plant systems.”
Because Mabey is a lyrical writer with obvious affection for his subject, “Weeds” charms as much as it informs. He redeems the aggressive and smothering heliotrope by musing that “in a bleak December, with not another wild flower about, it can touch your heart.” In a delightful chapter on his own home garden in Norfolk, England, he describes his “whimsical and sometimes downright hypocritical” weed policy: “I still hoick them up when they get in my way, but it’s a capricious assault, tinged with respect and often deflected by a romantic mood.” After reading this book, you will likely view the invaders in your own garden with a newfound respect; it’s quite possible you’ll find a bit of romance in them, too.
