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Devil in the Grove

Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Jul 05, 2017diaparalectdoxical rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
King's Devil in the Grove is an entertaining hybrid that mixes the novelist styles of the true crime and court-room procedural with historical and political analysis and biography. While entertaining the historical and political analysis is a bit underdeveloped and shallow. Gilbert would have us blame a racist and violent sheriff, his pathological deputy and their Klan friends for the murders of the Grove four. But Gilbert's own analysis shows the situation was more complex than that. As an elected official the Sheriff was dependant on his corporate funds to underwrite his successful campaigns. His corporate funders required a cowed and submissive black labour force in their orange groves and other industries. But they did not want them so terrified by the Klan as to flee the county. So the sheriff had to control the Klan at times. Meanwhile, the sheriff, a true paragon of corruption, was at the same time involved in profiting from gambling. This was another angle in the set-up of one of the four black victims. The complexities do not lend themselves to simply blaming the Sheriff and the Klan. Rather there was an overdetermination of conflicting forces involved beyond the control of any single evil character. Different forms of racism, fascism, societal sexual dysfunction, and early modern capitalism were all involved in a truly frightening stew of violence and ignorance. Still the book helps us glimpse the American South as a variety of fascist police state that used the brutally violent ISIS-like KKK as a state sponsored terrorist militia.