No Available Publishers, Threat To Abandon The Book, Then A Pulitzer: Should Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove,” A Black Lives Matter Book About The Groveland Four, Be On Our List Of Suppressed Books?

Gilbert King, author of “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” on Democracy Now and a picture of his book

 It’s about what happened 70 years ago.  The book about what happened back then came out in 2012.  It’s news now because Florida’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, just granted posthumous pardons to four young African-American men accused of raping a white woman near Groveland, Florida, 70 years ago.  Although the facts were already egregious enough, the book, by Gilbert King, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” uncovered previously unknown unredacted FBI reports that had been suppressed, evidence that there had been, in Mr. Kings words, “a ton of perjury,” fabrication of false evidence, and that law enforcement agents admitting torturing the four black men from whom they wanted to extract “confessions” so as to accuse them of the rape of a white woman that almost certainly never occurred.

King also was the first person to see a report that was “quashed” by the FBI and the U.S. attorney that showed that one of the accused black men was murdered by the local sheriff and his deputy.

The book is also important as a sort of origin story about Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice.

Coverage of Florida Governor’s pardons and the underlying back story was available through Democracy Now this week: The Groveland Four: Florida Pardons Men Falsely Accused in Jim Crow-Era Rape Case in 1949, January  14, 2019.

Should we add  “Devil in the Grove” to our Citizens Defending Libraries list of books that have been suppressed?                   

The story of the book’s almost non-publication, its near disappearance from the public commons of the book world where it could be part of ongoing public discourse and then, finally, its receipt of the Pulitzer Prize (also nominated for an Edgar) is reminiscent of the tales that attach to some of the other of the books on our growing list of suppressed books, including other Pulitzer Prize winners.  See: Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed.

Mr. King tells how, the book was “rejected 38 times by publishers.”  When it was finally published “it didn’t really get a lot of attention, didn’t get a lot of reviews.”  Really?  Why?  And then his publisher informed him of their intent to abandon the book and remainder it.  Remaindering a book is perhaps not quite so squalid an end for a book as being “pulped” out of existence, a threat that faced other books on our suppressed list, but it’s similar.

And then the book’s merit was recognized when it received the  2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, was nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award, and got the Book of the Year (Non-fiction, 2012) The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor!

Like other books on our list of suppressed books it was a catalyst for change- Would the Florida Governor’s pardons be forthcoming at this time without this book?  Doubtful.

Perhaps this book was not suppressed as obviously as other books already on our list, but it is important to recognize that in the tales of suppression that we have collected we are not talking about outright censorship, but about something more subtle.  The more subtle ways books on our list have been held back from the public is a continuum.   That continuum of suppression shapes public discourse, but it is hard to know where on this continuum to stop pointing out the effects of how the media industry is organized to deliver or not deliver content to us.

It will be noted that other books on our list of suppressed books deal directly with federal power or the power of the media, or some with issues of the surveillance and the intelligence community.   A book, like “Devil in the Grove,” about a racially based miscarriage of justice that occurred seventy years ago might not seem so equally challenging to government and existing power structures so as to be a candidate for suppression. . .   That is not unless you consider past to be prologue, in which case you can consider that this book is ever so relevant to today as a Black Lives Matter history book. 

Is the government threatened by “Black Lives Matter” thinking?  Apparently it is: The FBI, as documented in its own internal memorandum is, just like the old days, characterizing black activists protesting police brutality as terrorists.  The FBI has even labeled them with the newly coined term “Black Identity Extremists” (BIEs).  See:  ‘The Bureau Is Once Again Profiling Black Activists Because of Their Beliefs and Their Race’, by Janine Jackson, October 24, 2017.
   
Why is the Republican governor issuing his pardon for the Groveland Four now?  It is interesting to think that one reason may be that Florida voters just changed the law of the state reenfranchising and allowing to vote 1.4 million people previously convicted of felonies.  Florida is a state where about 10% of adults, 1 in 5 black adults, 1.5 million people in all were disenfranchised.  Crime convictions are often discriminatory: People who are poor, black or brown are tried and convicted for things others wouldn’t be . . .   Is the Republican governor’s pardon a political tip of the hat to that fact?  Is it also an acknowledgment to the newly reenfranchised voters that too often, as the convicted themselves must surely know, such people who are convicted are also innocent of the crimes of which they are convicted?

As noted, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” was published in 2012.  The book was  rejected 38 times by publishers, but it was published.  It is interesting to think whether it would be published now.

The publishing world has changed.  In a recent sermon about Amazon given by Ana Levy-Lyons a Unitarian Universalist minister in Brooklyn Heights, Ms. Levy-Lyons suggested that the changes that Amazon has brought to the book world are bleeding money out of that world (with the consequent layoff of marketing and sales people and editors and the shrinking of author royalties and advances).  She said that, “publishers are less able to take risks on first-time authors or authors with some off-beat weird idea.”  She referred to her own book, “No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments,” published just recently in March 2018, and said that these changes are continuing to happen so fast that she knows “for a fact that” if she had pitched her book even one year later, her “publisher would not have bought it.”  Thus “authors are finding it harder and harder to make a living.”

The ways in which the book publishing world have changed recently have been so fast and so vast they are difficult to assess.  It’s a moving target.  That includes assessing any changes on the continuum of soft suppression of what does and does not get published . .

. .   So “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” was rejected 38 times by publishers, but would it have been published at all now?

If you are a New Yorker looking for this book in your public library you might face a challenge.  Non of the five copies the Brooklyn Public Library has are currently available.  None of the NYPL's four circulating copies is currently available.  The NYPL doesn't keep a reference copy of the Pulitzer Prize winner in its 42nd Street Central Reference library, so don't go there.  It does keep a reference copy on hand in the Schomburg Library.  If you want, you can try for the e-book or the audio book they have.  Queens residents will have the best time of it: Six of the ten copies on hand are currently available.  At least until recent years the Queens Library system was not as hell bent as the NYPL and BPL on getting rid of books.

Who Is Hurt Most When Libraries Are Defunded and Dismantled? The Poor, The Racially Discriminated Against, Scholars, Future Leaders

Defunding and dismantling our libraries hurts society broadly, probably more broadly than many may have considered.

It is, of course, usually recognized that cutting back on library services significantly impacts low-income neighborhoods relying on them.  A PowerPoint presentation to the Queens Library board told it that library service is most important to low-income users: 2/3rds visit at least weekly, & almost 30% visit every/most days.  A recent Pew research Center report says "Low-income Americans, Hispanics and African Americans are more likely than others to say that a library closing would impact their lives and communities," see them as community anchors, and use them to pursue jobs.  And it's been astutely commented that wherever it happens the loss of libraries is "another surefire way to entrench inequality."
 
Researchers and students also use the libraries.  Arguing to destroy libraries, the NYPL tried a divide-and-conquer-the-community approach suggesting that the research library was elitist and not sufficiently populist when in any given year the researchers and students at its 42nd Street central reference library consult "only 6% of print sources."  The same argument was being used to thin out collections at neighborhood libraries and move books off-site from those locations too.  That "6%" consultation rate was referred to by Ada Louise Huxtable in her very last column, published just weeks before her death (Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, December 3, 2012), in which she lambasted the NYPL's Central Library Plan including its stingy thinking that books should not be kept on hand if they are consulted infrequently:

If we could estimate how many ways in which the world has been changed by that 6%, the number would be far more meaningful than the traffic through its lion-guarded doors. The library's own releases, while short on details, consistently offer a rosy picture of a lively and popular "People's Palace." But a research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by head counts, the current arbiter of success. This is already the most democratic of institutions, free and open to all. Democracy and populism seem to have become hopelessly confused.

Among other things, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and SIBL are the libraries for the graduate students at CUNY, the City University of New York, who do not have ready access to the impressive libraries used by students paying more expensive tuition at private universities.

It may be that the benefits of libraries as repositories of information that may seem obscure or not often thought about might easily be dismissed, but transmitted out through those who access that information, or make use of it to lead the way to new solutions for the problems of world, the benefit is widespread.  Ripley's Believe It or Not! phenomenally successful as a widely read newspaper feature, ultimately became an “entertainment empire” and institution itself. From 1923 until 1975 all the information for the newspaper feature was found by one researcher, Norbert Pearlroth, consulting some 7,000 books a year ("approximately 350,000 during his whole career") from the 42nd Street research collection.

Sometimes the factor of racial discrimination can be more blatant: There were those in the Brooklyn Heights community who expressed eagerness to tear down replace the central destination library there with a smaller one so as to stop attracting people such as those from nearby housing projects to the neighborhood in central downtown Brooklyn.  See:  A Consideration of Race, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy As NYC Libraries Are Sold And The Library System Shrunk And Deliberately Underfunded.

Administration officials hell bent on transforming libraries into real estate deals have tried other divide-and-conquer-the-community ploys.  Citizens Defending Libraries has testified before the City Council so that these ploys oughtn't slip by unnoticed.  Officials have claimed that if some New Yorkers lose their libraries to sales, proceeds will benefit other communities (via accounting gimmick eyewash that's more untrue than not, and implying that other community libraries won't be sold next).  Another tactic has been to say that if library space is surrendered to the real estate community, artists can benefit by being able to rent studios to dance and paint.  And another favorite, a frequently used wedge to divide community in many contexts in NYC, is to say that if real estate projects are allowed to proceed, developers will provide a few units of so-called affordable housing in return.

For complete information go back to our Citizens Defending Libraries Main Page (or to read through all the content of our Main Page in LONG FORM CLICK)