Author Gilbert King, guest lecturing in Stephen Bright's Yale course on Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage, recounts the 1949 Groveland case in Florida, where four young Black men were charged with raping a white woman. Drawing on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove, King traces how Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers took on the defense amid mob violence, a sheriff's shooting of shackled defendants, and a legal system stacked against the accused. The talk lays out the trial's procedural failures, the risks Marshall and his colleagues faced traveling into Jim Crow Florida, and how the case became a turning point in the NAACP's long campaign against racially motivated capital prosecutions. It is framed within a law school seminar on how race and poverty shape death penalty cases, using Groveland as a concrete historical example of that argument.