The Groveland case
This book looks back on the non-fictional events of the mid-20th century. The case in question is about a rape case where a white girl was allegedly raped by four black men in Florida. The case became so explosively political because of the changing perception of race, because of the Civil Rights movement. This makes the case into a proxy battle between the racist presuppositions of the Old South and the efforts of the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice and equal treatment among the races.
"Mr. Civil Rights"
The defense lawyer defending the alleged rapists is a famous lawyer who works with the NAACP and who is assigned to help the case to be fair. He is so famous for his incisive powers as a lawyer that he had already been dubbed "Mr. Civil Rights." His work is literally symbolic in the history of the nation, because it proves that he is not inferior at all as a Black man, despite common opinion at the time. So superior was he as a lawyer that he managed to see justice done even during the height of racism in America, despite even the "Jim Crow" overtones of American politics.
The retrial
The turning point in this story really comes when Mr. Civil Rights manages to get the Groveland Boys a retrial. The fact that it was not an open-and-closed case symbolizes that injustice was almost done because of prejudice. Abroad, it was regarded as a symbol for the changing times, and among the community of racists, it became a rallying cry against the Civil Rights movement. The news of retrial was so explosive that the KKK rallied together and murdered two of the defendants, lynching many, many more.
Sheriff Willis McCall
This famous white supremacist can be seen as a symbol for racism in power. His authority protects those who commit even murder from facing judgment. Contrast the types of justice: Mr. Civil Rights is a lawyer who has to surmount the terrible heights and depths of racism in order to get any justice at all, and then there is Sheriff McCall, who can propagate his racist political agenda with little to no effort whatsoever.
Murder and injustice
The murders of the defendants prior to the court's ruling is evidence of injustice. The injustice is itself evidence of deeply held racial prejudice. Because the prejudice is so overwhelming, the community of people who hold racist views was able to reinforce its prejudiced opinion, eventually arriving at a distorted point of view. They began to feel as though their precious authority was being undone by a new kind of justice, but since they believed their racist point of view was automatically correct, they ended up playing the victim of the changes (which is simply unbelievable). The irony of their prejudice and self-victimizing attitudes is most evident in the murders of the defendants. This is vigilante activity for the sake of racist agendas.
