Conviction: The Murder Trial That Powered Thurgood Marshall’s Fight for Civil Rights
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On New Year’s Eve, 1939, a horrific triple murder occurred in rural Oklahoma. Within a matter of days, investigators identified several suspects: convicts who had been at a craps game with one of the victims the night before. Also at the craps game was a young black farmer named W. D. Lyons. As anger at authorities grew, political pressure mounted to find a villain. The governor’s representative settled on Lyons, who was arrested, tortured into signing a confession, and tried for the murder.
The NAACP’s new Legal Defense and Education Fund sent its young chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, to take part in the trial. The NAACP desperately needed money, and Marshall was convinced that the Lyons case could be a fundraising boon for both the state and national organizations. It was. The case went on to the US Supreme Court, and the NAACP raised much-needed money from the publicity.
Conviction is the story of Lyons v. Oklahoma, the oft-forgotten case that set Marshall and the NAACP on the path that led ultimately to victory in Brown v. Board of Education and the accompanying social revolution in the United States.
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Denver Nicks is a contributor to Rolling Stone and National Geographic Traveler and a former staff writer for Time magazine. He is the author of Private: Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History and Hot Sauce Nation: America’s Burning Obsession.
John Nicks is an attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, specializing in oil and gas, personal injury, and civil rights law.
Ron Butler is a Los Angeles based actor who works regularly as a commercial and animation voiceover artist and an audiobook narrator. A member of the Atlantic Theater Company, he has over a hundred film and television credits to his name and won an Independent Filmmaker Project Award for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.
