Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

that the board approve an additional five hundred dollars, which brought Marshall’s total annual salary to $8,500.
    Of more immediate concern to Marshall, and Williams, was funding to sustain the Groveland Boys case, for, as Williams had told his people in Florida, “that Tavares business is only the first scuffle” and “the real wrestling match is just begun.” Yet, to date, the NAACP had pulled in only about fifteen hundred dollars, mostly in individual contributions from poor Florida blacks, whereas the case had already cost more than five thousand dollars, with “far more costly appeals ahead.” Roy Wilkins listened sympathetically to Williams’s pleas and Ted Poston’s stories, and he took the same position as Marshall, who had stated weeks before that the NAACP’s resources should be “thrown behind the defense of these boys.” Wilkins affirmed, “We’ll keep Frank’s promise, although it will cost at least twenty thousand dollars more to fight this case up to the Supreme Court. We’ll get the money somehow.”
    “Somehow” was, at least in part, a speaking tour, and Marshall decided to put Franklin Williams back on the fund-raising road, much the way he had when Williams traveled the country with the blinded soldier, Isaac Woodard, a few years earlier.
    Stories of prisoners’ beatings, abusive interrogations, and legal lynchings in Lake County had gained editorial attention in regional and national newspapers after the Groveland Boys trial, and by mid-September Ted Poston’s “Horror in the Sunny South” series had been running daily in the New York Post, his story of the ninety-mile-an-hour chase out of Lake County by a “bloodthirsty, motorized mob” having gotten particular, nationwide attention. The time was ripe with possibilities. As Williams noted, “We have provably innocent sons of fine, decent Negro-American families in the old tradition. We have burnings. Mob action . . . A whole community of peace-loving Negro workers scattered . . . lawyer intimidation, etc.” And Williams proved Marshall to be right. His tour of the Groveland Boys case—which in his retelling afforded him “all the characteristics of a dime-store novel . . . A perfect frameup”—raised more than $4,600 for the NAACP’s legal defense fund.
    Franklin Williams, at thirty-one years old, appeared to have unlimited potential. “He may have been the most gifted speaker I’ve ever heard,” LDF associate Jack Greenberg said of him. “His admirers use the term ‘silver-tongued,’ but even that didn’t seem adequate to describe his oratorical skills.” To his detractors, Williams was “glib,” sometimes brash, and he could certainly raise Mabel Norris Reese’s hackles. She’d once suggested that the New York lawyer might benefit from living some while in the gentlemanly South; without courtesy Williams bellowed, “I would not live in the South!” Marshall placed his confidence in Williams’s silver tongue and sterling intellect, which the young attorney had evidenced abundantly in Florida; so, to Marshall, it only made sense to have Franklin Williams argue the Groveland case before the state appellate court: a necessary step in the appeals process, if a fruitless one, for the NAACP had no real hope of a reversal in the state of Florida.
    First, though, the LDF had to decide upon the structure of the Groveland Boys’ appeal. With Shepherd and Irvin both facing the electric chair, they would surely join the appeal. Charles Greenlee, however, had been sentenced to life imprisonment on a jury recommendation of mercy. It was therefore entirely possible that he might win his appeal but in the retrial be sentenced to death. Not until 1981 (in an LDF-assisted case) did the Supreme Court rule that such a possibility discouraged appeal and “deterred the assertion of constitutional rights.” In essence, then, the Supreme Court interpreted a less-than-death sentence as an “acquittal” by the jury of “whatever was necessary to impose the death sentence” in the first trial, and thus ruled, under the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, that an appellant could not subsequently be sentenced to death in a second trial. In 1949, though, a legal misstep in the appellate process could send Charles Greenlee from a work farm to death row.
    Williams’s own experience in Lake County had convinced him, as he would convince Marshall, that Greenlee’s life sentence constituted as much mercy