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

as the callow, sixteen-year-old defendant or his defense could expect. Further, any chance of a second recommendation of mercy would in all likelihood be forfeit, Williams reasoned, when, after two or even three years in prison, before a retrial, an older, perhaps hardened, less ingenuous, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Charles Greenlee would appear in court. On the basis of this reasoning, Marshall and Williams devised their strategy: They would not include Greenlee’s name in the appeal; thus, if they should fail, Greenlee would still escape the electric chair. If, on the other hand, they should succeed in winning acquittals for Shepherd and Irvin, the consummately persuasive Marshall would strive to get the governor to commute Greenlee’s sentence. The two attorneys explained to the boy his alternatives, and a week after he’d received his life sentence in Tavares, Charles Greenlee in his own hand wrote a letter in which he stated that he understood fully the choice he was making and that, while he had consulted with lawyers and his family, the decision not to join the appeal was ultimately his. “So if God be with me,” he wrote, “I’ll pray that he do I will get a pardon if the other boys go free.” Shortly thereafter he was shipped off to Florida State Road Department Camp No. 16 in Lake City to begin his sentence of hard labor on a road gang.
    Guilty verdicts and death sentences did not, as Mabel Norris Reese had assured her readers, return Lake County to its Edenic bliss. Instead, wave after wave of undesirable publicity had been inundating the county ever since the close of the trial, much to the chagrin of Judge Futch, State Attorney Hunter, and Sheriff McCall. The publication nationally of Ted Poston’s New York Post story of the dramatic posttrial chase in the Nation especially pained Hunter, who preferred to believe that the people of Lake County had allowed the law to take its course. So, in an attempt to discredit Poston, Hunter held a hearing in Tavares, at which he invited highway patrolmen, police, and deputies from across Lake County to testify that they had not seen any cars speeding at ninety miles an hour toward Orlando on the night of the trial; and that they had not seen anyone step on Ted Poston’s glasses, either; and that Poston had not complained to any officers about anyone doing so.
    McCall remained mostly silent about the chase, but when Poston’s series on the Groveland trial earned the reporter a five-hundred-dollar award from the CIO American Newspaper Guild, the press-clipping, image-conscious sheriff was apoplectic. That guild, he railed, was a “damn bunch of Communists,” and Poston was but another “part of the Communistic element trying to tear down racial relations; trying to separate the races instead of bringing them together.” When Poston won a second prestigious prize for his series, Mabel Norris Reese took up her pen; in a letter to the chairman of the Heywood Broun Award committee she disputed the accuracy of Poston’s reporting. The committee was unmoved.
    Satisfied though Hunter, Futch, and McCall were that the hearing had sufficiently debunked Poston’s story as pure fiction—after all, why would the residents of central Florida choose to believe a communist reporter and lawyer from the North over the police and patrolmen of Lake County?—the FBI was not. The FBI chose to believe Bill Bogar, Exalted Cyclops of the Apopka Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan and key informant for the bureau. Bogar fingered Willis McCall as the party who’d initiated the storied but factual chase, and the FBI report indicated that the Klan had “intended to stop car and severely flog occupants, with instructions to leave state.” It also later led to the indictment of four Klansmen by a federal grand jury on perjury charges.
    The FBI’s investigations into the Groveland Boys case as well as Poston’s articles and Williams’s detailed reports to the NAACP in New York prompted Marshall again to contact the attorney general’s office. In a letter informing the attorney general that a “federal grand jury investigation is warranted” not just into the beatings of the Groveland Boys but also into the actions of deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell, Captain Herlong of the Florida National Guard, and Flowers Cockcroft, the “leader of an armed band of civilian men” who had terrorized Negro residents and burned their homes, Marshall urgently requested that the