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

receipt.”)
    In the spring of 1950, Williams’s staunch ally Walter White still remained on indefinite leave from the NAACP. So Williams really had no choice. As much as he might have wished to continue working out of New York and Washington on groundbreaking civil rights cases, he was packing his bags and heading back to the Sunshine State with its scary, unwelcoming, clay-eating, car-chasing crackers.

CHAPTER 13: IN ANY FIGHT SOME FALL

    Curtis Howard. ( Courtesy of Kim Howard Turner )
    F RANKLIN WILLIAMS MADE a gallant attempt to argue to the Florida Supreme Court that Charles Greenlee could not have been involved in the alleged rape of Norma Padgett because, according to the time line established by her own testimony, police had already apprehended Greenlee miles away from the scene. The Florida attorney general, however, offered a simple explanation for any discrepancies in the time line to which the NAACP counsel attached such importance:
    Mrs. Padgett didn’t have any idea how long the four negroes took to rape her. While sexual intercourse can be a prolonged affair in some settings, it is probable that these four negroes, goaded to a sexual frenzy by the prospect of having intercourse with a young white woman, took about as much time as a bull put to a cow in heat. Cover her, a few rapid thrusts, all over, and off again.
    To Williams, who had traveled to Tallahassee with Akerman to make their case before the justices, it was like arguing “in somebody’s back yard . . . to a group of men whose tendency would be to reject the fact that in their state there could be such an oppressive atmosphere that these young men could not get a fair trial.” The justices were hardly inquisitive, and there wasn’t “much of a play back and forth” of the sort that Williams had experienced when arguing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
    To no one’s surprise, Florida’s highest court upheld the Lake County verdict. Still, the justices did grant Shepherd and Irvin a ninety-day stay of execution, which allowed time for an appeal to the higher court. Marshall set Jack Greenberg to work on the briefs with Williams while the office waited anxiously for the Sweatt and McLaurin decisions. The Groveland Boys waited anxiously in jail.

    F OR THURGOOD MARSHALL in 1950, T. S. Eliot was right: April was the cruelest month. By then the FBI had not only completed its investigation into the beatings of the Groveland Boys but had also pressured the U.S. attorney, Herbert Phillips, to file charges against deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell. Phillips had responded by impaneling, at the courthouse in Ocala, a federal grand jury, before which Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee testified as to their physical abuse at the hands of Lake County law enforcement officials. The grand jury returned “no true bill,” essentially declaring the defendants Yates and Campbell innocent, and issued in addition a statement praising Sheriff McCall for his protection of the accused men from extreme violence. In a letter to Phillips the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general stated that the department was “disturbed and disappointed in the inaction of the grand jury, for we are convinced that the victims were beaten and mistreated as charged.”
    Marshall was outraged. Phillips had, at the last minute, summoned to Ocala the two physicians at the Raiford state prison who had examined the Groveland Boys, but by the time they’d arrived that afternoon the hearing had already ended. Phillips had not called any of the prison officials or FBI agents who’d interviewed the three prisoners and photographed their quite visible injuries. Furthermore, not to be accused of racial bias, Phillips had made sure that three black men were seated on the grand jury, and that they would hear the words of two upstanding deputies of the law pitted against those of three convicted rapists. It was clear to Marshall and the Justice Department that if Phillips had actually wanted indictments of the two deputies, he could easily have secured them. Instead, Herbert S. Phillips, an avowed segregationist appointed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, had left the critical decisions in the process to his friend Jesse Hunter, who had determined, for instance, that they didn’t “need any assistance from F.B.I. agents.”

    I N AUGUST 1949, when the Groveland Boys trial had been about to begin, Charles Hamilton Houston wrote a letter to Assistant Special Counsel Robert