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

game.” Bobbie Branch, the office manager, “an ample woman who resembled Bloody Mary in South Pacific ,” was especially excited after the decisions; she was swaggering around the place and “swearing like a marine,” Greenberg recalled. The press was ringing the phones off the hook, and visitors were parading through the office with their congratulations. Nobody wanted to go home.
    Of course, Marshall knew that the decisions had not gone so far as to obliterate Plessy completely, but he was at last beginning to see the fruits of the seeds Houston had planted after he and Marshall, in 1930, had sat down together to study the findings in the Margold Report. In the twenty years since, they had honed “the tools to destroy all governmentally imposed racial segregation.” The work was not done, but it had unquestionably and irrevocably begun. “It will take time. It will take courage and determination,” Marshall said, as if to convince himself that he had the fortitude to continue the mission without the man who had envisioned it.
    P ERHAPS THE BIGGEST surprise that spring came to Marshall and the LDF lawyers in the form of a three-part exposé that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times in early April. Norman Bunin, a twenty-six-year-old copy editor who had closely followed the Groveland case as it had unfolded in Florida, had felt that some of the testimony simply did not add up. To satisfy his own curiosity, he began reading the trial transcripts and trying to piece together exactly what had happened on the night of July 15, 1949. From the outset, it seemed glaringly apparent to Bunin, by virtue of the accounts of several witnesses, that at the time of the alleged rape Charles Greenlee was already in jail. Only Norma Padgett’s testimony placed Greenlee at the scene of the supposed crime, and in fact, with a stunning lack of physical evidence, the prosecution had based its case entirely on the word of Norma Padgett and her identification of the alleged assailants in court. Other details in the court records nagged at Bunin, such as the prosecution’s list of witnesses, nearly all of whom were never called to testify: Why? Bunin wondered.
    The more he wondered the more obsessed Bunin became with the case. Whatever days he could—he had not been officially assigned to the case for the paper—he spent buried in the court records, and on weekends, driving from the Gulf Coast to Lake County, he did the legwork that the defense had not had time to do before the trial. He drove to Eatonville, and back toward Mascotte, then up toward Okahumpka, to the spot where Willie Padgett’s car had stalled. He drove to the scene of the alleged rape near the Sumter County line, and then drove back to the Groveland train depot. He jotted down speeds and minutes and distances; he tried to make sense of the prosecution’s time line. But it made no sense.
    Bunin not only located alibi witnesses that Williams and Akerman had been unable to find, but also tracked down Lawrence Burtoft, the young man who had spoken with Norma Padgett in his father’s café the morning after she’d allegedly been kidnapped and raped. Jesse Hunter had interviewed Burtoft on two occasions, and chose not to call him as a witness. Bunin began to understand why; for, by Burtoft’s account, Norma had said that her so-called kidnappers, whom she could not identify, had not in any way harmed her. Moreover, she had appeared to Burtoft to be quite calm, despite the fact that, as she’d claimed, her husband might be lying murdered by the side of the road. She had not asked Burtoft to notify the police. All she wanted, she’d said, was a ride home, and “she waited patiently while he [Burtoft] had his breakfast.”
    One weekend Bunin drove to Bay Lake. A long, looping road took him to the Tyson farmhouse, where he hoped to interview Norma Padgett. His hopes were not in vain: Coy Tyson voiced no objections, perhaps because Bunin was not a reporter for one of those New York papers nor a person connected in some way to the NAACP, or perhaps because his daughter’s rapists had been safely tried and convicted. Norma, in a green farm dress, her hair mussed and her bare feet very dirty, scarcely resembled the girl with the blond curls and homemade bolero who had appeared in the courtroom at Tavares. Her story, however, was much the same, although Bunin did note a few discrepancies, most significantly in regard to her state of mind that morning of July 16.