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

executive assured his young colleague that “he didn’t have to worry about Thurgood Marshall, that he’d get a job as long as he was secretary.”
    White’s statement of assurance got relayed back to Marshall. As it happened, Williams had stepped out of the office, so Marshall asked the telephone operator to call him the moment Williams returned. Marshall did not have to wait long for the call. He met Williams at the door, and announced, “You’re fired.”
    Again Williams stormed into Walter White’s office. It was immediately apparent to White that in his absence power had shifted in the NAACP offices, and it was soon apparent to Williams that his ally and advocate could not make good on his promises. Franklin Williams would indeed have to worry about Thurgood Marshall, and as for that job he’d get as long as White was secretary . . . “Why, I didn’t mean that,” White told him.
    Franklin Williams did get another job. Within weeks he had been named West Coast director and regional counsel for the NAACP in San Francisco. While his transfer to the West Coast might justly have been viewed as a promotion as well, Williams left New York in disappointment, for, he believed, he would probably never again have the opportunity to argue civil rights cases for the LDF in the U.S. Supreme Court. He told Jack Greenberg that his ambition was to one day return to the NAACP as chief, but he less optimistically confided to other friends and associates that “he felt he was being exiled.” As it turned out, he would be back much sooner than he’d have expected.

    D URING THE SUMMER of 1950, Marshall decided to proceed more proactively in the Groveland Boys case. Norman Bunin’s exposé in the St. Petersburg Times had convinced Marshall that Norma Padgett’s story held more than she or the court had revealed, and in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse Lake County’s verdict, he preferred to have further investigations into the case completed or at least under way before a date was set for the second trial to begin. To a meeting in New York with representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Baltimore lawyer and national secretary of the Workers Defense League Rowland Watts, and New Leader reporter Terence McCarthy, Marshall also invited a friend from Miami, Buck Owens, of the Owens Detective Agency, and a young private investigator, one “Miss L. B. De Forest.” Together, they carved out a plan.
    Bunin told Marshall that “although most of the whites there [in Lake County] were happy about the conviction, many of them don’t believe Norma Padgett’s story.” Marshall thought, and the others agreed, that it “could prove fruitful” if Miss De Forest could cultivate relationships with some of the Padgetts, “not all of whom are on good terms with Norma.” It was agreed, too, that the detective “should try to get on good terms with the people of Groveland itself, especially the police chief [George Mays],” who had demonstrated a willingness to provide information to both McCarthy and the FBI. McCarthy and Watts would also brief Miss De Forest on further leads. She, it was decided, would enter Lake County undercover, as a potential buyer of real estate, and would regularly send reports back to the “realtor” Rowland Watts in New York, “to avoid any possibility of a slip-up.” Marshall agreed to payment by the NAACP of a five-hundred-dollar retainer and thirty-five dollars a day, plus expenses, for the investigator’s services. The deal was struck. All Miss De Forest needed to do now was pack her bags and hop on a bus for Lake County, and follow a piece of advice from Marshall, the lawyers, and McCarthy. “Keep away from Sheriff McCall,” they told her, although “plied with beer, his deputies might do some talking about their part in the case.”
    T HURGOOD MARSHALL ASSIGNED Jack Greenberg the task of writing the writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to hear the Groveland Boys case, and Greenberg did exactly as he had been taught: he talked first to academics and law professors; then he talked to Bill Hastie. He learned.
    Recently, in the appeal of a Texas murder case, Cassell v. Texas , the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed the conviction of a black man on the grounds of unconstitutional jury exclusion practices, the commissioners having “chose[n] jurymen only from people with whom they were personally acquainted, and they knew no Negroes who were