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

County” and engaged in activities that violated the laws of Florida.
    Two nights after her arrival, at a Baptist church service Miss De Forest was introduced to the congregation as “a stranger coming to live among us.” She was welcomed warmly: “They seem to have taken me into their hearts and homes,” she reported. Some of the younger ladies at the church invited her to join them for a soda at Carney’s Drug Store, just across the street from where she was staying. Over vanilla Cokes they discussed possible places Miss De Forest might consider for a permanent residence, and the young stranger feigned surprise when she was told that Lake County had experienced some racial trouble last year. The ladies from the church offered details about “the case” and about the Groveland Boys. One of the ladies noted that “Negroes are o.k.,” but if they “step out of their place . . . they’ll burn.” Another said, “The Northerners spoil them and treat them like equals. ” The woman who’d rented Miss De Forest a room in her house was also eager to talk about the rape of Norma Padgett, who, so she’d heard, had been beaten so savagely she’d been confined to the hospital for two weeks after the attack because “her breasts were lacerated and injured by the teeth of her abductors.” Rumor had rewritten the reality of the case.
    Over the next few days De Forest had “some success in dodging some of the realtors” keen to show her houses with orange groves in Lake County. She wore a “World Peace” pin of her own design that, she wrote, “interests everyone and is a good cover.” Each night in her rented room she composed letters on the progress of her investigation, which she mailed to Rowland Watts of the Workers Defense League in New York. In the coming days, she told him, she hoped to be introduced to some of Norma Padgett’s relatives, so she expected soon to be packing up her stationery, clothes, and Bible and moving to some place in Bay Lake.

    O NCE THE L. B. De Forest private investigation had been set up by Thurgood Marshall, Rowland Watts had shared with NAACP lawyers the results of the WDL’s own, long-running investigation into the peonage conditions in Lake County. For the WDL, the Groveland Boys case provided an opportunity to focus media attention upon the forced labor practices common in Florida’s citrus groves and at the same time to highlight, and hopefully to rectify, a criminal injustice in a death penalty case. Watts’s high-level contacts in Florida, all of them sympathetic to the Groveland Boys’ cause and willing to aid, if clandestinely, in the investigation, had access to official documents like driver registration records and even police department records. Among Watts’s confidential informants was Milton C. Thomas, formerly an editor at the Orlando Morning Sentinel and now public relations director for U.S. senator Claude Pepper, sworn political enemy to Jesse Hunter and Willis McCall.
    Thomas had had numerous conversations with reporters in central Florida who had been following the Groveland Boys case for their local newspapers but had felt pressured by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department not to dig too deeply into the story. Ormond Powers was one of those reporters. He had covered the Groveland Boys trial for the Orlando Morning Sentinel , and prior to that he had reported from the scene of the Groveland riots. He’d seemed always to find himself at the side of Sheriff Willis McCall, who had spoon-fed Powers news items like the claim that all three defendants had confessed. Powers had essentially collaborated with McCall, he’d printed the news the sheriff deemed was fit to print, but he’d later come to resent the fact that he had been used by law enforcement in Lake County. One of the stories he had not reported in any depth was that of Curtis Howard, which Powers believed to be one of the keys to the case.

    L . B. DE Forest hired a taxi to take her to Burtoft’s Café, where Norma Padgett had sought the help of Lawrence Burtoft on the morning of the alleged rape. After speaking with Burtoft’s mother about the modern six-room home and three-acre orange grove she was interested in selling, De Forest turned the conversation to the topic of Norma Padgett. “If we were to tell the truth about the case, the true facts,” a neighbor of Mrs. Burtoft’s said, “it would bust the case wide open, and the boys would have evidence for a new trial.” The