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

handle the arguments, period.
    On March 9, Marshall, in a heavy winter overcoat and fedora, arrived on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he posed for a photo with his LDF team: Jack Greenberg, Franklin Williams, and Robert Carter. Alex Akerman, who had worked with Greenberg on the brief for the appeal, as he himself had presented the case for the Groveland Boys’ defense before Judge Truman Futch in Tavares, had traveled up from Florida to see the attorney he had partnered at the original trial, Frank Williams, argue before the nine justices on the Supreme Court. On the trip north, Akerman had run into Reeves Bowen, the assistant attorney general of Florida, against whom he had argued the Groveland case before the Florida Supreme Court. Akerman had wondered why Bowen had decided to come to Washington himself to argue Shepherd v. Florida . “Well,” Bowen had responded, “I wasn’t going to send anybody else up to be slaughtered.” For, once the Court had ruled on Cassell , Bowen had little doubt as to what the outcome would be in Shepherd .
    “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal of the court bellowed. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”
    Shepherd v. Florida was called. Robert Carter, who was sharing the case with Williams, approached the podium. The NAACP lawyers were set to argue three specific issues before the Court: jury exclusion, change of venue, and lack of adequate time to prepare a defense. For reasons known only to him, Marshall had assigned the jury issue to Carter. Williams later stated that it “irritated me a little bit that Thurgood gave him that assignment because that was the issue on which I was probably at the time, according to Thurgood, the nation’s leading authority.” Still, Williams wasn’t surprised by the move, as “Thurgood and I did not get along anyhow, not too well.”
    No sooner had Carter begun to present the jury exclusion argument than, in Williams’s words, he “botched it up”: Frankfurter immediately interrupted him by citing “five or six other systematic exclusion of jury cases” and asking Carter if the Groveland case proved to be the same as them.
    “Yes,” Carter answered, but when he attempted to proceed, he was again interrupted, this time by Justice Robert Jackson. He failed to see why Carter needed “to say anything more” rather than simply to quote from Florida’s admission that it used a racial proportional system for jury selection.
    “Well,” Carter asked rhetorically, “what is the point of arguing for them?” With that, he left the podium and sat down.
    It was a strange beginning, and awkward. Certainly Williams would have handled the issue differently, but he had been assigned to argue change of venue and lack of time to prepare a defense. And he soon proved himself to be equally capable of producing an awkward moment. Williams opened by “paint[ing] a picture” of the atmosphere in Lake County at the time of the Groveland Boys trial. Oral arguments came easily to the dynamic, eloquent New York lawyer, and since he had experienced firsthand the antagonistic, tension-filled environment he was describing, he effectively accomplished the task of showing that “it was impossible to get a fair and impartial trial” in Lake County. Most important, Williams knew the record “backwards and forward,” and the appellate record included all those newspaper stories that he and Akerman had collected: stories of white mobs burning Negro homes in Groveland; articles quoting Sheriff Willis McCall’s proclamations to the press, such as his notices that he had obtained confessions from all three defendants. Then, for no reason that was clear to him or Marshall or the justices or anyone else, Williams addressed Frankfurter: “And Mr. Justice Frankfurter, this is a rape case.”
    Williams cringed at the words he himself had spoken, and not just because Supreme Court protocol required that lawyers, unless they are directly posed a question from the bench, address only the chief justice. “Jesus, I wanted to go through the floor,” Williams recalled, “but I was so conscious of the fact that Frankfurter had considered me excellent.” Justice Jackson, not resisting the awkwardness of the moment, leaned forward and asked Frankfurter, wryly, “Felix,