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

since when are you an authority on rape?”
    Nonetheless, in Greenberg’s estimation, Williams argued the case “superbly.” In Florida’s response to Williams, the assistant attorney general Reeves Bowen, as he had anticipated, got slaughtered. Bowen had barely uttered his denial of the racial tension that Williams had so dramatically presented on the change of venue issue when Justice Jackson halted him with the proposition that “the hardest thing for you to overcome” is the establishment by Judge Truman Futch of special rules “in anticipation of some kind of violence.”
    Likewise, Bowen’s attempt to defend the jury selection process was stopped short, and he was forced to admit that “a system of racial proportional representation had deliberately been used” to select grand jurors in the Groveland Boys case. His argument crumbled when he justified the jury selection process in Lake County in terms of “the historical background of the South,” stating that the county commissioners “just don’t think about Negroes as jurors” in the same way that they would not “think of having Negroes on a list for a social function.” Justice Harold Burton wondered if there was “anything to prevent” jury commissioners from putting the names of both whites and blacks in a box and “drawing them out by chance.” Justice Tom C. Clark marveled that Lake County had never heard of placing the names on a “jury wheel” and allowing spins of the wheel to randomly select the names of prospective jurors. Both justices drew laughs from the spectators and reporters. Bowen absorbed the judicial blows, and Marshall grinned from ear to ear.
    Marshall relished any moment in Supreme Court proceedings that forced Southerners to defend their Jim Crow traditions before the country’s top legal minds. It almost made up for the constant humiliation he’d had to endure so often in the courtrooms of the South. Except that when the lawyer for the state of Florida walked out of the Supreme Court building at the end of arguments, he would shake hands with his opponents and return safely to his home in the south of the South. No one was going to chase Assistant Attorney General of Florida Reeves Bowen out of the capital at ninety miles per hour, or drag him at gunpoint to a waiting mob along the banks of the Potomac.
    Akerman, too, headed back to Florida, and Williams boarded a long flight back to the West Coast. Marshall joined the other LDF attorneys on the train to New York.

CHAPTER 15: YOU HAVE PISSED IN MY WHISKEY

    Sheriff Willis McCall. ( Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida )
    T HURGOOD MARSHALL SENT a twelve-word telegram to Dellia Irvin: “Won new trial for Walter Irvin in Supreme Court of United States.”
    On April 9, 1951, exactly one month after they had heard arguments in Shepherd v. Florida , the nine Supreme Court justices handed down a per curiam decision—that is, a decision authored by the Court as a whole rather than by a specific judge—and thus were the convictions of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin overturned.
    It had been Robert Carter’s argument in regard to Lake County’s grand jury selection process that had afforded the grounds for reversal. Justice Robert Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, in which he was joined by Felix Frankfurter, scorching the roles that Judge Truman Futch, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and even Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic had played in convictions that “do not meet any civilized conception of due process of law.” Justice Jackson pointed to “prejudicial influences outside the courtroom . . . [that] were brought to bear on this jury with such force that the conclusion is inescapable that these defendants were prejudged as guilty, and the trial was but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which it generated.” So it was, Jackson opined, that “[t]he only chance these Negroes had of acquittal would have been in the courage and decency of some sturdy and forthright white person of sufficient standing to face and live down the odium among his white neighbors that such a vote, if required, would have brought.” In the end, the justice accounted the jury selection issue on which the two convictions were overturned to be of “only theoretical importance.” To characterize aptly Florida’s handling of the Groveland Boys case required, for Justice Jackson, stronger