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

language than that offered by counsel or by the precedent cited in Cassell v. Texas ;and in a stinging conclusion, he provided it: “The case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. It is on that ground that I would reverse.”
    With those two sentences Justice Jackson had indicted the legal establishment and law enforcement offices of Lake County. Reporters scurried for comment from county officials. While Judge Truman Futch refused to issue any statement on the Supreme Court’s decision, a justice on the Florida Supreme Court allowed that he was “not surprised” by the ruling. Florida attorney general Richard W. Ervin stated that he was “very disappointed” by the decision, but “the thing to do now is to go ahead and re-try the case as quickly as possible and dispose of it.” Jesse Hunter was less restrained. For months he had been openly critical of the NAACP’s fund-raising efforts to “perfect this appeal,” efforts for which there was “no reason whatever . . . except to pay their lawyers.” Ironically, it had been Hunter’s disingenuous attempt to demonstrate lack of bias by handpicking and seating a black man on the Groveland grand jury that had provided the NAACP lawyers and the U.S. Supreme Court the constitutional grounds for reversal. Sidestepping questions about Jackson’s blistering concurring opinion, Hunter insisted to the Pittsburgh Courier that the case had been overturned on a “technicality.” He also noted that he was “very fond of Atty. Franklin H. Williams of the NAACP.”
    As for the image-obsessed sheriff of Lake County, Willis McCall, he was infuriated by the Supreme Court’s decision and his bad press. In a public statement he ranted against the Court’s reversal and “subversive influences” like the NAACP and the CIO Newspaper Guild: “The fact that they did not appeal the case of Greenlee along with the other two is an admission of guilt. The fact is that our U.S. Supreme Court let a few minority groups such as the NAACP and their eloquent and sensational lies and the receiving of awards from the CIO Newspaper Guild, such as received by Ted Poston, Negro writer for the New York Post , influence them to such a prejudiced extent that they saw fit to reverse one of the fairest and most impartial trials I have ever witnessed. It is shocking to think that our Supreme Court would bow to such subversive influences.”
    In twenty months McCall’s resentment that black reporters and the NAACP had descended on Lake County “to see that justice was done” at the trial of the Groveland Boys had hardly abated, and he sneered at the claims made by the black New York lawyer and the award-winning reporter about being chased out of Lake County after the trial: “They realized they were meddling where they had no business. . . . I informed them that no one had invited them to Florida. That they were not needed here and were only making things more complicated. . . . I suggested they return home or where they could feel safe, that we could handle things here in an orderly manner without the interference and confusion they were causing.”
    Twenty-two months before, in mid-July, when that angry mob was gathering outside the Tavares jail, Willis McCall had staved off a lynching of the Groveland Boys. Tacitly, he had also made a pact with the men from Bay Lake: that they would allow the rule of law to take its course, but if swift and electric justice did not come to Norma Padgett’s rapists as McCall had promised—if the law did not do right—they would restore their white man’s justice to Lake County. McCall was now going to have to answer to them, and he was going to have to contend with another black circus, bigger than the one before, making a mockery of lawanorder in his county and a grandstand of the court. He bristled at the thought of another trial. “I have it directly from Sheriff Dave Starr of Orange County that Sheriff McCall is ‘sweating blood’ over the Supreme Court decision,” reporter Ormond Powers told his former editor M. C. Thomas. McCall’s “mental attitude . . . is difficult to understand if his hands are clean—which I doubt—knowing something of Florida politics and gambling tieups.”
    Alex Akerman had contacted McCall by phone after the Groveland Boys trial. Before the lawyer had been able even to state his business, McCall had exploded. In a tirade he had warned Akerman—a “God Damn