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

Nigger Lover”—not to return to Lake County. Akerman was appalled, and frightened, by the sheriff’s vitriol, especially since Shepherd and Irvin were at that point headed to the electric chair and Greenlee to a chain gang. Yet McCall was not boasting or gloating; he was brooding. For months he brooded, collected his press clippings, and added new names to his enemies list. He followed the progress of the Groveland Boys case through the courts; he grimaced at the names: Williams, Akerman, Williams, Marshall, Carter, Jackson, Williams. They’d be back. They’d be back, he’d tell himself, and then he’d say to himself, as he often did, “I don’t push easy. Nope. I don’t push easy.”

    T WO DAYS AFTER the Supreme Court decision in Shepherd v. Florida , Walter White sent a telegram to Franklin Williams in San Francisco: “Our warm appreciation for the notable part you played in speedy victory won in Supreme Court in Groveland case.” That same day in April, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur on the grounds that he was “unable to give his whole support to the policies of the U.S. Government.” Although Marshall did not pretend that Truman’s decision had anything to do with MacArthur’s dilatory response to the segregation of black servicemen in the U.S. Army, he was pleased to note that MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, “desegregated in about three weeks. Desegregated the whole thing.”
    Marshall was determined not to be in any way dilatory in the NAACP’s response to the Shepherd v. Florida decision; he would ensure that the defense in the second trial of the Groveland Boys in Tavares would have adequate time to prepare. With Shepherd and Irvin’s arraignment date set by State Attorney Jesse Hunter for August 15, Marshall immediately began putting a defense team in place, and Jack Greenberg immediately volunteered, not just because he felt it was an important case but also because he found it impossible to resist the prospect of a criminal trial in the highly charged racial atmosphere of the South. If “it wasn’t very smart,” as Greenberg said of his decision—for Franklin Williams’s Lake County stories could be worrying—the experience would prove to be as heart-stopping as it was eye-opening.
    Alex Akerman had moved to Virginia, and while he would be available for the trial, Marshall still needed an attorney in Florida to work the case: to initiate investigations, to pursue fresh leads (many of them a result of Norman Bunin’s exposé in the St. Petersburg Times ), to file briefs. Paul Perkins proved to be the man. A thirty-two-year-old black lawyer from Orlando who had attended Howard University Law School after serving in the U.S. Army, Perkins seized on the opportunity to work with Thurgood Marshall, even at the meager $3.75 per hour the LDF could afford to pay; he’d grown accustomed to working long hours for small pay or, more commonly among his indigent clients, for “ham or oranges.” Deep-voiced, confident, Perkins carried himself taller and larger than his thin, five-foot-five frame, and he shared none of Franklin Williams’s compunctions about driving deep into Lake County and knocking on doors. On his trips into Groveland, however, he would take along with him a friend’s young son, because, supposedly, some “strange code of ethics” prevented the Ku Klux Klan from accosting a black man in the company of his children.
    Part two of the Groveland Boys case began officially on July 6, when Jesse Hunter reindicted Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, who had been transported from Raiford to Tavares by Sheriff Willis McCall and his deputy James Yates. (At the state prison, McCall had observed to the guard, for the benefit of Shepherd and Irvin, “You all haven’t electrocuted those niggers yet? When you do, I want to watch them flinch.” And Yates had added, “Wish you all would run so that I could shoot the damn hell out of you.”) After the reindictment, Hunter assured reporters that the state’s case against the defendants was airtight and that the NAACP was just “causing trouble” by employing a legal technicality in an attempt to keep two black men out of the electric chair. Nonetheless, he was going to make certain that this time round “plenty of Negroes” were available for jury service, he said, then added that he’d not mind trying the defendants “before an all-Negro jury.”
    The Lake County retrial of the