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

Groveland Boys case promised the NAACP a national stage as large as that of the Scottsboro Boys twenty years before, and Thurgood Marshall was determined to take every advantage of it both for the political stature of the NAACP and for the cause of blacks in America. Whereas a “defense by committee” between the NAACP and communist organizations had complicated the Scottsboro Boys case, in the matter of Groveland, the NAACP, convinced of the defendants’ innocence from the outset, had not hesitated to take the case, thus preventing the Civil Rights Congress or any other defense groups from encroaching on its juridical territory. With the new trial likely to command the attention of a national event, Marshall recognized that the defense required not only an attorney with estimable credentials and a record of success but also one with extensive public relations experience, a nationwide reputation, and the fortitude to perform unflinchingly on the unfriendly turf of Sheriff Willis McCall. Marshall liked to say that he had “a big yellow streak running down my back” when traveling in the South. But not inside courtrooms and on courthouse steps: there he’d neither shirk his commitment to protecting the constitutional rights of powerless blacks like Irvin and Shepherd nor shrink from a fight with the Southern white establishment in the shape of a sheriff or a state attorney. By the summer of 1951 Thurgood Marshall had decided that he himself would represent the Groveland defendants, and with him to Lake County he would bring the swagger and confidence of the man who, just after Brown , would tell one newspaper publisher, “You can say all you want, but those white crackers are going to get tired of having Negro lawyers beating them every day in court.”
    In advance of their first trip to Florida, Jack Greenberg asked Marshall if he should reserve separate rooms or a double for the overnight train ride south. “I don’t sleep with nobody who don’t wear lacy drawers,” Marshall informed the eager young lawyer, who later recorded his impressions of their travel aboard a Seaboard Air Line train out of Pennsylvania Station. Although Greenberg had heard Marshall’s stories about his own days as a waiter in the dining car on the B&O, he had not expected that the porters would accord Marshall such reverence, and privilege. No matter that “white travelers were not yet accustomed to seeing blacks in dining cars,” Marshall received celebrity treatment as well as “treats like the outside cut of the roast beef” from the chef. Waiters kept the bourbon flowing “even in dry states,” while Marshall and Greenberg worked on briefs or read trial testimony to each other and took copious notes. They spent the daylight hours in Marshall’s room, and at night they’d ride in the front cars for blacks as the train lumbered through the South, past the ramshackle houses huddled in the darkness.
    Before he had left for the West Coast, Franklin Williams had briefed both Marshall and Greenberg on the Groveland case. Williams was convinced that no rape had occurred in the early morning hours of July 16, 1949. “Norma Padgett and her husband are very low class people,” Williams said, “who live down in this isolated little swamp area not too far from Groveland,” an area where Williams had conducted interviews with people who knew the young couple. From them he had gathered that the Padgetts had separated prior to the alleged rape; that because of possible spousal abuse, Norma had gone home to live with her parents. Willie had been trying to mend things between them, so he’d asked Norma out to a square dance. They’d picked up some whiskey at Frisz’s Bar and Grill, then headed over to Clermont, where they were drinking and dancing until the hall closed at 1 a.m.
    What happened thereafter, in Williams’s estimation, was that a very drunk Willie Padgett had tried to have sex with Norma in the car, had maybe even gotten rough with her, and “she gets hysterical and she jumps out of the car and runs away,” leaving behind Willie, who’s scared that she’s going home to “tell the Cracker parents and brothers of hers that he had attempted to rape her.” And that, said Williams, would be “the end of him.” For it was not uncommon in central Florida for the KKK to act as an enforcer of community morality, with night riders arriving unannounced and ready to mete out punishment at the home of a white man reported