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

to be beating his wife or at the house of a woman who’d been cheating on her husband or drinking and neglecting her children. Klan informants had described to FBI agents a “regulation strap four inches wide and three feet long nailed to a round wooden handle” that had been used on more than a few occasions to correct moral lapses in Lake County. Coy Tyson could easily “put the finger on” Willie Padgett if he were to learn that his daughter Norma was having problems again.
    The rape story, Williams firmly believed, was Willie Padgett’s idea. His reunion with his wife in the early light of that Saturday morning, when Willie and Curtis Howard, on their drive back to Okahumpka, encountered Norma in Lawrence Burtoft’s car, was as unremarkable as Burtoft recounted it because the couple had yet to fix their story. Willie had spoken of kidnapping, rape, and black men to Howard, but Norma had said nothing to young Burtoft that even hinted at violence of any kind. In Williams’s surmise, Willie Padgett had run up to his wife and, “out of hearing distance” of Howard and Burtoft, had said to her, “You know, Baby, you just been raped by four niggers. Don’t say anything else. This is what I have told him.”
    Marshall and Greenberg started a list of people to track down and investigate, so as to be able to counter more effectively the prosecution’s evidence in the retrial. Locating Lawrence Burtoft was going to be critical to the defense; State Attorney Jesse Hunter had essentially obliterated the young man’s bearing on the case, and for an obvious reason—he contradicted Norma Padgett’s testimony. Paul Perkins had tracked down some alibi witnesses, including a waitress at Club Eaton, a college girl, who recalled that Shepherd and Irvin had tarried there until at least 2 a.m. A private detective in Miami had recommended to Marshall an expert to evaluate the plaster casts and tire tracks that had roused Franklin Williams’s suspicions. The list would grow.
    So would the legwork. Once they had gotten settled in Orlando—Marshall among some willing black families and Greenberg at the San Juan Hotel, because “feelings generated by the Groveland case still ran so high” there was no family willing to risk a Jewish lawyer being spotted at its address—Greenberg and Perkins conducted investigations around Groveland during the day, and at night Marshall and Perkins would join Greenberg at the hotel, which was owned by a friend of Alex Akerman, for strategy meetings. On one of their daytime excursions, Greenberg and Perkins paid a visit to the Irvins, who still lived in Groveland, for unlike the “uppity” Henry Shepherd, who’d deserted the citrus groves for a farm of his own (and been ruined for it), Cleve Irvin knew his black man’s place. Their visit revealed that Walter had rented his room in his parents’ “unpainted, weather-beaten” home; moreover, the door to the room had a lock on it. Therefore, Greenberg reasoned, the deputies’ confiscation of Walter’s pants and boots as evidence constituted “an illegal search and seizure,” since Dellia Irvin would have had no legal authority to hand over her son’s belongings.
    As Greenberg traveled around Lake County under “battlefield tension” it struck the young lawyer that residents who were unwilling or afraid to voice their opinions about the Groveland Boys case might respond more readily to the impersonality of a public opinion poll as to whether the defendants could get a fair trial in Lake County. Marshall agreed, and the NAACP was able to hire, at cost, an up-and-coming pollster by the name of Louis Harris, on behalf of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Williams College, to conduct a survey of the Lake County population. Harris soon discovered he had a shadow, and he claimed that ultimately Willis McCall chased him out of town.
    Through the summer and into the fall, Greenberg and Marshall traveled by train back and forth between New York and Florida. Steadily they were building a defense for the Groveland Boys, while Perkins continued tirelessly to comb Lake County for potential witnesses. The strategy, put in place by Marshall and Williams in the first Groveland trial, had been to “create an error in the case, so that we could get it reversed on appeal.” Once they’d won the appeal, it was the lawyers’ hope that with the passage of time, “feelings would have leveled off and you would have a chance”: a