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

chance perhaps to prove reasonable doubt in the second trial; or maybe Norma Padgett would have “a change of heart.” The lawyers’ legwork was beginning to make of chance the possibility of an acquittal. Time at least appeared now to be on their side. As Williams had reminded Greenberg and Marshall months before, “Anything can happen in the interim.”
    L . B. DE Forest was having no problems insinuating herself into the daily life of the Lake County communities she visited. She had contacted the ministers at various churches and set up meetings with church members to discuss the abolition of capital punishment. The Baptists and the Methodists were especially supportive of her cause; a Catholic priest, on the other hand, advised her not to waste her time. “Prisons breed criminals,” he’d averred, and “no matter how much is done for them, they plan for one thing, escape and freedom. They will kill to free themselves, if they are given the opportunity.” She spent several hours with Judge F. R. Brandon of Groveland, who avouched his opposition to “chairs of torture” and entered his signature in her “book” petitioning support of her abolitionist campaign. The judge also offered some personal views on the Groveland Boys case; he “knew one of the boys who were arrested for rape, and thought the punishment too severe,” and he deemed the Tysons and Padgetts to be “drinking, shiftless, no-account white trash.” A newspaper editor in Leesburg meanwhile agreed to publish her poem “Mother Love.” And her “World Peace” pin continued to rouse interest among the county residents. She was making useful connections.
    Not everyone was receptive to Miss De Forest’s cause. On August 4 in Leesburg, she’d spoken with some of the younger police officers and firemen who had been quite willing to sign her book until the chief of police, Bill Fisher, convinced them that to do so might not be wise. On that same occasion Miss De Forest met the man she’d been warned to stay clear of in Lake County. He was wearing his white Stetson as he lumbered toward her. He looked askance at her peace pin, and her petition. When she voiced her disfavor of capital punishment, enlisting names of abolitionist supporters like Alex Akerman, he growled that Alex Akerman was “no good,” and as for her stance on the death penalty, he dissented, “ ‘An eye for an eye’ is the justice I believe in.” Then Willis McCall showed her his back and walked away.
    More than a few whites that Miss De Forest encountered—Harry McDonald, for one—firmly believed that the Groveland Boys had confessed to rape, as the sheriff had so widely advertised. If De Forest didn’t believe it, Harry suggested she visit the state prison in Raiford, where “she could hear it from their own lips.” Sure though Harry was, on the night of the rape, he himself, as night watchman at Edge Mercantile, had crossed paths with Charles Greenlee miles away from the crime scene. In Harry’s opinion, all four defendants “should have been shot on the spot and not cost the state the expense of a trial.”
    Curtis Howard signed Miss De Forest’s book. When she looked more closely at the signature, however, De Forest discovered that the shifty Howard had written down the name of a coworker, Marvin Smith. And Marvin Smith, it turned out luckily for Miss De Forest, knew “the Padgetts and their friends intimately.” Newly wed, Smith and his wife, Marian, the organist at the Baptist church, obliged De Forest with a tour of Groveland. As they drove past the cement shack that had housed the Blue Flame, Mrs. Smith noted that it had been “closed after the rape incident but is now rented to a negro family.” Mrs. Smith also noted that Norma and Willie “were acquainted with the four colored boys”—not surprisingly, as Norma came from “poor whites” and “did not bear a very good reputation.” Another of Howard’s friends and coworkers, Thomas Virgil Ferguson, “had nothing good to say about the Padgetts,” either. As De Forest wrote in her report, Ferguson “was disgusted with the Padgetts, and believes they could tell more, if a little pressure were used.”
    With her peace pin and petition book, L. B. De Forest continued to make her way toward Bay Lake, the clannish swampland in the south of Lake County, an area where she assumed most outsiders felt, and were, unwelcome. Seemingly oblivious to danger, and determined to find Willie Padgett,