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

tire.
    The door of the sedan swung open. “You sons of bitches,” McCall said, “get out and get this tire fixed.” Samuel Shepherd set one foot down on the sandy soil. As he stepped into the dark Florida night, behind him, cuffed to him at the wrist, his friend Walter Irvin stumbled out of the car. The sheriff stepped back from the door. He drew his gun from his holster.
    T HURGOOD MARSHALL WAS sleeping soundly at 409 Edgecombe Avenue when the telephone awoke him early in the November morning. It was Alex Akerman, calling from the San Juan Hotel in Orlando.
    “Well,” he told Marshall, “we don’t have any more case, because you don’t have any more defendants.” Half awake, Marshall struggled to grasp what Akerman was telling him. “They were killed tonight by the sheriff,” Akerman said.
    The phone rang at 7 a.m. in Jack Greenberg’s room at the San Juan. Roused from his sleep as he’d requested, he picked up that morning’s Orlando Morning Sentinel , which had as usual been slid under the door. He was jolted awake by the headline splashed across the front page:
    Lake County Sheriff Shoots Two Negroes

    Willis McCall standing before his Oldsmobile 98. Samuel Shepherd ( facedown ) is dead, and Walter Irvin is critically wounded. ( Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida )
    Greenberg tried to focus on what he was reading. Smaller headlines jumped out at him: “Officer Kills Suspect in Attack Case.” “Pair Enroute to Hearing Try Escape.” The name Sheriff Willis McCall was everywhere on the page. McCall had shot the Groveland boys. Shepherd was dead. Irvin was in the hospital, critically wounded. Tried to escape?

    Walter Irvin ( right ) survived being shot by Sheriff Willis McCall.
( Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida )
    None of it made sense to him. Greenberg got on the phone immediately to confirm that the paper had gotten the story right. Yes, Shepherd was dead, but Irvin had survived the shooting. Akerman had already called the FBI’s Miami office, saying he “wanted to furnish information with regard to a murder.” Thurgood Marshall would arrive in Orlando later in the day. Perkins rushed off a telegram to Governor Fuller Warren to request an immediate investigation into the “killing of Samuel Shepherd and mortal wounding of Walter Irvin by Sheriff Willis McCall.” The three lawyers sped off to Waterman Memorial Hospital in Eustis, where Irvin lay in critical condition.
    Greenberg, Akerman, and Perkins, as the attorneys for Walter Irvin, were granted permission to speak with their client in the company of a doctor and a nurse. They had barely glimpsed Irvin—in a white hospital gown, his head propped up on two pillows, strips of adhesive tape that ran diagonally from below his left jaw across his nose to the corner of his right eye, a red rubber nasogastric feeding tube inserted through his nose and ending in his stomach—when they were intercepted by a burly man with “the build of a blocking back” and a shoulder holster and pistol “draped over his 250 pound frame.” Akerman had stepped toward Irvin’s bedside as he’d asked his client to tell him “exactly what happened. Just tell the truth as you’ve always done,” but before Irvin had been able even to attempt a reply, the burly man ordered the three lawyers out of the room: “You might as well go away because I ain’t going to let you in.”
    Greenberg had heard enough of Franklin Williams’s hair-raising stories about the hulking, sadistic deputy James Yates to know whom they were confronting. Akerman explained to the deputy that they were visiting by permission of the patient’s doctors, and he cited specific language from Florida Statute 901.24 allowing an attorney to meet with his client, in private if so desired. The statute did not convince Yates to grant the lawyers access to their client; instead he made them wait in the hall while he disappeared into another room. On his return, Yates apprised the lawyers that they’d have to receive written permission from Judge Truman Futch in order to get past the deputy’s 250-pound blockade. “I have orders not to let anyone talk to this boy,” Yates said.
    He had gotten his orders from Willis McCall, who himself had been admitted into the hospital. In a room down the hallway from the man he had shot, he was, according to the doctors, “suffering shock and a heart condition.” Akerman attempted to reach Judge Futch, while, as Greenberg noted, “Yates