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

tried to hold his breath, to keep himself lying quiet, in the light pointed down on him. He couldn’t stop the awful pounding of his heart when he heard the deputy’s voice call back to the sheriff, “This nigger is not dead. We better kill this son of a bitch.”
    The hospital room itself might have gasped at that. Marshall’s eyes met Greenberg’s, then Perkins’s and Akerman’s; the horror was worse than any that Irvin’s lawyers had imagined.
    Irvin resumed, picturing himself lying on the ground and looking up at the deputy standing over him with a pistol in his hand, and without a sound watching the deputy lean down over him and slowly aim the gun. “The Deputy Sheriff then pointed the pistol on me and pulled the trigger, snapped the trigger, and the gun did not shoot, and so he took it back around to the car lights, and looked in it and shined the light in it, and then something they said was about letting it stay cocked, and so he turned it on me again and pulled it, and that time it fired, and went through here [indicating it went through neck] and then I began to bleed and bleed, out of my nose.”
    “Is that Deputy Yates you say?” Akerman asked, stunned.
    “Yes, sir,” Irvin replied, his voice fading. He paused to catch his breath. “He shot me the third time, but I managed to pull through OK cause I did not say anything, and did not let them know that I was not dead, and after all the people came, there was lots of people came there, and some of them predicted that I was not dead. . . . I heard some remarks that ‘he ought to have been dead long ago.’ ”
    Realizing that Irvin’s story would be headlined on the front page of virtually every newspaper in America the following day, the lawyers strove to get as much testimony from Irvin as possible before doctors stepped in and called a halt to the proceedings. “I know you are tired,” Akerman said, “but there is just one or two questions. Had you tried to jump him? The Sheriff?”
    “No, sir,” Irvin answered.
    Marshall leaned in. “Where was his gun?” he asked. “Did he carry it on the right hand side next to you?”
    “Carried it on his left,” Irwin said.
    “Did you ever try to escape that night?” Marshall asked.
    “No, sir, never.”
    “And you were in the front seat of the car?”
    “Yes,” Irwin said. “He put us both on the front seat.”
    Perkins took a turn: “Walter, did you have good hopes of coming out of this thing alright?”
    “Yes, sir,” Irvin said, “I sure did, for I sure did have high hopes of coming out alright, and why would I try to escape, didn’t have no reason to.”
    Akerman punctuated the hospital room press conference with a few final, terse questions to ensure that the reporters held the most salient facts of the shooting in their minds when they left to file their stories.
    “How many times did the sheriff shoot you?”
    “Two times,” Irvin told him.
    “How many times did Deputy Sheriff Yates shoot you?”
    “One time.”
    “You were shot three times?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    At that point the nurse closed the interview. Alan Hamlin folded up his stenograph. Marshall requested that Elliott have Irvin removed immediately from Sheriff Willis McCall’s custody; Elliott replied that such action lay beyond his authority but that he would relay the request to the governor. Flanked by Greenberg and Perkins, Marshall proceeded downstairs to the hospital entrance, where, he knew, the reporters were expecting him to make a statement. As Irvin was still going to stand trial if he survived the shooting, Marshall felt it necessary to assume an attitude of unruffled rationality so that the recent conduct of the renegade sheriff would seem all the more extreme by contrast.
    “We sincerely hope the good people of Lake County will insist that the action so obviously indicated by the sworn statement of Walter Lee Irvin will be taken immediately,” Marshall announced, and when asked if the NAACP lawyers would press for murder charges against Willis McCall, he replied, “The good people of Lake County should have time to take action, but if they don’t the NAACP will.”
    Stetson Kennedy rushed off to get further comments from hospital staff. Mabel Norris Reese called State Attorney Jesse Hunter to relate to him the details of Irvin’s statement. Other reporters stuck to the NAACP team, conspicuous among them Marshall’s New York friend Evelyn “Big East” Cunningham, also known as the