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

live with like a man learns to sleep with a sore arm.” For Marshall, Moore was one of the heroes. In the telegram Marshall asked if Moore could meet with him on Friday, November 9, in Orlando. Moore said yes.
    On November 8, newspapers across the country published Walter Irvin’s version of the shooting outside Umatilla, with Irvin’s claim that Deputy Yates had fired the intended coup de grâce capturing most of the headlines, none of them as sensational as the New York Post ’s: “Blood Lust of Sheriff and Aide Bared, Florida Anger Grows in Negro Killing.” The Post ran the headline large and provocatively on its front page, with a story by Jay Nelson Tuck, who’d found himself, like Ted Poston before him, reporting an event of even more moment than the trial he’d been sent to cover—it described law enforcement officials who were “ducking, weaving and scattering for cover today.” The Associated Press picked up Marie Bolles’s images of the bloodied Groveland boys lying by the roadside, as well as a portrait of Deputy James Yates, which one paper published above the caption “It’s a funny thing.”
    State Attorney Jesse Hunter was reported to have spoken on November 8 with Governor Fuller Warren, who reportedly agreed with Hunter’s recommendation that Sheriff McCall either be suspended or be ordered to resign temporarily from office. News of the meeting apparently effected a remarkable improvement in Sheriff McCall’s physical condition, as he checked himself out of the hospital and then drove two and a half hours north to Jacksonville, to a hotel, for a secret meeting with Fuller Warren. In November 1951 Warren was in the midst of a statewide barnstorming tour, replete with stump speeches and country music jamborees, in an attempt to recapture some of the magic that had swept him into office in 1948. Or at least, to rehabilitate his reputation. Illegal gambling scandals had put Warren in the investigative crosshairs of his longtime nemesis, Senator Estes Kefauver. The nationally televised Kefauver hearings on organized crime in 1950 not only had exposed the involvement of numerous Florida law enforcement officials in widespread corruption, by which they raked in payoffs from illegal numbers and bolita games, but also had aired allegations that Warren’s gubernatorial campaign had been heavily financed by prominent figures in organized crime. Kefauver had invited Warren to Miami to testify, but Warren had refused. Then, in 1951, resolutions calling for Warren’s impeachment had been introduced in the Florida House of Representatives, so the governor was now fighting for his political life. It took Willis McCall not much more than an hour to convince the former Klansman and governor that he might want to reconsider the wisdom of a suspension or temporary resignation for the sheriff. That done, Sheriff McCall headed back to Eustis, where he had set up another late-night, closed-door session, this time with Warren’s special investigator, J. J. Elliott, at a Lake County hotel. Again, no doubt by extortionist means, McCall got results, and Elliott got a singular role in the imminent coroner’s inquest.
    Early on Friday, a young FBI informant was riding the road to Tavares with several Klansmen, among them Eddie Jackson, the Exalted Cyclops of the Orlando Klan. Jackson wanted to run a plan by Willis McCall, and if the sheriff okayed it, the Klan would be able to “break you in right,” Jackson told the young, supposed prospective Klansman. They’d arranged to meet the sheriff in the men’s room of the courthouse. There Jackson explained that he’d come to Lake County with “a couple of the boys” to do a bit of a favor and to initiate a new member into the Klan. Jackson then put it more bluntly: they’d come “to kill Alex Akerman.” To the Klansman’s disappointment, McCall rejected the idea summarily. “No, I’m in the clear on this case,” the sheriff told Jackson, “and I don’t want you to do it, it would only cause trouble.”
    McCall had not said anything about them not scaring Akerman, though. So the Klansmen drove to Eustis and parked their car across the street from Waterman Memorial Hospital, where they waited for Akerman to arrive for a visit with his client. Only Akerman didn’t—he was working in Orlando that particular day—so Jackson and his men turned their attention to other potential targets, like that Negro who was “a big SOB in the NAACP.”

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