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

WASN’T LIKE Harry T. Moore at all, Marshall thought. Not only had Moore failed to show up for their Friday meeting in Orlando, but he’d failed even to notify Marshall that he’d not be there.
    Over the past twelve months the pressure on Moore from the NAACP’s director of branches, Gloster Current, had been intensifying. A year earlier, the New Orleans field secretary and former Harlem Globetrotter Dan Byrd had been dispatched to the Florida State Conference in Tampa with instructions to do a “hatchet job” on Moore, although, when the delegates’ votes were counted, Moore had managed to hold his position as executive secretary in Florida. In only two weeks, however, the regional director for the Southeast, Ruby Hurley, along with Walter White, would be attending, at Current’s behest, the 1951 annual state conference in Daytona Beach, and Hurley’s reputation was stellar: she “always delivered the votes.” In the past, Marshall had kept himself distant from Current’s branch business, as Moore surely knew. Still, Robert Carter and other of the NAACP lawyers were “wondering if Moore hadn’t gotten cold feet” when he failed to show up for the November 9 meeting, albeit Marshall had made it clear to him that he wanted to discuss the Groveland case.
    By November, too, the cumulative stress of the Groveland Boys trial and appeals and the now-thwarted retrial, from July 1949 nearly to the end of 1951, was beginning to wear on the normally self-possessed Moore. His commitment to a rectification of the injustices suffered by Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee had become hazardous. A citrus grower in Moore’s hometown of Mims had opined to an NAACP official that Moore’s “neck ought to be broken.” Also, recently letters had been threatening Moore with injury, or worse, for his work on behalf of the Groveland Boys; he had taken to carrying the letters on his person in the event that harm came to him. He had confided to one NAACP leader that he was now “afraid to travel in the daytime.” His fears were not unjustified; later that winter, on returning with his wife, Harriette, to their house in Mims for the weekend, he found the door lock broken, their home ransacked, and his shotgun stolen.
    Nevertheless, despite the threats, and in the face of his fear, Moore had continued—indeed, had increased—his efforts in the Groveland Boys’ cause. He organized mass meetings and protests; he delivered speeches. He helped the Shepherd family retrieve Samuel’s body, with the assurance that the local branch of the NAACP would cover the cost of their son’s funeral. He seized every twist and turn in the Groveland case as an opportunity to write letters to newspaper editors like Mabel Norris Reese, who was finding it more difficult to defend the injustices of law enforcement in Lake County. He remained Sheriff Willis V. McCall’s most vocal critic. He also continued to support and complement the efforts of Thurgood Marshall and the LDF in Lake County, no matter that, for whatever reason or misunderstanding, he had failed to appear at that meeting in Orlando on November  9.
    Late in the evening of November 9, Judge W. Troy Hall began the official proceedings for his coroner’s inquest with a viewing of Samuel Shepherd’s body by the jury in the company of special investigator Elliott, the state attorney Jesse Hunter, McCall, Yates, and members of the press as well as a nurse and a court reporter. On Saturday morning, November 10, the inquest resumed at Waterman Memorial Hospital, where Irvin’s attending physician, Dr. Rabun Williams, was scheduled to, but did not, testify, the judge having determined the doctor’s testimony to be unnecessary. The jury, press, and county officials proceeded with Judge Hall and J. J. Elliott to Walter Irvin’s room, where they heard the same story he’d told to his lawyers and members of the press on Thursday. Both Hall, as coroner, and Elliott questioned Irvin at length, but his recitation of the events of November 6 did not vary in any detail from his previous account. After forty minutes of testimony, Irvin tired; he was wheeled from his room to the waiting ambulance that delivered him to the prison hospital at Raiford.
    The inquest next moved to the roadside near Umatilla, where, in the view of Judge Hall, an attempted escape, not an unprovoked murder, took place. Hall led his friend Willis through the presumably evidence-based version of events. In the trunk of