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

Mr. Yates, we got to make it look like they tried to escape.” Jesse Hunter knew Willis McCall; he knew there was more fact than fiction in tales like those relating how the orange groves of Lake County were “fertilized with niggers that Willis McCall had killed”—if need be, with Deputy James Yates at his side. Jesse Hunter didn’t like piss in his whiskey.
    At their private get-together that Sunday, Agent Wall had offered to make the FBI evidence available to Hunter and Hall “for probable use before the Grand Jury.” When Hall had subsequently advised Truman Futch that the FBI had located the missing, last bullet, the two judges came to the decision, quickly, that there was “no need for a grand jury.” The last bullet need never be mentioned, in or outside a county courtroom, since the FBI would not be releasing its report to any other party. Disgruntled by the judges’ decision in regard to the grand jury, Hunter wished to dissociate himself from all the proceedings of the past few days. He did not appreciate having his good name used in a whitewash.

    The FBI found this bullet buried in soil directly beneath Walter Irvin’s “blood spot.” ( Federal Bureau of Investigation )
    At Hunter’s urging, Governor Fuller Warren had been prepared to suspend Willis McCall or force him into temporary retirement on November 8, but by the next day the governor had changed his mind, with some help from the sheriff himself at their private nighttime meeting in a Jacksonville hotel. Apparently Warren had decided that his administration could weather another civil rights scandal better than it could bear further allegations of impeachable offenses that linked the governor to the interests of organized crime. The former might prove to be embarrassing to the author of How to Win in Politics , but the latter would be ruinous to his political future. By mid-November Warren’s office had again been flooded with letters and telegrams and editorials in local and national newspapers demanding that he intervene in the latest miscarriage of justice by Lake County officials in the Groveland Boys case. Governor Fuller Warren issued a statement through his assistant that he was “out of the city at the present time on a statewide speaking tour.” Aside from that, he had no comment.
    Lake County newspapers viewed the decisions of the coroner’s jury and of Judge Truman Futch regarding a grand jury as a “complete vindication” of their sheriff: his shooting of Shepherd and Irvin had been justified as self-defense, and he would not face any investigation of possible charges against him by a grand jury. Northern and urban newspapers around the country, meanwhile, were reporting a whitewash operation not only at the county level but also at the highest reaches of Florida’s state government. Impugning everyone from Sheriff McCall to Governor Warren, editorials in the national press decried the lack of outrage over the lawlessness and “fantastic savagery” in “Florida’s Jungle.” No one was more incensed than Thurgood Marshall.
    “Irvin’s story was so convincing,” Marshall said, “that all who heard it are certain that he and Shepherd were the victims of a deliberate cold-blooded plan to murder both of them before the retrial ordered by the Supreme Court.” Marshall fired off an angry telegram to Fuller Warren, in which he first chided the governor for meeting with Willis McCall the night before the start of the coroner’s inquest, then reproved the fact that “after this conference your representative J. J. Elliott testified in defense of McCall. All this fits directly into new pattern which has replaced old type of lynching. You still have an opportunity to demonstrate whether or not the state of Florida believes in fair play and justice.” Marshall requested that Warren replace both McCall and Elliott. “The answer is in your hands,” he wrote.
    Marshall’s harshest indictment fell on Willis McCall. In an interview with columnist Arnold DeMille for the Chicago Defender , Marshall asserted, “This is the worst case of injustice and whitewashing I have come across in my career. There is no question in my mind or in the minds of others who heard Walter Lee Irvin’s statement that he and Samuel Shepherd were deliberately shot by Sheriff Willis B. McCall last Tuesday. The bullet hole in [Irvin’s] neck reminded him with every breath and every word that he, too, could have been dead and might yet die.