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

Any man in that condition is certainly not apt to lie. In listening to Irvin tell what happened you got the impression that he still wondered why the Lord had spared his life.” Marshall then raised the obvious questions that the coroner’s inquest did not: “Was it necessary to shoot two men, handcuffed together, three times in ‘self defense’? Why would not the body of the dead man have prevented Irvin, who was handcuffed to him, from running or doing anything else? Why did Sheriff McCall have only himself to guard two persons charged with capital offense on a road late at night? If Sheriff McCall was that brave, why would he have to shoot them six times? The last, and final question, is: If Sheriff McCall was shooting to defend himself, how could the bullets be so well placed, that none of them went wild?”
    Willis McCall didn’t collect and clip only local newspapers. He also culled less flattering notices of his achievements in office from black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier , which allied themselves editorially to the civil rights platform of the NAACP—an organization led by men who, in McCall’s estimation, “are no good at all.” The reversal of the verdict in the Groveland Boys case, argued by NAACP lawyers before the U.S. Supreme Court, McCall took personally, as an affront to his stature as an officer of the law in Lake County. The fact of the reversal and the prospect of the retrial had fueled further the sheriff’s resentment of the NAACP, twenty-eight months of it toward Franklin Williams, and his indignation at Thurgood Marshall, who was now slandering him in the Northern black press as a caricature of the Southern white racist sheriff. Not that reporters like Jay Nelson Tuck hadn’t recognized McCall’s bigotry with no help at all from the NAACP. In a New York Post article, Tuck expressed abhorrence at the “sheer, filthy offensiveness of it when Sheriff McCall tells a public inquest that he opened his car window in the rain ‘because the nigger smell got too strong.’ ” McCall preferred to present himself as a man who spoke the truth frankly, and if people couldn’t handle the facts of it, the fault was not his. “I don’t think there is any question about it that the white race is a superior race to the black race,” McCall once said. “I believe that’s a proven fact. In their native country, they’re still eating each other. We don’t do that.”
    Willis V. McCall may have been vindicated in Lake County, and he had dodged state criminal charges in the shooting death of Samuel Shepherd. Still, the need to set the record straight in the court of public opinion—to gain vindication by all—obsessed McCall. He had work yet to do, and he knew just how to do it, too.

CHAPTER 17: NO MAN ALIVE OR TO BE BORN

    Flyer announcing Thurgood Marshall’s appearance in Miami, Florida. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    A NOTHER JOB DONE, special investigator J. J. Elliott allowed himself a moment of self-satisfaction as he headed back to his room at the Fountain Inn in Eustis. He had been doing well by Governor Fuller Warren. After Senator Estes Kefauver’s hearings had exposed the statewide corruption in Florida on live television in 1950, Elliott had gotten some payback for Governor Warren in Washington, D.C., where he’d uncovered “crap games, after-hour whiskey sales, and prostitution flourishing right under Kefauver’s nose.”
    With an armful of newspapers headlining McCall’s exoneration, Elliott was fiddling with the key to his room when Stetson Kennedy spotted him, and joined the special investigator for a chat. After making some small talk with Elliott about bass fishing, Kennedy decided, on a hunch, to “play the ace up my sleeve”: from his wallet he pulled a “Klan Kard.”
    An activist and folklorist as well as a journalist, Kennedy had traveled across Florida with Zora Neale Hurston during the Great Depression, when the two of them had collaborated on a WPA Florida Writers’ Project chronicling the sights and sounds of American folk life in turpentine camps, on railroad gangs, in soup kitchens, and the like. In the mid-1940s, Kennedy had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia as part of his research for publications that sensationally exposed the organization’s activities and inner workings, its arcane rituals and “secret codewords,” to a fascinated