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

he wanted specifics to support claims of agent prejudice. Kennedy hedged; he required time to consult his files. Still, the FBI would persist; on Kennedy’s return to his home in Jacksonville, the bureau would daily contact him by phone to demand from him the specific information that he had supposedly placed in his files: to either “put-up or shut-up.” The bureau’s internal reports on the meeting with Kennedy in Washington, D.C., would include the directive that if Kennedy failed to provide specifics, agents should “back him down completely on these allegations.” The reports would also make note of the writer’s leftist connections, supported by quotes from interviews with Kennedy’s associates who described him as “the most dangerous Communist in the State of Florida.” After reviewing the reports, J. Edgar Hoover would write across the bottom, “I would waste no more time on Kennedy. He is just a phony.”
    On a call to the FBI the morning after the meeting, Marshall admitted that “it looked like Kennedy had swindled the NAACP into paying his transportation from Florida to Washington,” for in the exchange the NAACP had gained no new information vital to the Groveland case. While Kennedy’s communist affiliations hardly bore upon the case, they did provide Marshall, in his dismissal of the writer’s presumed scoops, with the opportunity to affect solidarity with the FBI. As always, Marshall expressed his appreciation for the bureau’s efforts as well as “the thoroughness of the investigation [the FBI was] conducting.” In return, he was thanked “for his appreciation of confidence in the work of this Bureau and was assured that the Bureau is only too willing to receive any information from him at any time.” Once again, Hoover and Marshall performed their private rites of cooperation.
    DeMille told Marshall he didn’t want to touch the story about Elliott being in the Klan, as it “could result in the nicest, fattest liable [ sic ] law suit” sure to have “yours truly pounding the streets looking for a new job.” However dismissive of Kennedy’s import Marshall may have been with the FBI, he did put the information regarding Elliott to use in a telegram he sent to Fuller Warren. While Marshall did not refer explicitly to Elliott’s possible affiliation with the Klan, he did imply to Warren that the governor knew exactly what outcome the special investigator would effect on his mission in Lake County, and to whose particular advantage that outcome would be. Also, Kennedy’s firm belief, however vaguely supported, that FBI agents in the South were “prejudiced in Civil Rights investigations” was very much in line with Marshall’s own thinking. (Marshall himself had walked into the same trap with Hoover, who had demanded agents’ names and specific incidents that Marshall likewise had failed to provide.) Moreover, for all the FBI’s efforts to marginalize Stetson Kennedy as a communist and dismiss him as a phony, his reporting on the Groveland Boys case had been consistent with the news stories being published at the same time in Northern papers. Finally, his claim connecting Jefferson J. Elliott to the Ku Klux Klan was one that even the FBI had acknowledged to be “entirely possible,” given that Elliott was “formerly on the Investigative Staff of Governor [Eugene] Talmadge of Georgia,” an admitted KKK flogger and racial demagogue who presided over a “Klan-ridden regime.” The FBI had questioned both Warren and Elliott in this regard, and both had denied that Elliott was a Klansman. “Sometime later,” however, according to FBI notes, Elliott allowed that he was a Klansman, describing his membership as being “part of my job.”

    T HE HEARINGS IN the retrial of the now one Groveland boy for the rape of Norma Padgett had been postponed for thirty days because of the shootings. Walter Irvin was meanwhile recovering from his wounds at Raiford. Jack Greenberg had amended the change of venue motion. Thurgood Marshall was preparing to return to Lake County, where a curious item had just appeared in local newspapers. That Judge Truman Futch, on December 4, 1951, had signed a confidential order instructing Sheriff Willis McCall to (again) transport Walter Irvin from Raiford State Prison to Tavares for the change of venue hearing had evidently been leaked to the press by the incensed state attorney Jesse Hunter. Apparently even McCall’s friend Judge W. Troy Hall