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

thought it a bad idea, as he had contacted the FBI to explore the possibility of enlisting a bureau agent to accompany the sheriff as an escort. Marshall contemplated the news piece with incredulity. No matter that Governor Warren had ignored every protest Marshall had wired to him in regard to the catastrophic prison transfer a month earlier, in dismay Marshall pleaded in yet another telegram: “In the name of human decency and justice we urgently request that you replace Sheriff McCall and have Irvin transported by State officials other than McCall. We further urge that you take all of the necessary steps to assure that Irvin will not be killed or wounded on this trip.”
    Hunter’s alarm spared Walter Irvin the experience of another two-hour car ride with the man who had shot him not a month before; Irvin was transferred by the state highway patrol. Willis McCall paid a visit to Raiford, nonetheless. To date, McCall had escaped indictment on criminal charges by the state in the roadside shootings near Umatilla, but the sheriff was fully aware that the FBI had located the telltale sixth bullet buried in the sand where Irvin had fallen. So McCall had located a tale-teller of his own: Merlin James Leiby, a twenty-four-year-old white prisoner on death row at Raiford. The sheriff’s trip to Raiford proved to be fruitful. Leiby, the “doomed murderer” who had been scheduled to die in the electric chair within days, instead was issued a stay of execution by Governor Warren. The governor had thus broken his monthlong silence on the Groveland Boys case, and he had done so on the basis of a written request by the sheriff of Lake County. McCall’s letter reported that prior to the transfer of the prisoners Shepherd and Irvin from Raiford to Tavares by the sheriff and the deputy Yates, Merlin James Leiby had overheard his fellow inmates on death row “planning to escape.” McCall then made his point: “I believe that testimony from him [Leiby] in person would have great bearing in case the prejudiced groups in New York bring enough pressure to bear in Washington for the Justice Department to place this case before a Federal Grand Jury.”
    Leiby soon found himself telling his tale to two FBI agents. The night before the transfer, Leiby told them, he’d overheard Samuel Shepherd say to another inmate, “I’ll be thinking of you when I’m out there drinking that Calvert Reserve whiskey and juking on Wednesday night.” And on the night of the transfer itself, according to Leiby, as Shepherd was leaving his cell, he told another inmate, “Well boys I’ll be a free man tonight.” On further investigation, the agents learned that another inmate, Robert Cecil Bell, had overheard a conversation as well. In his statement, Bell claimed that he’d heard two prison employees—“free people,” in prison argot—discussing how Leiby could likely escape his date with the electric chair if he had been fortunate enough to have heard Shepherd and Irvin planning their getaway. According to Bell, when one of the two prison guards asked, “Why don’t you suggest it to Leiby?” the other replied, “It’s already been taken care of.” In the end, the FBI found that for every inmate who believed Leiby’s story there was another who corroborated Bell’s statement that the prison employees had planted the idea for the story in the mind of the doomed inmate. The FBI concluded that “no action appears to be warranted.” While the NAACP scoffed at still another of McCall’s efforts to whitewash his shootings—with Walter White noting that in his experience with jailhouse stool pigeons, “it is not the practice” for white prisoners to be housed anywhere near enough to black inmates so as to be able to overhear their conversations—McCall’s effort did result in press coverage of the governor’s stay of execution and in the sort of publicity the sheriff sought in his endeavor to stave off federal charges. It also bought Merlin James Leiby time, until, one year later, the state of Florida pulled the switch on him at Flat Top.

    O N THE WEEKEND of November 23, the Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches held its eleventh annual meeting in Daytona Beach, the city in which all of Harry T. Moore’s family had received their bachelor’s degrees, at Bethune-Cookman College. Harry had actually been the last; he had been awarded his degree only a few months earlier. For most of those few months Harry had been