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

contemplating his options. The college degree provided him with some professional insurance, in the not unlikely event that he should be ousted as an executive secretary by the NAACP: a prospect that he was still not able to fully acknowledge. He could have opted to resign, or he could have chosen to work out some alternative position with the national office. Instead he was doing what he always did. He had chosen to come to Daytona Beach and fight.
    The first resolution on the agenda concerned the Groveland case, with a call for Governor Fuller Warren to “remove Sheriff Willis B. McCall forthwith from office” that might have been drafted by the letter-writing, speechifying Moore himself. It was overwhelmingly approved in a floor vote, unlike resolution 5, which met with more resistance than Harry might have expected and a lot more than Gloster Current and Ruby Hurley had anticipated. The national branches director and Southeast regional director, it turned out, could not deliver the votes, and the resolution to abolish the position of Florida’s paid executive secretary stalled on the floor. It proved to be no victory for Moore, either. Rather than engage in a protracted battle that might cripple the NAACP branches in Florida, Moore agreed to a compromise by which he would receive over time all back pay due to him—more than $2,600—on the condition that he would continue with the NAACP as an unpaid “state coordinator.”
    Moore left Daytona disillusioned. Current and Hurley “came in and took over,” Moore complained, making “this meeting . . . about the worst we ever had.” He returned home frustrated, in large part because his problems with Current and Hurley stemmed from his inability to raise more money in Florida. He told his mother, Rosa Moore, that “he could not understand why the colored people in Florida did not take more interest in NAACP work,” why they could not see that investing time or energy or two dollars annual dues in the NAACP was investing in a better future for themselves and their children. Change was coming, but it would be coming sooner with more support from the black community. As Marshall would often remind the NAACP staff and field workers, “the easy part of the job is fighting the white folks.”
    Again, Moore considered options. He would have some income from the NAACP and from his back pay (one could be cynical about that); also, Harriette’s position in the Palm Beach County school system was secure. They owned their house in Mims, and they were no longer financially supporting their daughters, as Peaches was teaching at a school in Ocala and Evangeline was working for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington. Harry himself had received a good offer to teach, starting in February if he was interested, and he’d also thought he might go back to school for his master’s degree. But again, with or without back pay, as secretary or coordinator, Harry knew he was, as always, in it to the end of the civil rights fight.
    In the weeks before the annual meeting in Daytona, a wave of racial violence had swept through the state of Florida. The year had begun with isolated beatings of blacks by the Klan, but the violence had intensified in March when a Winter Garden man was flogged and then shot to death. In April the violence had escalated. To the state senate’s passage of an “anti-mask” bill, which banned the wearing of hoods as well as unauthorized cross burnings, the Klan responded with a rash of “hit and run” cross burnings up and down the state. That spring, too, in an attempt to unite various Klan factions in common cause, Bill Hendrix, by day a plumbing contractor in Tallahassee and otherwise the Grand Dragon of the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had declared a war on “hate groups,” most notably the NAACP and B’nai B’rith. In Miami, bombings had laid waste to a Jewish community center and a black apartment complex; dynamite had been discovered, but had failed to detonate, at both a Hebrew school and a Catholic church. In the rubble of another bombed Jewish site had been planted a cross bearing “anti-Semitic and anti-Negro slogans” as well as Nazi and KKK symbols. “The Jew has already ruined the northern cities and wishes to invade the South,” read one letter that had arrived at the governor’s office. “They are teaching communism to the colored people, and inciting rioting through them.” By autumn, violence by dynamite had