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

spread to central Florida. The Klan had flattened the Creamette Frozen Custard Stand in Orlando because the owner had refused to dedicate a separate service window for blacks. Before the year’s end the “Florida Terror,” as it was dubbed by the press, had resulted in a dozen disastrous bombings and numerous failed attempts to destroy racial and religious-based sites: the Saturday Evening Post designated 1951 as “the worst year of minority outrages in the history of Florida or probably any other state in recent times.”
    For Harry Moore, all the outrages of white supremacy in Florida were epitomized by one case and one man. On a weekend in December, after the Daytona conference and before the Christmas break at Harriette’s school, Moore sat down at his desk in the Mims house, where he rolled a piece of stationery into his typewriter—still fretful over his treatment by the NAACP, he chose the Progressive Voters League of Florida letterhead—and with “Dear Governor” he began. Heatedly his fingers hit the keys, no matter that the lengthy, indignant letter would be stuck by some assistant to the governor into the Harry T. Moore file, already thick with unanswered correspondence and telegrams regarding Sheriff Willis McCall and the case of the Groveland Boys. Two decades of experience, twenty years of exasperation in the battle for civil rights in Florida informed Moore’s wrath over the Groveland case, in which the state was now complicit with the sheriff in murder. McCall’s rounds of fire, beyond killing one black man and seriously wounding another, were, Moore wrote, “still echoing around the world.” So he had questions for Governor Warren, questions that had to be asked again even though he had been asking them of Florida governors for twenty years, with no reply. “Is it true that in Florida the word of a Negro means nothing when weighed against that of a white person?” Who will be there for black families chased from their homes by the bomb-throwing Klan? Who will stand up for young Willie James Howard, murdered in front of his father for sending a white girl a Christmas card? Who will demand justice when a white man rapes a young black girl and is only levied a fine in court? By the time he finished writing his letter, he knew who. Harry T. Moore.
    Lately he had taken to carrying a pistol. “I’ll take a few of them with me if it comes to that,” Moore told his two daughters and loyal wife.

    M ARSHALL GATHERED HIS legal staff in New York to discuss another fund-raising tour. He thought “the best person would be someone from Shepherd’s family,” but he also had practical concerns. “Shepherd’s father can’t go because you never can keep him sober,” Marshall told them.
    Greenberg chimed in, “We really ought to call the Civil Rights Congress and find out how they raised money.” But Wilkins quashed that idea. “We do not have the same kind of discipline as the Communists do. The people in our branches will never work as hard.”
    “Some of the tactics are what we should use,” Marshall said. “We ought to get the most horrible pictures printed and out to the public.” He finally decided to send out “eight thousand letters to higher income bracket people,” adding, “We can say that Shepherd is dead and we paid for his funeral so that we have cared for the dead. But we must now care for the living.”

    W ALTER IRVIN, WITH handcuffs around both wrists, emerged from a state highway patrol car at the county courthouse in Tavares, where pretrial hearings in the Groveland Boys case were beginning on December 6. Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg both winced at the sight of him, for the defendants in the second trial had been reduced to one. “As matters now stand,” Marshall told reporters, “two colored men have already lost their lives as a result of this charge of attack of a white woman; one being killed by a sheriff’s posse and one by Sheriff McCall. Another is serving a life sentence. The fourth, Walter Irvin, although shot twice in the chest and once in the neck, must still stand trial and face the threat of the electric chair. This is typical Southern Justice.”
    However ambiguous Jesse Hunter’s own feelings about the sheriff of Lake County may have been, the state attorney was not about to rein in his fervor in the prosecution of Walter Irvin for the rape of Norma Padgett. First off, Hunter moved that Marshall and Greenberg not be admitted as counsel