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

for the defendant, on the grounds that the NAACP had been responsible for the publication of “vicious, slanderous and libelous matter” in regard to the case. Hunter introduced fund-raising materials that the Florida Committee of 100 had circulated nearly two years earlier, which included Ted Poston’s Groveland Boys article, “The Story of Florida’s Legal Lynching,” and he then contended that the committee, under the aegis of the NAACP, had set out to “stir up scandalous and libelous matter and material against the good people of Lake County, Florida.” Marshall countered that he was a lawyer representing a client, Walter Irvin, and that the committee “has nothing whatsoever to do with my office.” He had also experienced his first sting of the hostility that had unsettled Franklin Williams in this same courtroom.
    Still, Marshall had come to Florida prepared. The defense moved to disqualify Jesse Hunter, not because they held any hope that Judge Truman Futch would so move but because they wanted to have Hunter’s actions vis-à-vis Lawrence Burtoft, the first person known to have spoken with Norma Padgett after the rape, entered on the record. They called the state attorney to the stand.
    Akerman asked, “Did you interview him [Lawrence Burtoft] as a prospective witness in this case?”
    “Yes, I did, but I am not going to tell you what he told me,” Hunter answered; “he is your witness and you can find out from him.”
    Challenging Hunter, the defense pointed out that in an interview with the reporter from the St. Petersburg Times , Burtoft claimed he had told Hunter that Norma Padgett had said she wasn’t hurt and had said she could not identify her abductors.
    “That statement is entirely false,” Hunter barked in his gravelly voice. “He made no such statement to me at any time, and I am not going into what he did tell me. . . . You can prove it by Mr. Burtoft, not by me.”
    “Mr. Burtoft is out of the province of this court, he is in the armed forces of the United States, in North Carolina,” Akerman noted.
    “Well, you will have to go further than that before you ever get him back here to make any such statement as that, because he never made the statement,” Hunter replied.
    Now that Hunter had been fully engaged in battle with the defense, he’d resorted to old, tried-and-true tactics. He dodged and he denied, for of course he had not had Burtoft testify under oath in the first trial, for the same reason he had not called Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld as a witness: in neither instance would the testimony have supported the prosecution’s case. Hunter also doled. As if he had never heard the Supreme Court’s admonishment in regard to the doling out of disinformation to the press before the first trial, Hunter was telling reporters that the FBI had concluded that all six bullets had been fired from the same gun, when, in fact, the FBI had informed the state attorney that the sixth bullet could not be positively connected to McCall’s gun.
    On the motion for change of venue, despite Jesse Hunter’s argument that “this whole thing has been in the hands of a bunch of radicals . . . and it is directed to the men who came in here from out of the state to create race hatred,” Judge Truman Futch had little choice but to rule in favor of the defense. While the judge wanted a speedy conviction no less than Hunter did, Futch recognized that he had been clearly mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court to move the trial out of Lake County. Not that the ruling would prove to be an advantage to the defense.
    Marion County shared Lake County’s northwest border and its demographics. Its sheriff had also been recently involved in a shooting with a sixteen-year-old black youth, much to the consternation of Thurgood Marshall and the defense. For in this case the black youth, who had been picked up by Sheriff Edward Porter Jr. for questioning in the theft of a coat from a men’s store, had first attacked the sheriff with an ice pick, then shot Porter several times with his own gun. Sheriff Porter’s death was a clarion call to the people of Marion County; law and order had to be upheld at all costs, particularly in the face of unruly blacks. In December 1951 no other county in Florida could have been more predisposed to sympathy for a sheriff who claimed that two black prisoners had attacked him in his car.
    Marshall had hoped that Judge Futch would move the retrial to a more urban setting like