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

with the bodies and all the debris. Rosa sent Peaches outside to call to her uncles for help.
    “George! Arnold! Help!” Peaches screamed into the fog, at the Simms house a few hundred yards down the road. “George!”
    In minutes they had arrived. The porch, shattered into bits, evidenced the effects of a powerful bomb: dynamite, or nitroglycerin. Whatever it was, Harriette’s two brothers were expecting nothing good when they entered the ruin of a home.
    Peaches was sobbing, hysterical. “Something has happened to Daddy!” she cried, and the two men rushed to rescue the two bodies from the wreckage of a bedroom.
    Once they had lodged Harriette in the front seat of George’s roomy Buick sedan with her sisters-in-law Ernestine and Mabel, and Harry in the back with his mother, they sped as much as the fog allowed toward the Fernald-Laughton Memorial Hospital in Sanford, thirty miles away. The silence in the car was taut, broken only by Harriette’s faint cries for Evangeline or a worriedly whispered “Harry.” He was fading fast. With his head cradled against her shoulder, Rosa tried to comfort him, a boy in his pajamas, her son Harry in his pain. He “groaned several times.”
    When finally they cleared the fog, George aggressively stepped on the gas. He was worrying over his decision to drive Harry and Harriette to the hospital in Sanford, but he was certain a Jim Crow ambulance would not have responded quickly to a call from Mims on Christmas night. They had just reached the hospital when George heard Harry’s gargled moan. And Rosa’s stifled cry: Harry’s head had dropped down onto his mother’s lap; blood was seeping from his mouth onto her clothes and into the Buick’s upholstery.
    Fernald-Laughton Memorial was not a modern medical facility. A mansion in a residential neighborhood of Sanford that had been converted into a hospital, it had a limited staff: only one nurse and no doctors were on duty that Christmas night when George Simms carried his brother-in-law to a stretcher in the emergency room. The nurse telephoned Dr. George Starke, one of but a few black physicians in the area. Anxious, impatient, Simms, who had seen enough combat injuries in Korea to know that severe damage to the lungs and other internal organs characterized primary blast injuries, considered his brother-in-law’s chances, as it was not uncommon for victims to initially survive an explosion before taking a fatal turn for the worst. And still Dr. Starke hadn’t arrived at the hospital.
    The master sergeant in Simms sent him back to his car. He himself would bring Dr. Starke to the hospital, but his path crossed Starke’s in the Florida night. About the same time that Simms arrived at Starke’s residence, the doctor was entering the emergency room at Fernald-Laughton. And by the time Simms had raced back to the hospital, Dr. Starke was shaking his head as he stared down at the man on the stretcher. “Cerebral hemorrhage, internal hemorrhages and shock,” the doctor was saying to Simms. His words could explain cause but could not alter effect: Harry T. Moore was dead.
    “Yes, Mamma, that’s me” were the last words Harry T. Moore was ever heard to speak. Minutes later, in his pajamas, he’d peeled back the covers and, as he had for twenty-five years, settled into bed beside his wife, already asleep . . . and in an instant Moore’s work was done. His words dissolved into a groan. There would be no more speeches to his people, no more letters to the editor, no more telegrams to the governor, no more words. It was what they wanted, the men behind the man shrouded in the fog beneath the orange tree: no more words. The last words Moore was known to write he had typed in his impassioned letter of December 2 to Governor Fuller Warren, in which he implored the governor to hold Sheriff Willis McCall responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Samuel Shepherd, and the last of the questions he posed in that letter would resonate in the press worldwide in the days ahead.
    We seek no special favors; but certainly we have a right to expect justice and equal protection of the laws even for the humblest Negro. Shall we be disappointed again?
    Respectfully yours,
    Harry T. Moore
    T HE CONDENSATION LAY thick over the Moores’ orange grove when Broward County sheriff Bill Williams turned up at the scene of the blast with deputies and a bloodhound. Within hours FBI agents had arrived as well. Investigators combed through the