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

as they continued bravely, despite “the possibility of violent death,” the campaign for the civil rights of blacks in the Jim Crow South. The governor’s office was flooded with thousands of letters and telegrams demanding action on behalf of the Moores, but the telegram that Governor Warren received from Thurgood Marshall struck a more somber note, reminding the governor that the Moores were “representatives of the finest type of citizens of your state” and that “unless they can be secure from lawlessness no one in Florida is safe from destruction.”
    Governor Warren was aggrieved by the press response to the Moore assassination. Editorials nationwide advertised “Terrorism in Florida,” which led to organized efforts calling for boycotts of citrus and tourism. One op-ed page asked, “Notice Negro Blood on Your Grapefruit?” Another criticized the wife of New York’s mayor Vincent Impellitteri for vacationing in Florida: “It’s a pat on the back to the Klan murderers.” And a heavily circulated Associated Press story with the headline “Terrorists Kill by Night; Shadow of Violence Drifts Across Sunny Vacationland” was exactly the kind of national publicity the state of Florida and Fuller Warren did not need.
    Under the threat of drastic economic repercussions in Florida’s tourist and citrus industries, Warren could not simply ignore the Moore affair—and thereby tacitly exempt the KKK, especially as the Klan was now perceived by the press and the public to be running unrestrained by any governance in the state. Warren thus offered a six-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the “arrest and conviction of the dynamiters,” and he promised a full investigation into Moore’s murder, as “his assassins must be caught and punished.” In addition, Warren announced, he was sending his special investigator, J. J. Elliott, to Mims.
    Elliott, in his turn, declared that he would personally attend Moore’s funeral service, where he would be “acting as a human shield to guarantee the church’s safety.” He indicated, too, that he would be willing to “ride with the family to see that nothing happens, if they want me to.” The offer came with a boast: “I am the second best pistol shot in the state.” Also, when Walter White announced that he was traveling to Florida “to see what can be done to stop the reign of terror,” Elliott proffered his services as an armed personal escort.
    As the day of Moore’s funeral approached, the public outcry grew. So did the reaction to it, with black-owned homes and social clubs becoming targets for bombings throughout the South. Mostly, though, the nation’s attention was fixed on Florida and the increasingly high-profile case of the civil rights leader who was slain in the twelfth of that state’s bombings in 1951. The New York Times continued its daily coverage of news related to Moore’s assassination. It reported, for instance, that Donald Harrington, a minister of the Community Church of New York in midtown Manhattan, had offered a prayer for Florida residents “in their moment of degradation and humiliation”—a moment that had shamed not only Florida but all of America in the estimation of foreign nations: “Our whole country stands blackened and discredited in the eyes of the world because of Florida’s failure to protect the lives and liberties of all her citizens.” Harrington continued, “I am ashamed of Florida. I am ashamed of the white race. . . . I am ashamed of all the churches of Florida and elsewhere that have turned their eyes away from what has been going on in Lake County for these past years, and passed by on the other side while their fellow-Americans of a darker skin were being denied the most basic American and human rights and privileges. I weep for my country’s sacred honor.”
    The NAACP, which had forced Moore from his executive position in Florida only weeks earlier, was now calling on President Truman for “fast, resolute action” inasmuch as “the killer of Harry T. Moore is the assassin of the democratic ideal.” On December 28, as announced, Walter White arrived in Florida. At the hospital in Sanford he presented a check in the amount of $250 to Harriette Moore, with the pledge that all the money owed to Harry Moore by the NAACP—the $2,600-plus in back pay—would be paid in full. In fact, in the coming weeks the NAACP would raise many thousands of dollars on the back of Moore’s