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

death, and White realized he could not afford the public relations debacle that would surely result if donors should become aware of the NAACP’s ill treatment of its “democratic ideal” in the months before his murder.
    With J. J. Elliott indeed as his escort, White visited the Moore house in Mims. There, for the press, he praised the FBI’s investigation into the fatal bombing. “Everything was being done that could be done,” he told reporters, and he noted that U.S. attorney general J. Howard McGrath had told him “a dozen FBI agents [were] loose on the bombing,” because J. Edgar Hoover “has never been so disturbed over a case.” White finished the day at a mass meeting in Orlando, where reporters, echoing recent comments made by Governor Warren, suggested to White that communists might have been responsible for Moore’s death. White sneered as he replied, “I’m sure as I can be that Sheriff McCall is not a Communist.”
    Walter White left Florida two days later, as Moore’s funeral was being postponed in the hope that Harriette might soon recover sufficiently to attend. White’s flight home was hastily arranged, and unpublicized. Although there had been no threats on the NAACP leader’s life during his stay in Florida, tensions had been running high throughout his visit. A police spokesman in Orlando owned to reporters that it was “a relief to know that he’s gone.”
    Against Dr. Starke’s wishes, Harriette Moore visited her husband’s body at Burton’s Funeral Parlor. Weeping uncontrollably, she reached out to hold her Harry one last time. She did not make it to the funeral. On the morning of the service her blood pressure dropped precipitously and the doctor forbade her to leave the hospital.
    Early that morning, too, George Simms and J. J. Elliott arrived at St. James Missionary Baptist Church. Wearing mechanics’ jumpsuits and armed with flashlights, the master sergeant and the special investigator crawled under the church to search for hidden explosives. They found nothing. They then inspected the church interior wall to wall, pew by pew. Satisfied that the church was secure, they allowed the service to proceed.
    More than six hundred people attended the funeral of Harry T. Moore on New Year’s Day of 1952, most of them in the yard outside the small church. Evangeline and Peaches took their places beside their grandmother, Rosa Moore, in the front pew, and to the strains of “Rock of Ages,” played on a phonograph, their father’s plain casket adorned with a wilting floral arrangement was borne up the aisle to the pulpit. Among the mourners were representatives from the Civil Rights Congress who circulated a petition—some of it written by Stetson Kennedy—accusing the U.S. government of black genocide. A dozen men and women eulogized Moore, and from New York Walter White issued a statement on behalf of the NAACP’s national office.
    Following the service, mourners joined the mile-long procession from the church and along Old Dixie Highway to LaGrange Cemetery. Solemn-faced, in dark suits and Sunday dresses, they gathered near a cluster of live oaks cloaked in Spanish moss, at the segregated section of plots for blacks. A final prayer was spoken to take the soul of Harry T. Moore beyond the grave into which his body was lowered. The casket sank slowly, then paused, obstructed in its progress, as had been Harry Moore in his life’s work. Peaches and Evangeline gazed helplessly down at the wilted flowers atop the casket—they’d had to have the flowers brought in from Miami because local florists refused to deliver arrangements to Negro funerals—until, finally dislodged, the casket continued its descent.
    The next day Harriette Moore continued hers. J. J. Elliott and a state attorney rushed to her hospital bedside in the hope of getting a final statement, but the fading widow of Harry T. Moore was adamant. She would not speak a word to them “even if they had a pistol on them.” Harriette Vyda Simms Moore passed away on January 3. Her two grieving daughters braved the burial of a beloved parent for the second time within a week.
    Thurgood Marshall was out on the NAACP circuit, delivering addresses at memorial services for Harry T. Moore and his wife. At Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Harlem, where two thousand people packed the pews, Marshall shared the speakers’ platform with the likes of Jackie Robinson as well as Walter White, who announced that the NAACP was