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

considering a nationwide work stoppage if Florida failed to bring the parties responsible for Moore’s death to justice—even so, White continued to express his confidence in the FBI. Marshall’s more fiery rhetoric, however, was not at all likely to please J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, Marshall assumed a style that recalled the protests against lynching that he and his friend Moore had organized in Florida’s postwar forties, except that now he protested not with but on behalf of his friend. “You can pick up a newspaper or tune in on your radio set any time and learn where the FBI has out-witted some of the cleverest criminals in the world,” Marshall declaimed at Pittsburgh’s Central Baptist Church. “Yet when it comes to mob violence against Negroes, all you can get is, ‘We’re investigating.’ It’s time we got up off our plush seats and did something about it.”
    The FBI did continue to investigate the case, as did Fuller Warren’s man, J. J. Elliott, but neither made any significant progress in the weeks following the bombing. Tracking down a source for the explosives was next to impossible, for, as FBI special agent Frank Meech noted in his reports, “Getting dynamite all over central Florida was like buying chewing gum.” Even more frustrating to the agents, and more obstructive to their investigation, was the interview process, on which the FBI heavily relied. County sheriff departments and known Klan members were hardly forthcoming, and in central Florida the line between law enforcement and the KKK had often been indistinct. By the end of the 1940s it was completely blurred. “We’d go in and talk to someone in law enforcement,” Meech reported, “and they’d say, ‘what the hell are you investigating that for?’ He was only a nigger.”
    With the intensification of FBI activity after the Moore bombing in Florida creating considerable anxiety in the Klaverns of Lake County, Sheriff Willis V. McCall, despite his denial of any affiliation with the KKK, showed up at a local Klan meeting near Groveland. There, according to Special Agent Meech, he lectured the nervous Klansmen on how to deal with FBI agents and their questions. “We had informants that were already in the Klan,” Meech said. “Our informants identified McCall as the man who told Klan members: ‘You don’t talk to the FBI. Don’t tell them anything. Don’t even tell them your name.’ ”

CHAPTER 19: PRIVATE PARTS

    The NAACP raised tens of thousands of dollars in donations for the Groveland defense following the killings of Harry and Harriette Moore. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    S PECIAL AGENT WAYNE Swinney of the FBI had been assigned the task of escorting Thurgood Marshall around central Florida. Tensions were still running high after the Moore bombing, and when Marshall had informed the young FBI agent that Eastern Air Lines was “booked solid” and therefore unable to provide a seat for him on a return flight, Swinney had exploded. “I don’t care how booked you are,” he told the Eastern reservation agent. “You better find a seat for this guy so he can get out of here.”
    By no means was he underestimating the threat to Marshall in Florida. Swinney, along with nearly two dozen other agents committed to the Moore case “to ensure that the FBI was doing a thorough investigation,” had recently been looking into the shootings of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. In fact, he had just spent three days interviewing Willis McCall and local Klansmen in connection with Groveland and its aftermath, although he had not yet concluded, as he would eventually, that in regard to Harry Moore and his wife, “Klan members and some law enforcement officers were behind these murders.” They were also hell-bent on obstructing the FBI, no matter what the case, not to mention hobbling the NAACP. Orange County sheriff Dave Starr, McCall’s friend and a known member of the KKK, had, according to Swinney, “continually impeded the FBI’s investigation,” and the bureau was “worried that physical harm might come to Marshall” when he was in the area.
    With Marshall standing beside him, Swinney picked up the phone on the reservation desk and made a couple of calls of his own. Visits to Florida by high-profile NAACP executives like Marshall created security concerns and logistic headaches for FBI agents, who were more familiar than most with the menace