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

the KKK presented. The young agent finally breathed a sigh of relief as he watched Marshall climb the steps and board the plane headed back to New York.

    I N EARLY FEBRUARY 1952, Jack Greenberg boarded a train for Orlando. He was traveling with a representative from the Elmo Roper research firm and Arnold DeMille, a columnist for the Chicago Defender . They were joined in Alexandria, Virginia, by Alex Akerman. While Greenberg was understandably preoccupied with the upcoming resumption of hearings in the retrial of Walter Irvin, Akerman’s thoughts kept drifting back to the first trial, when he and Franklin Williams were defending three Groveland boys as much against the white justice of Lake County as in a case of rape. He tried to prepare his traveling companions for the hazards that awaited them in Willis McCall country. Greenberg had of course heard Williams’s unsettling tales, and he’d had some firsthand experience of the law according to Hunter and Futch, so the discussions between the two defense attorneys tended frequently to favor gallows humor, as DeMille noted when, after one exchange about the county thugs on both sides of the law, Akerman turned to Greenberg and asked, “How you want your body shipped back?”
    They arrived in Orlando on the afternoon of Saturday, February 9, which gave them more than a full day to prepare for the hearings that were scheduled to begin at the Marion County courthouse on Monday. Jack Greenberg checked into the downtown San Juan Hotel.
    About the same time that Greenberg was settling in at his hotel room, Grand Dragon Bill Hendrix was riling up his troops at a rally in Orlando. Alarmed at the progress of the NAACP in general, and more particularly of Thurgood Marshall, in the fight against Jim Crow, Hendrix had formed, by his claim, an “American Confederate Army” of ninety-seven cohorts in thirty-one states, all of them prepared to bear arms in the event that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation. At the rally that evening, Hendrix’s “rebel army” voted in support of three measures in its avowed purpose to forestall justice for all:
    1. denounce the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League as “hate groups”;
    2. retain the hood, robe, and mask as official uniform; and
    3. keep the fiery cross as a religious symbol.
    “Florida must have a few lynchings if its law enforcement officers don’t enforce 100 percent segregation in the state,” Hendrix reportedly proclaimed, after marching his army through the downtown streets of Orlando.
    Greenberg heard it before he saw it. A terrific roar arose at nightfall: engines revving, horns honking, the din of male voices. In the streets beneath his window Greenberg counted “at least 25 cars” circling the San Juan Hotel as he witnessed the procession of Klansmen in full regalia, “with confederate flags flying, some carrying blazing torches,” and for months Greenberg’s sleep would be haunted by the “white-hooded, sheeted figure [who] sat on the outsized hood of a Nash Ambassador, waving as it drove by.” Only seven years before, Greenberg had been among the first landing of U.S. forces that stormed Iwo Jima in 1945, and aboard ship he had battled Japanese kamikaze attack planes in Okinawa Harbor: “It was frightening, it was exciting. . . . There wasn’t any point in being afraid,” had said the twenty-year-old Greenberg, who then had an “unthinking belief in his own immortality.” At twenty-seven, the survivor of one of the deadliest battles America fought in the Pacific campaign of World War II had less faith in his immortality. With the Klan parading outside his hotel, Greenberg “took the vain precaution of putting a night table against the door” before he tried to sleep.
    The site of Hendrix’s KKK rally on February 9 had supposedly been “patrolled” by Sheriff Dave Starr and his deputies. Newspapers reported that neither Starr nor his officers had observed any illegal hoods or masks because they were “too busy with traffic accidents.” Hendrix, who had recently declared his candidacy for Florida governor, told reporters that he had been “misquoted” with regard to his “few hangings” speech. He was indicted on February 11 for violating postal laws by mailing “libelous and defamatory” postcards to journalists and politicians.
    The Klan had dispersed less than an hour before the Florida attorney Paul Perkins and journalist Arnold DeMille met Thurgood Marshall at Orlando’s