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

airport. The rally site was quiet when they drove by. “Your boys, the KKKs were here to greet you,” DeMille told Thurgood. “But they couldn’t wait any longer and left. They’ll see you at the trial in Ocala.”
    On the morning of February 11, Marshall and his team of lawyers were chauffeured the eighty miles to Ocala, and to their jaw-dropping surprise, the car was a “beautiful shiny Cadillac.” They’d arranged for a car, but Marshall would have preferred not to alight at Marion County’s Court House in a late-model hearse.
    Built in 1907, the Marion County Court House, a stately building with a facade of Indiana limestone, commanded Ocala’s Public Square. Reporters were waiting outside when Marshall arrived. They wondered what Marshall had thought of the Klan’s “rip-roaring welcome parade” for him, but he dismissively replied, “We’re going to trial.” More pertinently they wondered how Marshall planned to deal with Judge Truman Futch, who had barred the NAACP lawyers from representing the defendant, on the grounds that they “stirred up trouble in the community.” Marshall’s response was terse. “The charge is without foundation in facts,” he said, and stated that he’d be filing a motion in court: “If the motion is denied, I will appeal and keep appealing until I reach the Supreme Court, if necessary.” Marshall hinted, too, that a “sensational new trial element” would be introduced, but when he was pressed by reporters for more details, as he knew he would be, he gave them only one word, and a wry smile. “Witness,” he said. And walked on.
    As the retrial had been moved to Marion County, Walter Irvin had at least escaped the custody of Sheriff Willis McCall. He had not escaped the painful reminders of their November encounter, however. “My shoulder worries me frequently,” he told reporters at the courthouse in Ocala, “and my hand is numb and I get a buzz through my body when I move. For two weeks I begged them to let me see a doctor and when I did I got two pills supposed to be for my nerves. Once they took me to the hospital at Eustis and the doc there says I have a bullet in me near my kidney.”
    Except for the time he had been hospitalized in Eustis and at the prison, Irvin had spent the last thirty-one months in the death house at Raiford. He complained to reporters that the guards wouldn’t give him anything to read, and they “blew up when they heard I was getting a new trial. . . . Sammy was getting Life and Time and used to let me read them, but they gave out and lately there’s been nothing. I get nothing unless somebody arranged to send the magazine to me, and nobody has.”
    Reporters commented on the thin mustache that Irvin had apparently been permitted to grow since his last appearance before the press. “The captain of the prison say he going to make me shave it off after this trial,” said Irvin, “like he must be expecting me back.” Irvin’s irony prompted a reporter to ask if, then, he was innocent. Irvin seemed to be momentarily stunned by the question, perhaps because to him that had never been a question. Still, he answered it. “Am I innocent? . . . Sure I’m innocent.”

    C OURT WILL COME to order. No smoking!”
    From the balcony down, the courtroom went quiet. Like the balcony in the Lake County Court House, this one seated blacks, and it was “packed to the ceiling.” Blacks had “come from all directions with their paper bags.” At the midday break they’d gather outside the courthouse and talk together over their bag lunches, for the segregated eateries of downtown Ocala allowed them “no other place to go.”
    The first order of business for the defense was to petition Judge Futch to rule, contrary to his prior decision, that the NAACP attorneys Marshall and Greenberg be permitted to represent Walter Irvin. Marshall approached the bench with confidence; he doubted that Judge Futch would risk the possibility of another reversal at the Supreme Court were the defendant denied the legal representation of his choice in a capital case. Marshall was also secretly hoping that the feature story in the current issue of Collier’s magazine, which named him “our greatest civil liberties lawyer,” might win him some measure of respect, even in a Southern court. Earlier in his career, when Marshall had been arguing a motion before a Louisiana judge who was “no friend,” the opposing counsel had asked the court for more