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

time in order to check the accuracy of Marshall’s citations. In open court, the judge had declared, “You don’t have to worry about that. If Mr. Marshall puts his signature on it, you don’t have to check it.” Marshall owed that to Charlie Houston’s influence.
    Evidently State Attorney Jesse Hunter did not subscribe to Collier’s . He rose from his chair and was prepared to fight the defense motion. Futch, however, had reconsidered; he allowed the motion, and the two NAACP attorneys resumed as counsel for the defendant. Not unexpectedly, Futch denied the defense motion to disqualify Hunter.
    The defense next, and again, raised the change of venue issue. Marshall argued that the results from the Elmo Roper poll, which the NAACP had commissioned, showed clearly that the majority of Marion County residents believed that Walter Irvin could not receive a fair trial in Ocala. Marshall had confidence in the value of qualified, credentialed witnesses whose academic research and statistical analysis could be employed to illustrate systematic discrimination against blacks. Thus, in the school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott , he had used the testimony of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had studied children’s reactions to the “good” and “bad” qualities of black and white dolls, to bolster his argument that black children were stigmatized by being educated in segregated schools. In the hearings preceding Irvin’s retrial, Marshall called to the stand the Roper poll research executive, formerly a professor of sociology at Cornell University, and led him through a detailed explanation of the survey he had conducted. The survey showed that “not one of 518 whites questioned here in Marion County thinks Irvin is innocent. One percent were found to believe he may not be guilty,” testified the Roper executive. Moreover, his research indicated that the farther away Florida’s trial venues were from Lake and Marion counties, the more likely they were to “place the trial in a more neutral atmosphere.”
    Throughout the testimony Hunter mostly lounged in the empty jury box, “chewed occasionally on his teeth and gums,” and affected disinterest. In his cross-examination he disparaged the research and ridiculed the witness. “How much did they pay you?” Hunter asked the executive, who quoted seven thousand dollars as the cost of the survey.
    “Now, as a matter of fact, your firm predicted the elections of 1948, is that not correct?” Hunter inquired, referring to the famously inaccurate front-page headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” that the Chicago Daily Tribune , in its eagerness to go to press early, had run on the basis of polls.
    “Yes it did,” the researcher admitted, but any amusement elicited in the court was unintentional, because he added, “We predicted it wrong, but we did predict it.” Once the laughter in the courtroom had died down, no one doubted that Hunter’s objection to use of the survey would be supported by the bench.
    Hunter proceeded to counter the defense claim that Marion County’s prejudice disallowed the possibility of a fair trial for Walter Irvin, by calling his own witnesses, among them L. R. Hampton, a sixty-three-year-old black dentist. He was stirring. He extolled the love and respect that blacks and whites alike accorded each other in Marion County; he declared Judge Futch to be “one of the best friends of me and my race I have ever known.” He praised a county that historically had produced a Negro city councilman and a Negro county treasurer, and he expressed concern that the retrial of the Groveland Boys case in Ocala might harm the “good feeling that has existed all of these years” between the races.
    “Now, Dr. Hampton,” Marshall asked, as he began his cross-examination, “when were these Negroes Mayors and City Commissioners, like you have testified about?”
    “Well,” Dr. Hampton replied, “it’s so far back that I can hardly remember.”
    “About how far back was it?”
    “Well, it was something like sixty years ago.”
    “Then what you mean to say,” Marshall said, “is that there were Negroes who held those kind of offices back immediately after the Civil War, don’t you?”
    “Well, it was a long time ago.”
    Marshall’s final question for Dr. Hampton addressed the more immediate issue of jury selection and composition. “Would you have considered it proper to have Negroes on the jury?”
    “Well,” the dentist answered, “I