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

decision.
    Dellia Irvin was holding her chin high. Marshall recalled how she, too, could have lied—in the first trial, on the witness stand—and tried to save her son’s life by testifying that Walter had come home that fateful July night at 2 a.m. Instead she’d stated that he’d come home but she didn’t know the time.
    “Won’t say it on myself,” Irvin insisted. Marshall and Greenberg tried to impress upon their client and his family that they were not going to win this trial in Marion County; they also emphasized that there were no guarantees at the Supreme Court. But Walter Irvin was adamant. He would not admit to rape. They’d have to say that for him, he told his lawyers, who pointed out that the judge would accept a guilty plea only from the defendant’s own lips.
    Greenberg was dumbfounded by the decision of the steadfast, young defendant “who wouldn’t confess after brutal beatings, and who wouldn’t die after having been shot three times.” Marshall, too, was at a loss for words, though in that moment he knew “damn well that man was innocent.”
    Irvin reiterated, “I’ll take a life sentence right now because that’s better than the chair, but if I have to say I had anything to do with that lady I’m not going to do it. I’m not guilty.”
    Clutching a well-worn Bible, Dellia Irvin gave her son a hug. “All right, now,” she comforted the boy in him, and told him he’d be back home with her soon.
    After the recess the defense attorneys returned with Irvin to their table in the courtroom. To Marshall, menace seemed to hover in the atmosphere of the room, perhaps because his gaze had fallen on Willis McCall. A bear of a man, he stood tall in his cowboy boots; one hand was resting on the butt of his holstered gun, the gun he’d used to shoot down two of the Groveland boys—and maybe to fire a few of the slugs in Ernest Thomas, too. Marshall’s eyes had drifted to the sullen, dull-faced presence of Willie Padgett among some spectators when, with a loud crash, Jesse Hunter’s chair broke under him and landed the state attorney, sprawling, on the floor.
    It was Hunter’s galluses that captured Marshall’s eye. Red galluses. Like the ones Herman Talmadge of Georgia wore to honor his father, the former governor Eugene Talmadge. Four years earlier, Herman had honored his father’s racial prejudices as well. In his own gubernatorial campaign Herman made fame out of hate with his signal, one-word stump speeches. He’d stand on a stage, tug on his red suspenders, and shout “Nigger!” over and over until he’d whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “You tell ’em, Hummon,” his redneck constituents would holler back, their tobacco juice spattering their “red Talmadge neckties.” An epithet and suspenders won young Herman Talmadge the 1948 special election decisively. If segregation and white supremacy wanted a symbol in the South, it was found in red galluses.
    Hunter got resettled in another chair, and Judge Futch took his seat on the bench, where he had laid out sticks for his whittling. With the permission of Futch, if not of the court attendant, Arnold DeMille snapped a photo of the Whittlin’ Judge, who asked the Chicago Defender columnist if he might “see it when it was made up.”
    The last pretrial motion to be heard concerned the admission of Walter Irvin’s pants as evidence, which the defense was challenging on the grounds that Deputy James Yates had entered the Irvins’ house on the morning following the alleged rape and had collected the evidence—the pants Walter had been wearing the night before—without a search warrant.
    Attorney Paul Perkins asked the defense witness Dellia Irvin who arrived at her house on the morning of July 16, 1949, and she replied, “Well, this Deputy Sheriff, he came up to the house and said that he ‘came for that little black nigger boy’s clothes.’ ”
    Perkins established that the “boy” was her son, Walter, and then asked, “What did you give him?”
    “Well, I gave him a pair of brown trousers and a pair of brown shoes, and a white colored shirt.”
    “Now, Dellia, were you afraid?”
    “Yes, sir, I was because he was the law.”
    Dellia had asked Yates the likely date of the trial, and, as she told Perkins, the deputy had barked at her that “there might not be any damned trial.”
    The defense argued that because Walter Irvin paid rent to his parents for a bedroom with a lock on its door, Dellia Irvin was not