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

or, for that matter, the driver who’d come to his aid. He then drove close to ten miles, past quiet homes and several storefront businesses that were still open, and even past the police station, to Dean’s filling station on the east side of Leesburg.
    In cross-examination by Akerman, Padgett acknowledged that he and Norma were not living together in July 1949 and that they had been drinking whiskey the evening of July 15. Akerman noted, too, that Padgett had previously testified that the car driven by Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin was a ’46 or ’48 black Mercury. Later, Padgett claimed the car was “light green.” Akerman, however, failed to address some questionable, key details in Padgett’s story: After an assault and suspected abduction, why had Padgett passed by a police station and stopped instead at Dean’s filling station? How was it that he could identify with such certainty the black men in the Mercury and recall, in detail, their conversations, but could not remember a single detail about the car or the driver and anyone with him who actually got Willie back on the road?
    A baby was crying. Jesse Hunter had called his next witness, and Thurgood Marshall turned his head to find the source of the noise. Norma Padgett was passing a three-week-old infant, her second son, to the outstretched hands of her sister or a cousin.
    “Dressed for a party,” Jack Greenberg thought as Norma smoothed the front of her cotton dress, white with a floral print, and tugged at her “coral-colored cardigan sweater.” The two and a half years since Norma had testified in Lake County—when one reporter had wondered, “Why would a ‘rape victim’ strut and prance and pose like another Victoria Price of Scottsboro notoriety?”—had not been kind to her. Now nineteen, “bone-poor” and living rent-free on her uncle’s farm, she was, relatives said, trapped in a marriage to a man who “neglects” her and “spends his wages recklessly.” She walked up to the witness stand; she was not strutting or prancing: She “has the bent carriage and the shuffling walk of a woman three times her age,” one newspaper reported. Her blond hair, bobbed and curled at the first trial, was hanging lank and lifeless. Her eyes were puffy. Her arms “ricket-thin” and her shoulder blades poking at her tight dress, she raised her right hand and swore to tell the whole truth.
    Jesse Hunter treated Norma gently, his voice nearly as soft and low as hers, “which often could not be heard above the sounds of the traffic outside the open windows of the court.” So solicitously—so strategically solicitously, the defense lawyers opined—did the state attorney lead his witness through her testimony that any antagonism in cross-examination was bound to seem harsh, even barbaric, by comparison.
    Norma’s rendering of the roadside encounter did not diverge from Willie’s. After the fight, which left Willie unconscious, the story became Norma’s own. One of the black men, she said, told the others, “Grab the lady,” and the five of them—Ernest Thomas at the wheel, Charles Greenlee in the passenger seat, and Norma sandwiched between Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin in the back—drove to “a little ole side road” near the Sumter County line. The car stopped, “and then this nigger by the name of Thomas got in the back seat.”
    Asked if Thomas did anything to her, Norma replied, “Yes, sir, Thomas he jerked up my dress, and I jerked it back down, and he told me to leave it alone, and pulled it back up, and he made me take off my pants . . . and Thomas raped me first, Thomas did.”
    “All right,” Hunter said, “which one raped you next?”
    “Then Irvin raped me next, he was the second one, and I don’t know which one was next after that.”
    “And all four of them raped you out there on that side road?”
    “Yes, sir, they did.”
    Hunter paused, to allow Norma time to elaborate. Yet the fire she had brought to her testimony in the first trial was gone; she neither craved nor basked in the court’s attention, as she had in Lake County. She exhibited no anger or shame, but not out of apparent indifference; she seemed simply to be tired and worn down. She hardly called the Groveland Boys niggers anymore.
    So Hunter prompted: “Do you mean that they put their private parts into your private parts?”
    “Yes, sir, they did.”
    “All four of them did.”
    “Yes, sir, they did,” said Norma, confirming the