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

taction of private parts. She need not have said anything more. A white Southern reporter whispered to a Northern newsman, “That’s all, brother. The next move is up to the U.S. Supreme Court. This Irvin is convicted here and now.”
    Hunter proceeded to what occurred after the rape, when, Norma said, the black men were trying to decide what to do with her. “One of them said to me, which would I rather do, ride on down the road with them and be killed or get out and walk, and I said that I would get out and walk, so they got me out of the car. . . .” And Norma ran. She hid in the woods, she said, “until almost daylight,” then walked to Okahumpka, where she waited until Lawrence Burtoft opened up the café.
    Glossing over any words that Norma may have exchanged with Lawrence Burtoft, the state attorney returned to details of the rape. “Now, Norma,” Hunter asked, “did you fight those Negroes in that car?”
    “No, sir, I didn’t.”
    “Why didn’t you fight them?”
    “Because I was scared to.”
    “Did they threaten you?”
    “Yes, sir,” Norma said.
    “In what way?”
    “They said if I made any noise or screamed or hollered or tried to do anything, they would shoot me.”
    “Did they have a gun?”
    “Yes, they did.”
    Frustrated by Norma’s reluctance or refusal to forward her story, Hunter led her further. “Now, Norma, you submitted to those Negroes because you were afraid of them?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you say they had a gun and made threats to you?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you say this defendant sitting here in the courtroom is one of those men?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “That is Walter Irvin?” Hunter practically pleaded.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Will you point him out to the jury?”
    Norma Padgett pointed vaguely in the direction of Walter Irvin. That two of the Groveland Boys were now dead and another was doing hard labor on a chain gang in South Florida no doubt robbed the moment of some of its drama, but Norma’s limp gesture held not a lick of the electricity she’d generated when she had risen in the witness box at the Lake County courthouse and with her finger extended had pointed at each defendant in succession.
    “The nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee.”
    Jesse Hunter’s case for the prosecution rested almost singly, and strongly, on his certainty that no jury in Lake or Marion counties would ever accept the word of a black man over the testimony of a young blond farm girl who had accused him of rape. So he had Norma accuse her alleged rapist again, then again and again.
    “Now, Norma, this is a very important thing,” Hunter stated with emphasis. “I want you to tell this court and jury whether or not that is one of the Negro men that raped you that night in the back seat of that automobile.”
    “Yes, sir, it is.”
    “Are you sure about that?”
    “Yes, sir, I am sure.”
    “You are positive he is one of the ones who raped you that night.”
    “Yes, sir,” Norma said, and five times more she said she was sure when five times more Hunter asked her, for he wanted to be absolutely sure that the jury was sure that Walter Irvin was one of the four black men who had raped her.
    Marshall had decided, and announced, that neither he nor any other black attorney would be cross-examining Norma Padgett before a white, male jury in Marion County. Mabel Norris Reese saw wisdom in the decision. “You had a farmer jury, a white woman had been raped by negroes and this was in their minds,” Reese said. “There was no question at all. They weren’t considering evidence. They had their eyes fastened on Hunter . . . it would have been suicide for Marshall to get up and argue anything in the jury.”
    Careful not to display any antagonism toward the state attorney’s witness, Akerman had Norma review her account of the events that culminated in Willie’s fight with the four black men. Then, barely acknowledging the alleged rape—for the defense strategy was not to question the allegation of the rape but to raise reasonable doubt as to Irvin’s involvement in it—Akerman focused on Norma’s arrival in Okahumpka, on foot, outside Burtoft’s Café. In the first trial, because Hunter had chosen not to call Lawrence Burtoft as a witness, the prosecution’s narrative had omitted Norma’s conversation with the owners’ son in the café. To Akerman, Norma responded that she knew Lawrence Burtoft, the young man who’d let her