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

the girl in the roadside grass when he appeared in the most illustrious trial to take place in central Florida.
    “My mother was a saint to put up with him,” Kim Howard said, for Libby was fully aware that her husband was committing serial adultery. “There were just so many young girls that he would go off with. He was indiscriminate, and so charming and charismatic that there was no end to the girls. He couldn’t stop. My parents’ second divorce involved my father getting our babysitter pregnant.” Her father was also an unapologetic racist, Kim Howard claimed: “He and Uncle Leroy were very close. He would do anything for him.” So, when for the first time she learned about the Groveland Boys trial, Kim Howard said, “My first thought was, ‘Curt, what did you do now? What did you get yourself mixed up in?’ My father didn’t drive past Norma Padgett. He wasn’t stupid. Knowing my father, he had something to do with that girl. He’d gotten himself mixed up in something. If he was really a hero, and my mother believed it, we would have heard about it.”

    T WELVE YEARS EARLIER, in the case of the black butler Joseph Spell, who stood accused of raping socialite Eleanor Strubing, Marshall had refused a plea offer from prosecutors and elected to go forward with a trial because he believed that in Connecticut a white woman’s claim of rape would not, by force of cultural necessity, be accepted as unassailable fact. Marshall correctly gauged the jury’s disinclination to convict on the basis of race and won an acquittal for Joseph Spell. No less correctly Marshall concluded it could never happen in central Florida.
    In declining to cross-examine Curtis Howard, the defense was passing up the chance perhaps to lay bare the very heart of the Groveland Boys case. But because this was an interracial rape case in the South, the defense team had to tread lightly. As one reporter noted, “The absence of medical proof  . . . could only be alluded to in passing.” That Norma and Willie, having shared a pint of whiskey, were no doubt drunk, that they had not been living together, or that Willie had passed a number of houses and even a police station after his wife’s alleged abduction “could only be hinted at in the most discreet and obscure terms.” Another reporter covering the trial had wondered if Norma might have concocted the rape story to “extricate herself from an embarrassing or compromising position” or if the story had been invented “to extricate husband, wife and third party from the trouble that might attend disclosure of a fight which involved the eternal triangle.” No matter how “demonstrably true” any such scenarios might prove to be, none of them, the reporter wrote, could “be entered as evidence in a Southern trial of this kind.” The defense dared not to question in any way either the purity of the Flower of Southern Womanhood, however indelicately she might be represented by Norma Lee Padgett, or her probity in the “contention that she [had] been ravished” by four savage blacks. Should the defense dare to tread upon a white Southern woman’s honor, not only would the jury fail to acquit a black man of a rape charge, but they would also most surely deliver him a death sentence. So the only practicable strategy for the defense in the Groveland Boys case was to raise reasonable doubt by showing that the state of Florida had arrested the wrong men.
    Marshall had to scramble to bring Lawrence Burtoft to Ocala. He had minister S. Ralph Harlow, a member of the Committee of 100, write to Burtoft in Fort Jackson, South Carolina: “We need you very much if that trial is to be fair. . . . This boy’s life is at stake and the honor of Florida is at stake. Only a fair trial can free Florida from a blot that can never be cleaned. You can do much to make that trial fair. I pray that you may have the courage, the sense of justice, the spirit of Christ, to bear witness to the truth.”
    The testimony of Lawrence Burtoft, which outright challenged the truth of Norma Padgett’s tale, was indeed “as far as the defense dared to go.” Burtoft had been flown to Ocala from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, on a plane chartered by the NAACP. Still in his uniform, he took the stand as the first witness for the defense. The Okahumpka native testified that on the morning of July 16, when Norma Padgett showed up at his father’s café (the local “dining hall or dancing place,” as