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

spoke “patiently, politely, softly, but fluently and with dignity,” as one reporter noted. For years Marshall had been honing his approach to all-white juries in courtrooms across the South, and his reasonableness was difficult to resist. “With Marshall, you really got the impression that what he was saying had to be right,” a fellow lawyer observed. “That no honest person could really avoid the thrust of what he was arguing. That he really, really believed in this cause. And that made him very effective.”
    Marshall touched briefly on the matter of Deputy James Yates’s plaster casts, or rather on the question that the state had raised as to the bias in Howard Bennett’s testimony, for which the reputedly expert witness had been handsomely paid by the defense. Alex Akerman would argue the evidence itself in his closing statement, but what Marshall wished to make clear, he explained to the jurors, was that it was the defense’s duty to offer the court the “best evidence we could find” just as it was the state’s obligation to present their best evidence. “It is awfully hard to get the best evidence in the world without paying for it,” Marshall told them.
    To a significant degree, the money expended on expert testimony indicated the importance that the NAACP attached to the Groveland Boys case and to the life of the defendant. Marshall emphasized to the jury “that this is an extremely important case, and it is an extremely important case to Walter Lee Irvin. There is a man’s life involved here, his life is at stake, and gentlemen, I urge you, when you are considering this case, and making up your verdict in this case, to keep in the foremost part of your mind this fact. That every man, no matter what his color or race or creed might be, and no matter what the crime that he is charged with, each man in those circumstances is entitled to the fairest treatment that anybody can possibly give him. . . . You are the sole judges of the evidence and the testimony in the case, and it is your responsibility to reach this verdict. . . .” Marshall finished with a nod and “thank you for your patience and attention.”
    Futch called a recess for lunch. As the jurors were filing out, Jack Greenberg, at the end of the defense table, heard one of them say to another, “Damn, that nigger was good. Sure looks like it’ll be close.”

CHAPTER 21: THE COLORED WAY

    State Attorney Jesse Hunter questions Lawrence Burtoft in July 1949, while Sheriff Willis McCall and Deputy James Yates glare. ( Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images )
    B OY, THAT’S A great man,” Hunter said, speaking of Marshall.
    Mabel Norris Reese had had ample opportunity to observe the two opposing counsel in court, and in the course of the trial they had seemed to grow quite “buddy-buddy.” During breaks in the proceedings, Hunter had on occasion sat down with his coffee at the defense table to engage Marshall in conversation, to make the NAACP lawyer from New York feel more at ease in Marion County. Willis McCall might not have been impressed by Thurgood Marshall’s closing argument on behalf of Walter Irvin, but the state attorney from Lake County—“a terrible racist,” though he was known to be, according to Reese—unquestionably was. Reese had detected a change in Hunter’s attitudes toward race as well as toward the sheriff ever since the shooting of the two Groveland boys that November night on a dark road near Umatilla: a change that was reflected when Marshall’s name came up at a lunch with Hunter during the court recess on the Thursday of the trial, and Reese noted, “You could just see the respect all over [Hunter’s] face for that man. It was such a shame they could never have lunch together, but at the time no restaurant in Florida would have permitted it.”
    Reese’s own attitudes had been shifting, too. Before the first trial, she later admitted, she had been “conned into believing that these boys were guilty. . . . In the beginning, I just felt the evidence was there, and I admit I tried them before they’d been given a chance to be tried.” After the trial, and the appeals, and the reversal of the verdict by the Supreme Court, which was in essence an indictment of the prejudicial system of justice in Lake County, Hunter had been “his usual blunt self and didn’t like it one bit,” Reese recalled, and Willis McCall had “raved and raved.” Reese also recognized,