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

went right to Norma’s bare legs as she slid her thin body across the tattered seat. With only one stop to make, Willie pulled away from the Tyson farmhouse as the Florida sun was setting, and minutes later he idled the old Ford in front of Frisz’s Bar and Grill, where he ran inside and picked up a bottle of whiskey for the big dance.
    On July 15, 1949, the front pages of newspapers across the country bannered frightening news for Americans. President Truman had called an emergency meeting with “top Cabinet, military, atomic and Congressional leaders” on a matter so secret that none of the participants would comment “for the good of the country.” As it turned out, Russia, aided by spies who worked on the Manhattan Project, was just weeks from successfully testing its first atom bomb, a near replica of the U.S. Fat Man design, years earlier than analysts had expected. The United States was already in the throes of the Red Scare, and Americans’ fears of atomic warfare and the spread of communism intensified.
    The same day another headline in the papers announced that the celebrated stage star and singer Paul Robeson had been a member of the Communist Party for years, and was “ambitious to become ‘the Black Stalin’ ”—or so a former communist testified at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington, D.C. The witness stated further that the Communist Party planned to set up a black republic through an armed revolt in the South, extending from Maryland to Texas, and that Robeson had been assigned “certain secret work that was intercontinental.”
    On that mid-July Friday, twenty-three-year-old Willie Haven Padgett, his work on the farm done for the week, was blissfully unaware of the portents of nuclear warfare or the creeping threat of communism. He was looking forward to a Friday night of drinking and dancing and getting whatever else he might in the backseat of his car before the sun came up. Born and raised among the lower-class whites of Tattnall County, Georgia, Willie had moved with his family to Bay Lake, Florida—a clannish stretch of truck farmers who mostly lived off the land in scattered wooden shacks a few miles south of Groveland. He hadn’t made it past grammar school, so he had already put in years of hard work in the family’s fertile Lake County soil when he met a frail but comely girl up the road named Norma Lee Tyson.
    Still, Willie was nervous, despite the fact that this was hardly their first date. He’d met the Tyson girl the year before, when she was just sixteen years old, and he and Norma had married a few months later. But things had been rocky from the start, and the two had separated even before their first anniversary. Norma’s father, Coy Tyson, had had a lot to do with that. He didn’t much care for the freckled, bucktoothed kid who asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and Coy Tyson certainly didn’t like the fact that his daughter was often left at home while Willie caroused all night all over Lake County. Rumors around town had it that the short-tempered Willie got rough with young Norma—that he slapped her around at times—and Bay Lake locals knew Coy Tyson wasn’t going to stand for behavior like that. Willie realized he had to watch his step with Norma these days, because the Tysons were not to be messed with, and tonight might be his last opportunity to make things right with Norma Lee.
    One thing working in Willie’s favor was that Norma, despite her age, wasn’t exactly an innocent farm girl—not even in the eyes of her father. Her reputation around town was “not good,” according to one white woman who knew her, and “a bad egg” is how another local described her. For Norma had been seen “cavorting with Negroes”—one sure way for a white girl to tarnish her reputation—and this may have been why Coy Tyson was willing to give Willie another chance with his daughter. The Padgetts and the Tysons alike had thought the young couple would benefit by a temporary separation; both had some growing up to do.
    By the summer of 1949, Norma was living at her father’s house and Willie had moved back onto his mother’s property about a mile down the road from the Tysons. The monotony of long hours on the farm and the haunting daily reminder that he had failed so early in his marriage had Willie looking forward to the weekend as a chance to patch things up with his teenage bride. There was a dance at the American