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

Futch returned to the bench.
    A cigarette in his hand, Judge Futch addressed the spectators. “Now when the jury gives its verdict, I don’t want a man to move in this room until the sheriff takes the defendant out.”
    And what happens if he’s not guilty? Marshall thought. The conclusion appeared to be foregone.
    Just before 4 p.m., the twelve jurors filed into the courtroom, their eyes giving nothing away. The room settled into a hush. The verdict was read.
    “We the jury find the defendant guilty.” There was no recommendation of mercy.
    Irvin betrayed no emotion. He sat, unmoving, except for the twitch of muscle in the hollows of his cheeks. Walter’s mother swallowed her wail as she broke down in tears. Around her in the Jim Crow gallery sobs accompanied Dellia Irvin’s grief.
    Marion County sheriff Don McLeod patted Irvin on the shoulder. “Like a man stunned,” the defendant stepped before Judge Futch for sentencing. His senses numb, he barely heard the words that would echo inside his head for months: “ . . . electrocuted until you are dead and may God have mercy on your soul.”
    Immediately, Marshall made a motion for a mistrial on the basis of Hunter’s prosecutorial misfeasance in his summation before the jury. Futch denied the motion, and borrowing a pen, after fumbling in his pockets in an unsuccessful attempt to find one, he sealed Irvin’s doom with his signature. Reporters raced to telephones and their typewriters. The jury was dismissed, and Walter Irvin, again in handcuffs, was escorted by Sheriff McLeod, in a suit and fedora, from the courtroom to a waiting patrol car.
    Richard Carter, reporter for the Compass , lingered at the courthouse. He wanted to get some quotes from the prosecutor, but he settled for Sam Buie, whom he asked for a clarification of a remark made by the state attorney in his closing argument. Addressing a point raised by the defense as to why Walter Irvin, if he were guilty, had not simply fled after raping Norma Padgett, Hunter had scoffed at the logic and told the jurors what he knew they’d know, “Don’t you know that is the colored way of thinking?” Buie explained to the inquisitive reporter that Hunter had in fact meant to use the word criminal , not colored . Carter, who had that very day been named the 1951 recipient of the George Polk Award, given to “the reporter who was faithful to the best tenets of his profession even at the risk of life itself,” was not convinced. He would later write, “Could this be another of the ‘rape’ cases which Southern authorities have been known to whomp up as an afterthought in order to keep the Negro in his ‘place’?”
    Once Carter had walked out of earshot, Assistant State Attorney Sam Buie asked some other reporters who were standing close by, “Say, is that Carter a nigger? He’s got awful curly hair. You sure he’s no nigger?”
    Dellia Irvin caught up with Thurgood Marshall as he was leaving the courtroom. Tears formed ragged trails down her cheeks. “She had the most impressive face I’ve ever seen on a woman,” Marshall said later. “Real high cheekbones and a whole lot of red in that black. A whole lot of red, and a lot of Indian. And she just had these piercing eyes. . . .”
    “Lawyer, don’t you let my boy die, you understand that?” Dellia Irvin enjoined him. “She said it four times,” Marshall recalled. “Don’t you let my boy die. I could hardly go to sleep. I could see this face, and boy, it really . . .”
    Overcome himself, Marshall took the inconsolable woman into his arms; her body was trembling. “Don’t worry, honey.” Marshall tried to comfort her. “With the faith of our people and the grace of God, we’ll be back.” Tears welling in his eyes, too, Marshall assured her, “We’re going to stick by you. . . . We are going to keep on fighting.”
    On Monday he would be filing a motion for a new trial in Tavares, Marshall told the reporters outside the courthouse, before he climbed into the hearse. With Paul Perkins, Arnold DeMille of the Defender , Robert Ratcliffe of the Courier , and Milton “Buddy” Lonesome of the Baltimore Afro-American , he rode to the small hotel in Parramore, where some of the black news correspondents picked up their luggage, and then dashed on to the airport in Orlando.
    Mabel Norris Reese was waiting in the courthouse lobby. The sun was beginning to set, and she had a long drive back to Lake County, but something had to be