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

example of it except at the victory celebration. He was leaving with Cissy. . . . That was the first time I’d ever seen any indication that she wasn’t just another worker there.”
    The victory was not celebrated in the South. The Brown ruling triggered a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity and White Citizens’ Council activism, whereby “respectable citizens” joined together to exert economic pressures against local individuals and organizations that either supported desegregation or did not openly oppose it. In Lake County, an editorial by Mabel Norris Reese praising Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court’s decision was not inconsequential. The opposition planted a burning cross on her front lawn, smeared “KKK” in red paint across her office windows, and poisoned the family dog with strychnine.
    Ironically, for all the briefs that the LDF lawyers had filed on the Groveland case over the past five years and for all the appearances Marshall had made in the Supreme Court as well as in Florida county courthouses in the attempt of the NAACP to save the life of Walter Irvin, it was Marshall’s Brown victory in Washington that incidentally set in motion a sequence of events in Florida, which, as it happened, gave the Groveland boy his best chance of escaping the electric chair. For the Brown decision infuriated Willis McCall, both in itself and all the more because the case’s celebrated, winning lawyers were the very same who had descended on Lake County and had as much as called its sheriff a cold-blooded murderer. Not that he’d allow them to intimidate him, or their Supreme Court decision to determine how he would maintain law and order in his domain.
    Streams were going dry and farms to ruin in the South Carolina drought of 1954, so in the spring Allan Platt decided to move his family south, to Mount Dora in Lake County, Florida, where his brother helped him find work picking oranges. He and his wife, Laura, enrolled their five children in the white public school, only to discover they were not white enough. The school did not ignore the complaints of parents expressing concerns that the brown-skinned Platt children might be Negroes; instead, the principal reported the complaints to the county sheriff. So it happened that Sheriff Willis McCall, accompanied by the school principal, paid a visit to the Platts’ residence, where he conducted his own anthropological investigation. He lined the five children up against the wall, and peering down over his glasses, one by one, he studied them. “You know, he favors a nigger,” he decided, thus dispensing with seventeen-year-old Denzell; as for thirteen-year-old Laura Belle, “I don’t like the shape of that one’s nose”—and in as many minutes as children he determined that all five children were indeed Negroes. Despite Allan Platt’s claims to Irish and American Indian descent, and unconvinced by birth certificates as well as a marriage license which designated the Platts as “white,” McCall ordered the children to be kept out of school, pending further investigation. Platt’s objections fell on deaf ears. If there was one thing Willis McCall could do, he bragged, it was identify both “Black Angus cattle and mulattoes.”
    “The sheriff is the law here,” school officials responded when the Platts protested the sheriff’s dictum. So, too, Mabel Norris Reese reported in a series of articles that would ultimately earn her a Pulitzer Prize nomination and continuing coverage in Time magazine. Taking up the Platts’ cause, Reese also renewed her old feud with Sheriff McCall. “If the children never see the inside of another school, they will not go to a Negro school,” Allan Platt told Reese. For his family had no association with blacks; they had attended only white churches, and his grandfather had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Furthermore, the Platts were legally designated as “white,” though some documents indicated, too, a Croatan Indian ancestry—which, McCall was quick to point out, was defined by Webster’s dictionary as a line of “people of mixed Indian, white and Negro ancestry.” McCall spouted, and Reese’s articles spurred sixty-five pupils at the Mount Dora school to sign a petition stating that the Platt children’s “right to an education has been taken away because of the opinions and prejudice of one man.” The next day, when school opened, the children found a chalk line running down the