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

Legion hall in Clermont, about sixteen miles away, and if Willie could get his jalopy of a car to run—and if Coy Tyson would approve—he could show Norma a good time out on the town.
    For Norma, even if she and Willie were having troubles, the idea of going out dancing with him on a Friday night was still preferable to another night at home with her father. Why should Willie always be out having a good time? Why should she be always the one stuck at home?
    After picking up a bottle of whiskey at Frisz’s, the Padgetts arrived at the American Legion hall in Clermont around 9:30 p.m. They found a table with Willie’s sister and her husband, and mixing with young farmers and war veterans still in their twenties, the young couple drank whiskey, danced, and gabbed until 1 a.m. After a last dance, they left the hall and headed for Willie’s old Ford.
    Willie tried to start the car, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. According to Norma’s later account, they had to “get it pushed off” in order to leave the unpaved parking lot. As they rolled down the road into darkness, both of them roaring drunk, Norma announced she was hungry, as she hadn’t had anything to eat that night; so they decided to drive to Burtoft’s Café, a “dine-and-dance spot” in Okahumpka, to grab a sandwich. With farmland and pastures flickering by the car window, they passed what was left in the bottle of whiskey back and forth. They had traveled some miles north toward Okahumpka when it dawned on Willie that Burtoft’s Café probably wouldn’t be open at this hour. Norma decided they should turn around; she was tired, she just wanted to go home.
    Willie slowed the car. The road was deserted, and Willie’s hopes were empty. Nothing magical was happening between him and Norma—all they shared was frustration and youthful impatience and confusion. Maybe it would never work out between them. What would they be, then? Neighbors? Willie didn’t see himself ever leaving Bay Lake, and Norma wasn’t going anywhere, either. Seventeen years old, thin, and pretty, but a prisoner in her daddy’s house, sitting around all day and night with her daddy whispering in her ear that Willie Padgett’s no good. Another man was sure to come along, come to rescue her. Willie had seen the young veterans practically leering at Norma when he was dancing with her. No doubt they were whispering, too, wondering where things stood and how long it would be before Norma was free of him. Well, she was still Willie Padgett’s wife. At least in name she was.
    Good and drunk now, Willie took another swig of whiskey before handing the bottle to Norma. Then, slowing the car, he made a right turn down a dirt driveway, but he didn’t get far. He struggled with the wheel to pull up beside some mossy oaks, and stopped at a fence gate. The Ford’s engine rattled the dashboard. The headlights illuminated the white, sandy road before them. Despite the shining moon, it was undeniably dark and uncomfortably quiet, with no signs of cars coming from either direction. Norma Lee, in her pink cotton dress, sat on the front bench seat, her delicate body pressed against the door, while she waited for Willie, the boy she called “Haven” in happier moments, to rest his hand on the gearshift and turn the car back around so that she could finally go home.

    S AMUEL SHEPHERD WAS having car troubles of his own that night. He and his friend Walter Irvin, both twenty-two-year-old army veterans from the same outfit, had started out the evening in his father’s 1937 Ford, but the car was not acting right in Groveland. So Samuel drove them back to the Shepherd house in Bay Lake around 9:30 p.m.; there he hoped to swap the old Ford for his brother James’s Mercury. James, who was married to Walter’s sister, ultimately consented to the switch, on the promise they’d have the car back before James had to leave for work in the morning. The two friends gassed up the tank and headed east for a night out.
    The town of Eatonville was only six miles north of Orlando and thirty-five miles east of the town that Samuel and Walter called home. Yet it was worlds away from Groveland. After the Civil War, many black soldiers, not content to be swept into the undesirable parts of a town, chose to settle in one of dozens of race colonies that had begun to spring up across the nation. There blacks could live a life that was virtually free of racial friction. In 1887, Eatonville became the first