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

justice from Mrs. Reese than I have from you,” Platt told the sheriff.
    Again the Platt family had been forced from their home, and the children from their school; eventually they were invited to enroll in a private school in Mount Dora. Jesse Hunter publicly and strongly criticized McCall not only for failing to protect the Platts but also for telling reporters that the Lake County Sheriff’s Department had no cause or intent to protect them. The former prosecutor also, and again, contacted Governor Collins. “Disturbed” by reports like Hunter’s, the governor issued a statement: “Lawlessness of this kind in Lake County has just got to stop. Not only are the rights of the individuals involved but the good name of this fine county and of the state is put in jeopardy.” Sheriff McCall remained undeterred. At a meeting of the Lions Club not long after the firebombing of the Platts’ house, he announced, “In my book, they’re still mulattoes. This only proves that there are some people who will stoop to integrate our schools.”
    In New York Marshall had been following the press coverage of the Platt case, and he took particular interest in the coverage by Mabel Norris Reese. That Reese had once called for honor to be avenged in the rape of Norma Padgett and declared Lake County a racial paradise, and that she had lost all regard for the sheriff of that county, attested to the human capacity to change. No longer able, after the sheriff’s shooting of the two Groveland defendants, to turn a blind eye to the racism and white supremacy in her own backyard, she had tipped off the NAACP about the last bullet found in the sand, and she had since kept the New York office informed, through intermediaries, of what she learned further about the case from Jesse Hunter. Hunter himself, it appeared, had begun to rethink the entire Groveland Boys matter, “due chiefly to the influence of Thurgood Marshall,” according to Reese. Hunter may have even begun to regret the “sacred duty” that compelled him, a man stricken with a fatal disease, to win his last capital case in Lake County at the cost of Walter Irvin’s life.

    I N HIS FIRST year as governor, LeRoy Collins took countless “Florida selling” trips to New York, where he chased manufacturing deals, the construction of atomic energy plants, and insurance company relocations. He was, as Time magazine observed, “an indefatigable salesman of his state boom.” The last thing Collins wanted to see, then, was a New York newspaper headline asking, “Is There Negro Blood on Your Grapefruit?” Not only would bad press cost the state a tremendous loss in agricultural and manufacturing dollars; it would also stem the flow of money from Northern tourists and winter residents, whose seasonal migrations had prompted a boom in housing and construction. Neither an advertisement nor an asset for the Sunshine State were trigger-happy sheriffs and bomb-planting, torch-wielding mobs in white robes and hoods.
    With letter-writing campaigns and newspaper stories rekindling interest in the Groveland Boys case and the plight of Walter Irvin, Thurgood Marshall turned to a friend, a former president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Allan Knight Chalmers, for additional purchase. A highly respected white minister who had chaired the Scottsboro Defense Committee in the 1930s, for seventeen years Chalmers had negotiated tirelessly with the state of Alabama until all nine defendants had gained their freedom. At the time of the first Groveland Boys trial, Chalmers had participated in the investigation into the case by the Committee of 100, and he had come away convinced that the defendants were innocent. In 1955, when Marshall contacted him in regard to the fate of Walter Irvin, Chalmers was teaching at Boston University, where he was mentoring a young student named Martin Luther King Jr. In Chalmers, Marshall saw the kind of man by whom LeRoy Collins might be persuaded to favorably address Walter Irvin’s situation, as Collins appeared to be a man moved by words and ideas. Moreover, Chalmers’s 1951 book, They Shall Be Free , struck chords that Collins had also touched upon in his inaugural address, as in Chalmers’s call for “effective action” in what Collins would name a “moral wilderness”:
    There are enough staid people in the world holding things as they are. We need no more of them. What we need is people caught by the truth that no one is free when anyone is