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

bound. That is not an easy idea to have get a hold on you. It has to be applied person by person, not just in the pious generalities of the resolutions good people pass when they gather for a moment and separate without effective action.
    Marshall’s request produced a letter to clergymen in which Chalmers called for their support of clemency in the case of Walter Irvin: what Chalmers described as a “desperate situation.” In the letter, too, he cited a Florida newspaper that, in the same day’s edition, covered Irvin’s impending date with death in one article and in another reported that a thirty-year-old white man had been fined a hundred dollars in the rape of a fourteen-year-old black girl. The coincidence hardly spoke to the “truth and justice and fairness” Collins espoused in his inaugural address.
    The governor did act upon the case, if without fanfare or even an inside-page notice in the newspaper. Shortly after taking office, Collins initiated a secret investigation into the Groveland Boys case by his personal friend Bill Harris, a Tallahassee lawyer. What Collins wanted was an objective, detailed, fact-based report; so, to obviate any social or political fallout for either Harris or the governor’s office, Collins assured Harris, who would be acting only in an advisory capacity, without a fee, that the report would not be made public. A thorough review of the evidence and the testimony left Harris unconvinced that the Padgetts had been able to positively identify the Groveland boys. More apparent was the failure of the state to utilize procedures available for valid scientific analysis of the pants stains, footprints, and tire tracks that “could have nailed this case down and removed any reasonable doubt.” At issue, too, was the lack of any medical evidence to support the rape charges. Harris more than doubted the validity of the prosecution’s time line; he rejected it, for how could the gun in Charles Greenlee’s possession have been used in the crime when Greenlee was already in custody nearly twenty miles away from the scene of the alleged rape? Neither did Harris accept the findings of the coroner’s jury, which concluded that Sheriff Willis McCall was justified in the shooting of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. In his report Harris stated that the shooting was “in its best light an act of gross and willful negligence, and in its possible interpretation an act of criminal negligence.”
    Seeded further by the likes of Chalmers and the Committee of 100, the storm of letters and telegrams to the governor’s office did not abate. Clergymen pleaded for clemency. Tourists vowed never to spend another penny in the Sunshine State. Florida residents expressed shame at the sanctioned inhumanity of Irvin’s case. But other voices decried any attempt by committees or agencies or associations to alter the status quo either in Florida or in the case of Walter Irvin. In a letter to Governor Collins from U.S. Attorney Herbert Phillips, who had angered the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI in 1950 when he failed to take action, despite “substantial evidence . . . that the victims were beaten and tortured” by members of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, the avowed segregationist—Phillips bristled at the mere mention of Thurgood Marshall’s name—wrote: “Since I am your personal friend and desire that the NAACP shall not prove itself more powerful than our courts . . . I see no reason why the leaders of the NAACP and those who follow their leadership should expect you . . . [to be] setting aside the verdict of guilt of two juries, the judgment and sentence of the Circuit Judge, the two decisions of the Supreme Court of Florida, and the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding and affirming the death sentence imposed on Irvin.”
    Inhumanity, shame, virulence, segregationism—none of it aligned with the governor’s personal vision for his state. Within months of each other, LeRoy Collins and Thurgood Marshall appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1955, but the two men had more in common than political celebrity. Collins, who stood among the first of the “New South” politicians, and Marshall, who was emerging as the architect of a new America, both championed the cause of racial justice, no matter its political inexpediency, and both men would become leading, outspoken opponents of the death penalty in the United States. Marshall would later say, “In