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

recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” More bluntly, Collins would declare the death penalty to be “Florida’s gutter of shame.” He might have said the same of the racial injustices that had for too long defined the social tenor of the conservative Old South, although in his gubernatorial campaign he himself had opposed desegregation. “I realized we had to change,” Collins said after he had read those letters and telegrams, for without change he could not achieve the new Florida that he had envisioned in his inaugural address: a Florida that could “offer to the people of the world the finest investment on earth—a place in the sun.”
    Memorable among the thousands of letters, and moving as well as suasive, was one that Collins received from Jesse Hunter. The prosecutor of the Groveland Boys related how he and Thurgood Marshall had reached an agreement whereby Irvin would receive a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plead, but subsequently, after a lengthy conference, Marshall had informed the state attorney that the defendant insisted he was innocent and refused to plead otherwise. Hunter then recounted for the governor the details of the private meeting he’d had three months before the retrial, on the morning of November 7, 1951, when he had slipped past Deputy James Yates at Waterman Memorial Hospital and stepped into the guarded room. In the hospital bed, barely conscious, with a red tube taped to his face, lay Walter Irvin, the defendant he had already once sent to the electric chair and the man whom Hunter had noticed was still alive the night before. The man’s chances of recovery were uncertain, as Hunter had suspected—that was why he had driven to the hospital at the crack of dawn. The two men briefly discussed Irvin’s condition, and Irvin told the prosecutor he believed that he was going to die. Hunter sensed an opportunity: “Confess to the rape,” he whispered, promising Irvin that anything he said would be confidential and not ever be used against him. “For my satisfaction alone,” Hunter added. And waited, until: “No . . . I’m not guilty,” Irvin rasped.
    To Collins, Hunter’s intent in the letter was clear. After his bedside conversation with Irvin, the ailing state attorney had confided to Mabel Norris Reese that he had doubts concerning Irvin’s guilt. Yet the prosecutor in him would not allow him to quit on the case and the chance of a second conviction. Now, seventy-six years old, leukemic, his health failing, the former prosecutor was striving to clear his conscience, to do what was right—to persuade Governor LeRoy Collins to commute Walter Irvin’s death sentence.
    Hunter’s intent was clear to Willis McCall as well, and it rankled the sheriff even more than the Supreme Court’s reversal of the first Groveland Boys verdict. After meeting with the governor, McCall sent Collins a letter of his own, in which he tried to explain away the former prosecutor’s change of heart as “a demonstration of senility . . . greatly influenced by a radical female editor who in the opinion of many citizens in this county has pink leaning in her editorials.”
    In the letter McCall argued further, with a parting shot at Thurgood Marshall and his New York lawyers, that commutation of Irvin’s sentence to life “would only be a victory for NAACP who has set out to destroy the authority of our courts, as it is an undisputable fact that they are the ones behind this movement. Should they accomplish this goal, it would mean one thing. That all a Negro criminal would need to do would be to pick out some innocent helpless white woman as a target to satisfy his ravishing sexual desires, keep his mouth shut, proclaim his innocence and let NAACP furnish the money and lawyers to beat the rap. Governor, at this time I have great confidence in you as a deep thinking man, I am praying that you will see fit to let the verdict of the Court stand and keep our great State safe for our fair womanhood. This obligation we owe to our children.” The sheriff’s argument might have persuaded Collins’s predecessors, Fuller Warren and Charley Johns, but the New South governor had no ear for still more racially motivated cries for blood and vengeance. Collins was persuaded more soundly by Bill Harris’s less biased report, which by the way showed Willis McCall’s fingerprints to be all over the Groveland Boys case. From the start, McCall