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

had wanted the four Groveland boys dead, and he had proved himself ready to execute them himself if the state of Florida hadn’t the stomach for it.
    Mabel Norris Reese had no stomach for it, or for the renegade sheriff of Lake County. Neither did Jesse Hunter any longer. Eventually in the matter of Groveland, and in the Platt case, both Reese and Hunter had stood up to McCall at the risk of their families and their property, as had Harry T. Moore, whose protests of injustice had cost him and his wife their lives. Like Collins himself, Reese and Hunter had been willfully blind to the issues of race in Florida, and Collins, like them, had “realized we had to change.”
    Governor Collins was close to his decision on the Irvin matter when, on September 21, 1955, a petition came across his desk. It came bound in a well-traveled book that apparently had made its way around Lake County about five years before, when a young woman had circulated it. A poet, an activist, a supporter of world peace, an opponent of capital punishment (and a private investigator with the Owens Detective Agency in Miami)—she’d roused some curiosity and no alarm. No one knew quite what to make of her, with her peace pin and her farm dresses. She was friendly enough, a harmless sort of girl and maybe a little naïve, and she seemed to know the Bible. She talked a lot about justice and the death penalty. She was collecting signatures in her book, “to abolish capital punishment.” She’d gotten hundreds of them—it wasn’t many, she knew—no matter that people like Willis McCall tried to shoo her away. Most people, though, listened to what she had to say. Simple people, hardworking farmers and housewives, they invited her into their weatherworn shacks scattered around the Bay Lake swampland; they offered her meals and a place to stay. They might feel strongly against the blacks, but they firmly believed, and said so, that capital punishment was wrong. God-fearing country Baptists, they knew that by their deeds and tenets they, too, would be judged someday. The girl believed that every signature was important, that each could make a difference, and that collectively the signatures could change a mind or bestow mercy or realize a truth that people had not yet dared to speak: the pen was a mighty instrument.
    The book lay open on the governor’s desk. It had come to Collins from the well-known Reverend Ben F. Wyland, the leader of a group of fifty churches in the state of Florida. Idly the governor flipped through the pages of the petition as he pondered whether to spare the life of Walter Irvin. A signature caught his eye. There, on the page before him, among the hundreds of Lake County residents declaring in the strokes of a pen their opposition to capital punishment, he read: “Norma Tyson Padgett.”

Epilogue

    (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)
    T HE STATE,” Governor LeRoy Collins said, “did not walk that extra mile—did not establish the guilt of Walter Lee Irvin in an absolute and conclusive manner.” Collins’s decision to commute Irvin’s sentence, he told reporters, had been weighted heavily by a letter from former state attorney Jesse Hunter, which had reinforced the governor’s own feelings about the case. He explained, “My conscience told me it was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried and now, on this bad performance, I was asked to take a man’s life. My conscience would not let me do it.” On the basis of Hunter’s letter and the findings in Bill Harris’s investigation, not to discount the presence of Norma Lee Padgett’s signature on a petition proposing the abolition of capital punishment, Collins had led the State Pardon Board to a unanimous approval of the Groveland boy’s “long-pending plea for clemency.”
    Probably in an effort to offset the inevitable political consequences of his decision, Collins, who had that week been featured on the cover of Time , also impugned the NAACP for its involvement in the case, which was “prompted by the bare fact that the defendant is a colored man rather than by careful evaluation of the circumstances of his guilt or innocence.” The censure infuriated Thurgood Marshall, however pleased he may have been by the action taken by the governor and the pardon board to end the long battle for Walter Irvin’s life. In response, Marshall declared that Collins’s commutation in fact vindicated the