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

NAACP’s position that Irvin had been “the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.” Marshall also, in turn, reproached the governor, whose “every statement” regarding the NAACP had been “completely in error,” for following “the pattern of other southern officials in using the NAACP as the whipping boy for the repeated injustices against Negroes in the south.” Had the NAACP not intervened, Marshall asserted, all four Groveland boys would be dead, and Collins “would not have had to request the pardon board to commute Irvin’s sentence.” One thing Marshall had to concede, however, was that, as one newspaper stated, “it took far more political courage [for Collins] to spare the life of this Negro than it would have taken to let him go to the electric chair.”
    For Walter Irvin, the play of politics in the commutation was superseded by gratitude and relief, and hope. “I want you to know that, as long as I live I must, and I will, with all sincere, look to you as my earthly god,” Irvin wrote to Governor Collins. “Now that my health is failing, I do hope and pray that I will be able to go free someday because I feel, as I have, and I did for a lifetime, live a clean and law abiding life, Sir!”
    Lake County did not take the news of Irvin’s commutation well. Judge Truman Futch presided over a grand jury called to investigate the State Pardon Board’s action on the grounds that Collins had been influenced by “Communist pressure tactics.” The judge did allow, though, that the governor may have been “the innocent victim of a clever deception,” apparently implemented by a communist agent. For, Futch claimed, “startling documents”—like a petition protesting capital punishment, it would appear—had come into his possession to prove that “at least one person suspected of being a Communist agent had been sent into Lake County” and that efforts “to gather information on this case . . . have transgressed both the law of God and man.” Sheriff McCall enlisted two of the signatories to the petition, Norma Padgett and her aunt, to testify before the grand jury that any signature of theirs on any petition had to have been obtained by a “ruse,” as they had not knowingly ever signed any such document. The governor refused to testify. Being “accountable only to his conscience,” Collins stated that he would not participate in any secret grand jury proceedings, although he was perfectly willing, he said, to answer any questions “in the Cabinet room with the press and public present.”
    Truman Futch’s special and unprecedented grand jury investigation elicited negative editorial comment from Mabel Norris Reese in the Mount Dora Topic. Her protest won her, first, the load of dead fish that was dumped into her front yard. Second came the hand grenade that was tossed at her house; the explosion was heard five miles away, but fortunately neither she nor her family was home at the time. Sheriff McCall was “investigating.”
    In the end, the Lake County grand jury found that Collins and the State Pardon Board had acted within their legal rights to commute Irvin’s sentence. The jury did, however, rebuke the “smearing of the good people of Lake County and its law enforcement officers” by Tom Harris of the St. Petersburg Times as well as Reverend Ben F. Wyland’s “obtaining and circulating a petition seeking clemency for Irvin.” Wyland had also written to Collins, stating that both Norma and Willie had signed the petition at a time “when feelings ran high,” and emphasizing the “victim’s” compassion. “If this woman who suffered most could show mercy and forgive her enemies surely we could follow such a worthy example.”
    No fan of the governor, Sheriff McCall was not satisfied by the outcome of the grand jury’s investigation, not with his friend Fuller Warren planning another run at the governorship in the next election. So McCall hatched a plan to embarrass the sitting governor outside the grand jury room, and again he enlisted the aid of Norma Padgett. At a Washington’s Birthday parade in McCall’s hometown of Eustis, just as Collins was leaving the Grandview Hotel, two Lake County deputies escorted a “neatly dressed” and not so forgiving Norma Padgett over to him, and in front of hundreds of parade-goers, she accosted the governor, screaming, “You’re the one who let out the nigger that raped me! How would you have felt if that had been your