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

solve the murder of Harry T. Moore. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to access FBI cases files, he hunted down witnesses, he continued to pressure Florida attorneys general and the state’s governors for action, and he lived to see the Moore case reopened three times: in 1978, 1991, and 2005. Stetson Kennedy died in Florida in 2011 at the age of ninety-four.

    I N THE EIGHT YEARS Charles Greenlee had been serving at Belle Glade State Prison Farm, he’d been a model inmate. He had worked his way off a chain gang and onto a road construction crew. He liked his new responsibilities; he enjoyed having more freedom. So much so that one day in 1957 he simply walked away from the work farm, and eighty miles to the north, in Fort Pierce, he found a job and in six weeks had settled into a “model life.” That’s when he was apprehended, and returned to Belle Glade. In July 1960 Greenlee was awarded parole. He married, raised a family, and built a successful heating and cooling maintenance business in Tennessee, where he lives today.
    Norma and Willie Padgett’s marriage did not last; they finalized their divorce in July 1958. Norma remarried, but is now a widow living in Georgia.
    Miss L. B. De Forest . . . vanished.
    In 1961 Jack Greenberg succeeded his mentor as the LDF’s director-counsel at the NAACP when President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Greenberg is the former dean of Columbia College and is currently the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York.
    Franklin Williams was appointed by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to assist Sargent Shriver in organizing the Peace Corps. President Lyndon Johnson later appointed him ambassador to Ghana, but not before first consulting his friend Thurgood Marshall. “I would put Frank there without any hesitation,” Marshall told the president. In 1985, Williams returned to Florida to give an interview on the Groveland Boys case for the University of Florida’s Oral History Project. When the talk turned to Sheriff Willis McCall, Williams bristled. “This man is a, is a vicious killer,” Williams stammered. “Is he still alive?” he asked, and was answered yes. “I would not doubt,” Williams averred, “if he knew I were here today speaking. I would not doubt that he would come and try to kill me. I do not want to cross him.” Franklin Williams died in New York in 1990.
    Mabel Norris Reese shared Williams’s opinions of Willis McCall. Her fears fueled by dead fish and hand grenades, she left Lake County shortly after Governor Collins commuted Walter Irvin’s sentence. She divorced and remarried, and Mabel Norris Chesley, who counted Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent black activists among her friends, committed herself as a reporter and columnist for the Daytona Beach Morning Journal to the advancement of the civil rights movement in Florida. She wrote regularly to Walter Irvin, and took occasion to visit him, throughout the years that he remained in prison at Raiford.
    January 1968 brought Walter Irvin his parole, with the stipulation that he not return to Lake County. Now forty, he had spent nearly half his life in prison. In Miami, where he lived with his sister Henrietta, he found work in construction, even with his impaired health, and tried to lead something like what people called a normal life. In February 1969, Irvin received permission from his parole officer to attend the funeral of an uncle in Lake County. He had been back in Willis McCall country for but a few hours when friends and relatives found him apparently sleeping in a car after the drive north; but he wasn’t sleeping. Walter Irvin was dead.
    Mabel Norris Chesley was suspicious. She did not doubt the depth of Willis McCall’s resolve to visit his county justice upon the Groveland boy, especially as he had failed to do so on that dark country road eighteen years before. The Lake County Sheriff’s Department report on Walter Irvin’s death stated that the forty-one-year-old black male had died of natural causes. A St. Petersburg Times reporter told Mabel that he had tried to speak to the doctor who’d pronounced Irvin dead. The doctor had hung up on him.

    E NCLOSED WITH THE letter to Justice Thurgood Marshall was the newspaper article by Mabel Norris Chesley on Walter Irvin’s death in Groveland, reportedly of natural causes. Marshall had by then been a sitting