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

optimistic about what had happened in Oklahoma. Every visit to a Jim Crow courtroom confirmed to him that the American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks—but he was seeing tiny cracks in the veneer. Guilty verdicts with recommendations of mercy instead of death sentences. Police officers indicted on brutality charges. Hope where there was none before. Criminal cases could affect people in unexpected ways. They raised awareness, increased NAACP membership, and if handled properly, they could bring in money. Lots of it. “I think we should aim at $10,000,” Marshall wrote to White. “We could use another good defense fund and this case has more appeal tha[n] any up to this time. The beating plus the use of bones of dead people will raise money.” Between the Spell case in Greenwich and Lyons in Oklahoma, Marshall was optimistic about the future. “The NAACP did all right this month. . . . We have been needing a good criminal case and we have it. Lets [ sic ] raise some real money.”

CHAPTER 5: TROUBLE FIXIN’ TO START

    The Southern Knights of the KKK, led by Bill Hendrix in 1949. ( Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida )
    N ORMA PADGETT DIDN’T make it home that night.
    The first glare of another warm July sun had just come up over the high and dry pastures of Okahumpka, Florida, when Clifton C. Twiss and his wife, Ethel, up early as usual, heard a car coming up the road. The motor shut off for a moment, then started back up again, and when they looked out the window they saw a thin girl walking away from a small, dark car toward the fork. Clifton picked up his binoculars to get a closer look and then passed them to his wife. The car, with a white man driving, sped away. Unusual thing to see this time of morning, they thought—young, blond girl dressed nicely, pacing back and forth along the newly paved road, a purse slung over her shoulder. They kept an eye on her, curious as to why this waifish teenage girl would be up at six o’clock on a Saturday morning out here in Okahumpka—a town that wasn’t much more than an intersection in Lake County. It was odd, they thought, but she didn’t appear to be in any trouble. The couple, seeing her dropped off by the side of the road, decided she must be hitchhiking or waiting for someone, so they went about their morning rituals, stirring their coffee and reading the morning paper, and occasionally glanced up the road at the girl in the pink dress with the purse.
    At about 6:45 a.m. nineteen-year-old Lawrence Burtoft, who was finishing his shift as watchman at his father’s Okahumpka restaurant, looked out the window and saw the girl standing by the crossroads of Leesburg and Center Hill. He didn’t know her by name, but he’d seen her in the restaurant before and knew that she was from Bay Lake, a small community of mostly dirt-poor farmers about twenty miles south, and he wondered what she was doing up here by the cattle pens in Okahumpka so early in the morning. She looked as if she was waiting for somebody. Burtoft got dressed and went outside to pick up the fresh bread that was dropped off each morning before daylight.
    “Good morning,” the girl said as Burtoft approached. After they’d exchanged greetings, she asked if anybody might be coming along who’d be able to take her back to Groveland. Burtoft told her no and offered her some water or a cup of coffee. She declined, but they went inside the restaurant anyway. Sitting across from Norma Lee at a table, Burtoft slowly sipped his coffee and tried to figure out, without prying, what had brought this girl out here to the middle of nowhere.
    After a few minutes of small talk, Norma indicated that there had been some trouble. She told Burtoft that she’d been out last night with her husband, Willie Padgett, and his car had broken down on the way toward Groveland. Some black men, she said, had come along in a car and pulled over, to see if she and Willie needed any help.
    Burtoft had just finished his coffee when the girl told him the black men had hit Willie over the head and carried her away in their car.
    Burtoft’s eyes studied the girl. “Did they hurt you?” he asked.
    “No,” she said, adding only that her feet hurt from walking such a long way.
    Burtoft noticed a tear in the girl’s dress; it had gotten caught on a barbed wire fence, she explained. Burtoft remarked nothing in the girl’s behavior to suggest that she’d been kidnapped by some black men a