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

nothing, a static hiss. Finally, with heavy clarity the words came.
    “A white housewife . . . raped by four negroes . . .”
    With his passengers sitting in stunned silence, Willis McCall’s ears pricked up. Black suspects were in custody, he was told, but a mob was forming in Groveland and there was a “pretty high feeling” around the county. McCall stared straight down the highway, one hand gripped tight on the wheel as he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. He knew Lake County better than anyone and he could sense the distress on the other end of the radio. Night was coming; he needed to get back fast. The sheriff had one more thought, which he was able to relay to the jailer.
    “Call Yates and tell him to get the Negroes out right away,” he said. “Hide them in the woods.”
    M CCALL HIGHTAILED IT to his split-level farmhouse in Eustis, threw the Oldsmobile into park, and began unloading luggage from his trunk to the garage. Night was falling, and he knew now that a large mob of heavily armed men was forming in Groveland, and another in Mascotte twenty-five miles to the south. A gang of blacks, he’d been told, had raped a young, white Lake County girl, and as the news quickly spread, cars were rapidly gathering. Vengeance charged the county air. McCall knew how it would end, unless Yates got the Negroes hidden in the woods. Say nothing more on the radio, McCall had told his deputies: men at the Leesburg station might be listening, and McCall wanted no chance of a tip-off that might lead to a roadblock or ambush. He needed to secure the suspects because in darkness, he knew these south Lake County men would head north to Tavares. He was sure of it. They’d storm the jail, and there’d be no stopping the lynching.
    The sheriff was hoisting his luggage from the trunk when two cars pulled up to his house. In the first car he could see Deputy Yates and another man, Captain Bill Allison, a warden of the prison camps in Tavares. Deputy Leroy Campbell pulled the second car in behind them. Joining the sheriff in front of the house, Yates told him the Negroes were lying down in the back of his car; he’d ordered them to keep their heads down, so no one had seen them as they drove through town. Yates added that they had confessed to raping Norma Padgett.
    Willis McCall was quiet. He walked toward the rear of Yates’s car. His wife, Doris, had stepped outside, and he could hear his sons, Malcolm and Donnie, laughing and playing inside—the two boys oblivious to their father’s mood and the deputies’ tension. McCall peered inside his deputy’s car. He could see two prisoners crumpled together on the floorboard, handcuffs joining their wrists. He opened the rear door and immediately recognized the faces of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, the two army veterans from Groveland who had been picked up by Lake County deputies early that morning. As the door swung open, the dazed prisoners could hear the echo of children’s laughter at the same time they caught a glimpse of the “Big Hat Man” who stared down at them. They were all of them in a world of trouble.
    W ITH SHEPHERD AND Irvin still slumped down on the floor in the back of the car, Yates and another deputy sped north toward Florida State Prison, in Raiford, some two hours away. McCall fired up his Olds and headed in the opposite direction, toward Groveland, where he aimed to quiet any mob he might encounter. He never made it. Just outside the city limits, he spotted a motorcade of twenty-five cars moving toward Tavares, their headlights blazing a path to the jail. McCall, certain they meant business, spun his car around. After following them for a few miles, he gunned the engine and, pulling ahead of the convoy, he took the lead into Tavares. He had his revolver at hand on the seat next to him.
    McCall parked the car and hurried to the back of the courthouse. He left his gun behind; with more than 125 men “armed to the gills” coming toward him, a revolver would be no deterrent. McCall recognized many in the mob as Bay Lake farmers, men he knew, and he knew a show of force was likely to provoke them into violence. If he was going to prevent a lynching, McCall was going to have to do it with his wits and personality.
    “Willis, we want them niggers.”
    Flowers Cockcroft, thirty-five, the “husky, brash” son of a Lake County watermelon farmer, stepped forward and spoke for the mob. The sheriff removed his hat and, attempting to