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

meet their rage with a smile, talked fast and acknowledged as many of the men as he could by name. “I can’t let you people do this,” he said, looking toward Cockcroft. “You fellas elected me to uphold the law, and I’ve got to do it.”
    McCall was answered by men in the back of the mob hurling obscenities, but he dared not show any fear. He lowered his voice. “I may be in sympathy, and I know you’re stirred up about this thing,” he said. “You’ve got a right to be. But you don’t have a right to take the law into your own hands. These Negroes are going to be held and tried in court.”
    “Look, McCall,” one man shouted, “we’re going to fix them niggers right now or none of our women is gonna be safe.”
    Even as the sheriff continued to reason with them, he could sense they were determined in their purpose and he feared they might be on the verge of storming the jail. His reputation around Lake County might be enough to hold them off, but only if he changed his tactics. “The prisoners you want are no longer here,” McCall told them. “They’ve been taken elsewhere.”
    From the back, jeers and shouts of “Liar!” pierced the night. The mob thought McCall was bluffing; they demanded to be let into the jail. A few minutes of heated discussion later, McCall agreed to allow a small delegation inside to search the jail cells for two black prisoners. He pointed to two men at the front of the lynch mob; Willie Padgett and his father-in-law, Coy Tyson, stepped forward. Padgett would at least recognize the men who had beaten him and abducted Norma the night before, and Coy Tyson couldn’t wait to lay eyes on the men who’d raped his daughter. Flowers Cockcroft, the self-appointed spokesman of the mob, also joined them. McCall had negotiated an agreement, and Deputy Campbell led the three men into the courthouse while the sheriff and a few nervous deputies waited outside with the rest of the mob.
    I N HIS CELL on the top floor of the jailhouse, sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee was still trying to figure out what was happening to him. He had just arrived in town the night before from Gainesville, where he and his friend Ernest Thomas had been washing dishes and flipping burgers together at the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In. The twenty-five-year-old Ernest had been looking to come home to Groveland and he’d convinced his younger friend that plenty of orange-picking work awaited both of them in the groves of Lake County.
    At six feet tall, Charles looked older than his age, but he still had the wiry frame and the fears of a teenager. Leaving home hadn’t been easy for him. His close-knit family had endured a summer of unimaginable agony. In May, Charles’s four-year-old sister had been killed when she was struck by an Atlantic Coastline train passing on the tracks close by their home in Pine Top, near the Georgia border, in Baker County, Florida. His grief-stricken thirty-two-year-old mother, Emma, was already inconsolable when, in the cruelest of fates, just weeks later her two-year-old daughter was killed on the same tracks. The family had been irreparably damaged. Charles’s own grief had compelled him to leave.
    On the morning of July 15, in Zuber, Florida, Charles and Ernest had hitched a ride south on the back of a University of Florida truck. They’d caught a few more rides, and eventually some white men in a Dodge truck had dropped them off in Mascotte. They had walked the remaining couple of miles along the train tracks to Groveland. Both of them were filthy, and since their plan was for Charles to stay at the Thomas house, they decided he should wait in the train depot while Ernest picked up some clean clothes at the Thomases’ home for Charles to wear. He had been waiting about an hour and a half when Ernest returned in a 1941 Pontiac with two packages of cookies, a bag of peanuts, and a bottle of soda water, but no clean clothes. For those, Charles would have to wait a few more hours, until Ernest’s mother got home from her job running a beer joint in Groveland.
    The idea of loitering in the rail depot of an unfamiliar town at night, when he was all sweaty and caked in road dust, made Charles more than a little anxious. So, when he spotted a .45 Colt revolver with a four-inch barrel beside his friend on the front seat of the Pontiac, he asked, half jokingly, if Ernest would let him meanwhile hang on to the gun. To Charles’s surprise Ernest agreed. He handed over the gun, then