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

Puryear, the mayor of Groveland, saw about fifty Bay Lake men standing outside the jail as he was driving by. Feeling uneasy and suspecting they “might cause some trouble,” he learned from a Lake County deputy that the crowd believed the jail was housing a Negro who had raped a Bay Lake girl the night before. Puryear and the deputy determined that the Negro should be moved from the rickety Groveland jail. They hustled the teen outside, past the gathering mob, and into the mayor’s car. Charles was transferred to Tavares without incident.
    At Tavares, Charles found himself in the bullpen, where he saw, among the prisoners, “two colored boys who were all beat up.” Their faces were swollen and bloody; they sat slumped in resignation; they said nothing. One of them, Charles noticed, “had a big hole knocked in the back of his head.” When the prisoners were served supper, the two beaten ones were removed from the cell. The taller of the two returned before Charles had finished his meal. He removed his shirt; bruises and welts covered his upper body.
    The turn in Charles’s fate was hard for him to fathom. He had never been in any serious trouble with the law. The day before, he and his friend Ernest had set out for Groveland, where they’d be sure to find decent jobs picking citrus. They’d even lined up a place to stay. Most important, Charles had traveled with the blessing of his parents, who hoped that by striking out on his own he’d have a chance for a fresh and optimistic start in a new town. When his father told him, “Go ahead and try,” Charles felt ready for an adventure. But not for this one.
    Night had fallen. Charles Greenlee had been in the supposedly more secure county jail in Tavares for about nine hours when the angry shouts of a much larger crowd had the prisoners on the top floor stirring. Unlike his fellow inmates, Charles had some idea why the mob had gathered, and he was scared for his life. He could hear some men moving from cell to cell. When they reached the bullpen, he immediately recognized Willie Padgett, the man who had talked to him earlier that day in Groveland. Padgett recognized Charles, too; just as he had told Norma, he now told her father that Greenlee wasn’t one of the boys.
    “That’s the boy they picked up in Groveland for carrying a gun,” Padgett said. Charles sighed in relief; he began to think this whole misunderstanding would be cleared up soon.
    Except that Leroy Campbell was eyeing him with suspicion and menace. The “stout white man dressed in a white shirt with bloody specks, felt hat, brown summer pants, revolver strapped to his hip, and a small brown badge on his belt” was one of the deputies who had grilled him in Groveland, and at Tavares he’d been conducting the two brutalized colored boys back and forth from the bullpen.
    After searching the basement and the other floors in the courthouse, the three Bay Lake men—Padgett, Tyson, and Cockcroft—were finally satisfied that Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin had been moved to Raiford, just as the sheriff had said. Still, they weren’t happy, and they left the building grumbling. The mob outside assured Coy Tyson that they’d take care of things their way if the law failed him and his daughter. Willis McCall urged them all to go home.
    “You’ve got families and responsibilities,” he told them. “I’m sure you have many things to do on a Saturday evening besides sit here and argue with me about some nigras. I’ve secured them, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got to follow the law. Now, you fellas give it up and go on about your business. Some of your wives are probably waiting supper, or they may be wantin’ for you to take ’em out to a movie or something.”
    Slowly, and to McCall’s great relief, the crowd began to disperse.
    By the end of the weekend, Sheriff Willis McCall would be proclaimed a hero in newspapers across the country for successfully preventing a lynching in Lake County. The Orlando Sunday Sentinel trumpeted McCall’s fortitude before the mob under the headline “Lake County Bride Kidnapped,” while a paper as far away as Eugene, Oregon, shouted, “Sheriff Staves Off Lynching.” Even the New York Times noted that the “fast talking” sheriff moved quickly to “disperse a mob of about 100 armed men who came to take two Negroes from his jail.” Th e Miami Herald praised McCall’s “steadfast courage,” but added, “the whole setting smells Ku