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

controversial, Marshall always worried over their potential to “crowd out other important work.” He had also learned, however, that headline-grabbing press coverage of the NAACP’s more salacious criminal cases produced an increase in both membership rolls and financial donations more immediately and more dramatically than the segregation cases that they’d labor on quietly for years. As special counsel, Marshall was the public face of the NAACP, and he too was capturing headlines. His presence inside and outside courtrooms around the country on behalf of defenseless blacks seeking justice had cemented his reputation as Mr. Civil Rights. He was collecting important victories before the Supreme Court, including Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), wherein the Court, siding unanimously with Marshall, ruled that the enforcement in a state court of a restrictive covenant that barred “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from owning property violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Marshall’s name was being splashed across the headlines of every major newspaper in America, and on radio broadcasts he was being hailed as “the Joe Louis of the courtroom.”
    On July 17, 1949, the day after Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin stopped to assist Willie and Norma Padgett on a lonely stretch of road just north of Groveland, Florida, Marshall was 2,500 miles away with Wilkins in Los Angeles, where the delegates to the NAACP Annual Convention were still buzzing about Walter White. Half of them, Wilkins noted, “wanted to lynch Walter for leaving Gladys, and the other half wanted to string him up for marrying a white woman.” The organization’s attempt at damage control on the West Coast required most of the executive staff and LDF lawyers, so the national office in New York was working with a skeleton crew. Marshall had left only one young lawyer behind at the home office, associate counsel Franklin Williams, in the event that any legal emergencies arose.

CHAPTER 6: A LITTLE BOLITA

    The Groveland Boys. From left to right: Sheriff Willis McCall, jailer Reuben Hatcher, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, and Samuel Shepherd. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    B Y THE HUNDREDS, blacks cleared out of Groveland on the backs of citrus trucks. Others took blankets, food, and water and fled with their children into the pine leaf forests, surer than rumor that the Ku Klux Klan would be coming from all directions to burn down Stuckey Still, the black enclave west of Groveland.
    Not satisfied that he had appeased the mob at the jail for the night, Sheriff McCall took some highway patrolmen down to Groveland, where he was troubled to see that the Bay Lake men hadn’t gone straight home to their wives and families as he’d suggested. Their numbers, in fact, were growing. The sheriff estimated that some 250 men had gathered in the streets, around their cars and trucks, and more vehicles were spilling into town by the minute, their horns blaring. The streets of Groveland were noisy with dangerous excitement. Two of the rapists may have made it to Raiford, but that didn’t mean the night was over.
    Ernest Thomas had seen the writing on the wall, what with Norma Padgett claiming she’d been raped by “four niggers” and his friend Charles Greenlee in jail, where a large crowd was aching for a lynching party. Ernest wanted out and hopped on a bus heading north that morning.
    Disappointed that they had left the Tavares jail empty-handed, Coy Tyson and Flowers Cockcroft made it clear to the “sullen, glint-eyed” mob that they still had some business to settle. And they’d settle some of it in Stuckey Still, an area just outside Groveland where blacks lived in wooden, weather-beaten shacks on small plots of land dotted with palm scrub and pines. By nightfall, however, most of the blacks had already evacuated.
    McCall was trailing cautiously behind a cluster of cars when a volley of shotgun blasts rang out. In a din the cars sped off in all directions and disappeared in clouds of dust. Stunned, the sheriff’s gaze followed the trajectory of the shots. It took him to their target: the Blue Flame, the juke joint owned by Ethel Thomas, Ernest’s mother. As he was assessing the damage to the cinder block shack—the windows had been blown out by “15 loads of buckshot”—McCall discovered one man inside: he’d been roused from his sleep but was