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

him in the stomach and he will die quickly,” he said.
    Charles Greenlee—one eye puffed shut, blood pouring down his face, broken glass imbedded in his feet—finally broke. He began sobbing like his tortured mother, who all summer long suffered the unbearable pain of losing her two daughters on the railroad tracks. Quivering between gasps for air, he begged Campbell not to kill him.
    Savoring the moment, the deputy took his time before he shoved the gun back into his holster. But Charles could not escape the menace in his gaze even as Hatcher uncuffed him from the pipe. His wrists burning and bloody, Charles was bending over to pull up his pants when a hard kick from behind knocked him to his knees. He fell forward and lay, a crumbled heap, in the dirt. That’s when he recognized one of the men in the shadows staring down at him. It was the Big Hat Man, Sheriff Willis McCall.
    Crowding around him now, the men led Charles to the elevator. McCall was all business. Like Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, the young boy from Santa Fe had confessed to raping a white woman—and he’d catch up with Ernest Thomas yet. Just as the elevator was about to ascend, Charles was treated to a hard kick “in the privates”; he doubled up on the floor, unable to move or breathe. The elevator rose to the fourth floor. Campbell dragged the boy to a cell and locked the confessed rapist in.
    W ILLIS V. MCCALL was Lake County born and bred, and like Charles Greenlee, he knew the anguish families endured after the death of children. His parents had seen a daughter and two sons die before Willis was born, and as a boy living at his father’s “heart yellow pine house,” he’d experienced the tragedy of his younger brother’s drowning in a nearby lake. The son of a dirt farmer, McCall had spent his “scratch-hard childhood” working long hours in the fields, plowing, and chopping and picking cotton, often barefoot. Those Bay Lake men riding through Groveland weren’t much different from his father, McCall knew, but he had also determined early on, perhaps because of a deep-set fear of poverty, that he wasn’t going to walk in his father’s shoes. For he also had smarts and ambition. By the age of twenty-one, he had not only acquired a wife—he’d married his girlfriend, Doris Daley, a local Umatilla girl—but also accumulated some cows, and he soon turned a small-time milking operation into the Bluebird Dairy, a business venture complete with state-of-the-art pasteurizing machinery, the first in Lake County.
    In the mid-1930s, at the age of twenty-six, McCall had sold his dairy and taken a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a fruit and vegetable inspector, in an industry that had been taking more than its share of lumps. Aside from countless bank failures at a time when citrus prices hit record lows during the Great Depression, central Florida was also devastated by hurricanes, a Mediterranean fruit fly outbreak, and the coldest winter freeze in the state’s history. Yet over the next nine years, McCall would witness a remarkable rebound in central Florida’s citrus industry—one that would enable the state to overtake California as the largest harvester of citrus, thanks to a series of government programs, contracts, and interventions.
    The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s work relief programs, built railways and highways in Florida that, once completed, made it easier and faster for growers to ship fruit to other parts of the country. Then, in 1945, the National Research Corporation developed a new method of concentrating orange juice and won a $750,000 government contract to prepare more nutritious and better-tasting food products for U.S. soldiers overseas. The company created the Florida Foods Corporation to fulfill the contract, but the war ended shortly thereafter, and the army canceled its order; so the corporation, its research and development completed, shifted its focus to the consumer market, setting up a new entity that would ultimately become Minute Maid Company. It wasn’t long before America’s freezers had the six-ounce tins that brought Florida orange juice to their kitchen tables just by adding water, and Willis McCall couldn’t drive anywhere in Lake County without passing a roadside sign that read “This Is a Minute Maid Grove.” That same year, too, the federal government allowed farmers to begin spraying crops with DDT; the toxic synthetic