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

pesticide, used during World War II to control typhus and malaria, proved to be extremely effective against citrus insects that had long menaced Florida orange groves.
    With Lake County on its way to becoming one of the richest counties in the nation, USDA inspector Willis McCall was able to foster relationships with the powerful citrus barons of central Florida. In the mid-1940s, the issue most crucial to citrus growers was labor. More groves were sprouting up everywhere in the region; the trees were healthier, the crops more bountiful. Business was good, especially for growers large enough to do their own packing, shipping, and processing. But profits depended on keeping the cost of labor down, because labor represented by far the largest proportion of costs. Since the 1920s, black migrant workers had been coming to Florida from two directions: Georgia to the north, and the Bahamas to the south. Poor whites, too, streamed south into Florida for seasonal jobs picking and packing in the citrus groves. As the industry began to lengthen the production period, however, migrants, both black and white, started settling in the area. Still, in the early to mid-1940s with the country at war, even the combination of an influx of workers and new settlements of permanent workers could not offset the chronic labor shortage in the area.
    Imposing, gruff, intelligent, and focused, Willis McCall, in his country boots and wide-brimmed Stetson, caught the eye of some local bankers and citrus barons as the kind of man who understood their needs as businessmen—a man with a “tough reputation in the groves.” Before the citrus boom, Lake County was rife with lumber mills and turpentine stills, where forced labor thrived and camps were often guarded at gunpoint to prevent workers from escaping. Camp bosses ruled with an iron fist. They were hard men who frequently resorted to beating workers to satisfy production demands, and despite a steady flow of European immigrants arriving in America in the early twentieth century, blacks were still the preferred workers. “No white people from any country . . . will . . . submit quietly to such treatment as the common Negro,” read an editorial in the Christmas 1904 edition of Southern Lumberman . Willis McCall was a throwback to the bygone days of Lake County.
    When the incumbent sheriff died in office in early 1944, McCall threw his hat into the ring with the backing of the county’s big citrus men and began campaigning. He was a natural. Quick-witted and folksy, with a big, round face, McCall was capable of showing extraordinary self-confidence as well as a self-effacing, aw-shucks modesty around voters. Even his opponents swore he could “charm a snake.” He branded himself “the People’s Candidate.” Smiling, with one of his meaty hands placed affectionately on a man’s shoulder while shaking hands with the other, he inspired trust and a feeling of safety. “People have confidence in me,” he said. “They know where I stand.”
    After knocking off five challengers in a primary, McCall won a tight race against interim sheriff and former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Emil Yde to become the new sheriff of Lake County in May 1944. One of his first moves as sheriff was a lightning-quick response to a newspaper allegation that McCall’s campaign had been financed by gambling interests and that McCall himself would prove to be a “sell-out in politics.” To prove the paper wrong, McCall raided a warehouse where he destroyed, he claimed, eighty-six slot and pinball machines belonging to his alleged financial backer, the county’s “King of Slots.” The Leesburg Commercial subsequently stepped back from its allegations, stating somewhat apologetically in an editorial, “It looks very much like we have a fine sheriff in Lake County.”
    Cleaning up the slots racket and sweeping punchboard lottery games out of Lake County’s taverns, however, were mostly symbolic gestures on McCall’s part, rather than demonstrations of a morally driven, sustained attack on illegal gambling. For the new sheriff was presiding over a county where bolita was king. A lottery game also known as Cuba, bolita (“little ball” in Spanish) employed one hundred Ping-Pong-type balls with numbers on them, which were tossed in a sack and then pulled out blindly, one by one, in a nightly or weekly “throw.” Players might bet as little as a nickel on their selected numbers, and the last numbered ball to