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

“without the formality of extradition proceedings.” They had no choice but to work to pay off their fines at whatever grove or camp they were taken to, and they often worked under the supervision of armed guards, as they might on a chain gang.
    In April 1945 six pickers accused the sheriff of brutality—McCall had gotten wind that they were attempting to organize citrus pickers to protest a mandatory seven-day workweek at A. S. Herlong & Company in Leesburg—so it didn’t take long for Sheriff McCall to come to the attention of the NAACP. Complaints mounted at the NAACP that McCall’s main function in law enforcement “appears to have been to dragoon the colored peons used in the county’s citrus fields and packing plants.” The NAACP, observing “a pattern of beating and abusing” on the part of the sheriff, contacted the U.S. Justice Department. The FBI was ordered to open a civil rights investigation. The federal field agents were stymied, however, when the pickers and their families suddenly began disappearing: fleeing Lake County for faraway states like Texas and Missouri, or, in the case of the Fryars, as far north as Harlem. (The Fryars managed to sell their chickens, but left behind all their possessions.) Local whites had made it clear that blacks could expect consequences and possible mob action if they stirred up trouble for the sheriff and the county by talking to J. Edgar Hoover’s men. Thus was Sheriff Willis McCall able to successfully dodge charges, as the FBI abandoned its investigation due to lack of evidence.
    Emboldened by the support he received from both the citrus growers and the whites in Lake County, McCall became more audacious in his arrests—audacious enough to make headlines in the winter of 1948. The local groves had slashed fruit-picking wages by 20 percent, an action that brought an out-of-town union organizer named Eric Axilrod from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to Mount Dora. At a public meeting Axilrod encouraged pickers to protest the wage cuts by staging an “Easter Holiday” strike in order to prevent “the return to eight cent boxes of fruit.” When McCall arrived on the scene with some of his deputies and spotted Axilrod’s “Don’t Starve Tired” circulars, he immediately handcuffed and arrested the organizer, then paraded him in front of more than one hundred men as a lesson to any pickers who might be considering joining a union. “Look at his wrists!” McCall bellowed before carting Axilrod and six pro-union workers off to jail, where they sat for days. The activist’s father posted a thousand-dollar bond, and on Axilrod’s release, McCall warned him and his “communist infiltrated groups” never to return to Lake County. Axilrod forfeited the bond and drove straight to Alabama, with McCall’s deputies tailing behind to make sure the union rabble-rouser left the state of Florida.
    I ’M WILLIS MCCALL and you’re a damn liar!”
    In 1948, thirty-four-year-old reporter Mabel Norris Reese hadn’t been in Lake County for very long when “this great big hulk of a man in a ten-gallon hat burst through the door.” She was still trying to understand the Jim Crow world that she found herself in after her husband, an Ohio newspaperman, purchased the Lake County weekly newspaper, the Mount Dora Topic , the year before. It wasn’t long, either, before Reese, as the Topic ’s editor, had her first run-in with Sheriff McCall. She’d written a story about McCall’s “political shenanigans” in his first term as sheriff, when he’d claimed to raid the warehouse of Lake County’s King of the Slots. As it turned out, the King had not been one of McCall’s backers, but rather a political opponent, who in fact had gotten out of the slots business by then. Nor had McCall smashed to pieces any pinball and slot machines, according to the King, whose garage was housing only machine parts he hadn’t disposed of yet. McCall, the King told Reese, had put on a show and tried—unsuccessfully—to pin a slot machine rap on him.
    Patiently producing her notes for the irate and intimidating sheriff, Reese showed him direct quotes by his accuser and explained that she was only reporting the words of others. McCall was not satisfied. He left the office in a huff, and at every store and office up and down the quaint, tree-lined business streets of Mount Dora, he stopped to recommend strongly that they not advertise in the Topic .
    For several