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

days following Axilrod’s release and banishment, McCall was apoplectic. The CIO, effectively barred from Lake County by the sheriff, hired pilots to buzz the citrus groves in small planes. From out of the sky, leaflets fluttered to earth. They accused McCall of running union organizers out of the county at gunpoint and resorting to “Hitler’s gestapo technique” by using the sheriff’s office to intimidate workers in order to drive them back to their “cut-rate jobs,” all in violation of the law.
    Mabel was at home when she received a tip that a black picker who had been spotted talking with a labor union representative had gotten into some trouble. On arriving at the black laborer’s house, she found him bandaged from head to foot. The beating, he told Mabel, had been executed by two of McCall’s deputies, one of them his right-hand man, James Yates. “Now let that be a lesson to you,” the picker had been warned. “Don’t talk to any of these organizers again.”
    That “lesson” was exactly the hard-line stance that whites in Lake County had come to expect from their sheriff, and the threat of a union-organized labor strike in the groves and packinghouses of Florida’s interior citrus belt during the height of the harvest season spelled bad news for any opponents hoping to unseat Sheriff Willis McCall. McCall had shown that he was, according to the CIO, willing to throw up a “big ‘red scare’ trying to hide the illegality and one-man campaign of intimidation,” and he was not afraid to play hardball with blacks, either. More worrisome to McCall were the sustained efforts on the part of the NAACP to unsettle his, and central Florida’s, political way of life. The Democratic Party had controlled Southern politics since Reconstruction, and most general elections were determined by the outcomes of Democratic primaries. For McCall, as for many sheriffs and politicians in the South, once they’d made it through the all-white primaries, Republicans usually did not have the numbers to challenge.
    In the landmark case Smith v. Allwright , Thurgood Marshall had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944 that it was unconstitutional for the state of Texas to ban blacks from voting in the Democratic Party’s primary. The Supreme Court agreed and overturned the party’s practice of all-white primaries, a ruling, Marshall noted, that was “a giant milestone in the progress of Negro Americans toward full citizenship.” He later assessed the Smith v. Allwright victory to be “the greatest one” of his career.
    When the Court’s decision was announced in June 1944, a raucous party broke out at Manhattan’s NAACP office. Phones were ringing off the hook, and the secretaries made a game of transferring the various, ceaseless press and congratulatory calls around the office in circles. Marshall cracked a bottle of bourbon with his staff—and managed to miss a call from Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy, who later told Marshall that “a guy had the right to get drunk at a time like that.”
    Attorney General Tom Clark made the victory even sweeter when he “told the other states they’d better fall in line or he’d whack them one.” It was indeed a watershed moment that, Marshall knew, would usher blacks closer toward full citizenship and enable them to vote in primaries everywhere once and for all. He knew, too, that the South would not acquiesce to the Court’s decision without a fight, as by reflex states erected legislative hurdles to slow the tides of change. Still, with blacks in Texas no longer prohibited by law from voting, a revolution in Southern politics had truly begun, as had the dismantling of white supremacy at the ballot box.
    Meanwhile, not far from Lake County, a quiet but relentless NAACP man was about to make Sheriff Willis McCall’s life difficult. A schoolteacher from Mims, Florida, Harry Tyson Moore had been closely following the Smith v. Allwright case because he himself had had the opportunity to work with Thurgood Marshall on an equal pay case in Brevard County a few years earlier. Not long after the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling, Moore and some of his NAACP associates organized the Progressive Voters League, which mounted an aggressive campaign to register blacks onto the voting rolls in Florida. By 1948, he had brought nearly seventy thousand new black Democratic voters into the system, and with Florida’s black population growing significantly every year,