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

Moore’s voter registration drive represented the single greatest threat to the citrus belt, to the Southern way of life, and to Willis V. McCall.
    It was no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan held five rallies in Lake County in the weeks leading up to Election Day to show their support for McCall as well as presidential candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was running as a member of the splinter group of segregationist Southern Democrats who became known in 1948 as the Dixiecrats. Clearly, any CIO-backed candidate for sheriff was going to have a tough time getting black voters to the polls. To make it tougher, on the eve of the election 250 hooded Klansman formed a motorcade that snaked its way through Lake County, “warning blacks not to vote if they valued their lives.” Trailing behind the motorcade in a big Oldsmobile, his trademark white Stetson visible to all, was the incumbent sheriff himself, “making no attempt to interfere” when the Klansmen stopped to burn a cross in front of a black juke joint in Leesburg. The evening ended in a field just north of Lake Okahumpka, with Klan speeches and a barbecue. It may as well have been a celebration of what would prove by a landslide to have been the inevitable—the reelection of Willis V. McCall. Thus began his most eventful term as sheriff of Lake County.

CHAPTER 7: WIPE THIS PLACE CLEAN

    State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and Deputy James Yates visit the remains of Henry Shepherd’s home. ( Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images )
    G ROVELAND WAS A ghost town.
    Mabel Norris Reese slammed down the phone and sped south to see for herself.
    “Everything was silent,” she observed. The reporter for the Mount Dora Topic had never seen anything like it. Blacks had simply vanished. She wasn’t there long when she heard the roar of the engines in the distance and experienced a “scary feeling” when a long line of cars rolled into town, and it was only as the noise grew louder that she began to get a glimpse of anyone. “People would rush inside and shut their doors, pull their blinds,” she said. Blacks ran for the woods “or streaked for miles into the groves.” Mabel tried to count the cars; there were more than two hundred vehicles, she observed, many with license plates from Polk and Orange counties. Her instincts told her to get home to Mount Dora to be with her husband and young daughter, but as a reporter, Mabel sensed trouble. She couldn’t leave.

    I NSTEAD OF DRIVING back home to Eustis after the Saturday night ruction of the Bay Lake men, Willis McCall commandeered a room at the Groveland Hotel in the event that they were planning another ride. The night, though, was mostly quiet, and the sheriff even managed to get a few hours of sleep in the old hotel on Cherry and Main streets. On Sunday morning he went with his deputies to survey Mascotte and Stuckey Still for damage, but apparently only Ethel Thomas’s bar, the Blue Flame, had been shot up. At mid-morning Groveland had the eerily quiet atmosphere of a town deserted, as if warnings of a landfall by a powerful hurricane from the Atlantic had driven the residents away. It was clear to McCall that a black exodus wouldn’t have occurred without good reason, and his instincts told him to hold on to his room key at the hotel—that more trouble might be yet to come. A few miles to the south, in the Bay Lake homes with telephone service, white farmers and their wives were spreading word to friends and relations that four Lake County Negroes had raped Coy Tyson’s seventeen-year-old daughter.
    McCall kept himself busy. Annoyed that Ernest Thomas had managed to skip town before he’d had a chance to talk to him, McCall telephoned the Gainesville Police Department and the sheriff of Alachua County to put them on the lookout for the young black man wanted for kidnapping and rape. He interviewed Norma and Willie Padgett to ascertain their version of events since Friday evening, and he concluded a meeting with State Attorney Jesse Hunter by assuring the prosecutor that he’d find more than sufficient evidence, beyond the accusations of the young Bay Lake couple, to show that a kidnapping and rape had occurred in Lake County. He’d already gotten confessions from the prisoners, and Deputy James Yates was collecting physical evidence including tire tracks and shoe prints from the crime scene; a physician in Leesburg had examined Norma. He’d bring