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

the attorney a case rock-solid, McCall told Hunter, and he’d get Ernest Thomas.
    By mid-afternoon Groveland was getting unquiet. “Knots of men stood about on the main street, hard-eyed and watchful,” and McCall noticed that the automobiles—some parked, others cruising the streets—had come from neighboring counties, as well as from Georgia. It was common Klan practice to use outside Klaverns on “rides” or “jobs” in cars with the license plates intentionally obscured so that local riders could not be easily identified. At dusk, a twenty-car procession rolled into Groveland; flyers advertised the cause. Headlined “Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan,” they extolled the virtues of white supremacy under the logo of Dr. Samuel Green’s Association of Georgia Klans. An Atlanta obstetrician and Grand Dragon, Green boasted that the Klan was once again growing by “leaps and bounds” in its purpose to establish “a beachhead in Florida.” Outraged by President Truman’s espousal of civil rights legislation, Green had promised that any Yankee attempt to force equality between the races would oblige Americans to “see blood flow in these streets. The Klan will not permit the people of this country to become a mongrel race.”
    Willis McCall sensed events could easily escape his control. Hailed as a hero in the morning’s papers for preventing a lynching on the steps of the Tavares jail, the sheriff knew that he and his handful of deputies would be powerless should the four hundred to five hundred men now milling about in the business section of Groveland decide to make a second move on Stuckey Still. He knew, too, that in countless instances in the South angry mobs had pressured, sometimes at gunpoint, local sheriffs who were holding black men accused of raping white women to walk away from their jails. What usually followed were lynchings “at the hands of persons unknown.” (The NAACP defined “lynching” as an illegal killing by three or more persons claiming to be serving justice or tradition.) The case in Groveland was uncomfortably similar to events seventeen years earlier in Scottsboro, Alabama, when two white women accused nine black youths of rape and Sheriff M. L. Wann headed off a lynch mob outside the Scottsboro jail, declaring, “If you come in here I will blow your brains out,” before he called in the National Guard. In his stand against the KKK, Sheriff Wann may have been a hero to the North, but under mysterious circumstances he was also shot dead one year later by a white man who was never apprehended. Willis McCall realized fully how fine was the line he’d have to walk between the requirements of the law and the unspoken expectations of the Klan. For neither politicians nor the powerful citrus barons held sway over white mobs bent on vengeance in the matter of Negroes, the flower of Southern womanhood, and rape.
    A group of Lake County’s leading citizens met with McCall to voice their concern over developments in Groveland. Among them was Norton Wilkins, one of the owners of Groveland’s B&W Canning Company, the largest employer of any canning operation in the state. With more than five hundred plant workers, mostly women, who famously dressed in nurses’ uniforms, and countless more pickers in the groves, B&W was, in 1949, shipping a million cases of canned fruit and 250,000 boxes of fresh oranges and grapefruit annually. Wilkins was concerned that Klan violence would lead to a mass exodus of blacks, which would have a disastrous negative impact on production, and profits, at his plant. Also present was L. Day Edge, a wealthy businessman and former state senator with extensive real estate holdings in the county. His family had once owned a turpentine still, which stood on all the land that was now called Stuckey Still; when the still shut down, Edge gave the “colored people their homes and property for being so faithful in his service.” In attendance as well were Groveland’s mayor, Elma Puryear (who had on Saturday transported Charles Greenlee from Groveland to Tavares), and a few other prominent Lake County residents. Fearing that the gathering restive mob intended more damage than a few potshots at a black juke joint, they discussed a course of action for “protecting lives and property of persons in the colored section of Groveland.” They ultimately agreed that McCall should place a phone call to Florida’s governor, Fuller Warren, to request assistance. Within