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

minutes, Warren notified the National Guard, informing commanders that following the rape of the Bay Lake girl, the “situation was getting out of hand” in Groveland.
    By 11 p.m. troops had arrived from the National Guard in Leesburg and Eustis. At McCall’s behest, they were dispatched to strategic locations in black sections of town, mostly for, as McCall told them, “psychological effect.” The commanding officer on the scene observed five hundred armed men in cars stalking the streets of Groveland, and Lieutenant James Herlong saw immediately that his twenty men were far outnumbered and stretched too thin over the potential areas of disturbance. He phoned the governor to request additional troops. By midnight, some seventy more guardsmen were spreading over the vacant lots and open fields around Stuckey Still.
    Around 1:30 a.m., McCall observed that the unwelcome cars in Groveland had begun to disperse—the local whites were returning to their homes in Bay Lake. The presence of the National Guard had gone a long way toward preventing any further mayhem, the sheriff was convinced, and once he was confident the threat had passed, McCall relieved both the Eustis and the Leesburg units from duty. At daylight, he and State Attorney Hunter met in the sheriff’s office with several reporters and a photographer from the Associated Press. Hunter and McCall had succeeded not only in maintaining law and order in Lake County, but also in averting a labor crisis in the citrus groves; they wore smiles of accomplishment. Outside the courthouse, however, some men from Bay Lake were again milling around in a restless manner, and the sheriff’s teeth gritted behind his smile. He still had work to do, as word had obviously made it out of Tavares that the third rapist was being held in the county jail. While the affable Jesse Hunter entertained the reporters, McCall slipped upstairs with his deputies Leroy Campbell and James Yates.
    The prisoners had just been served breakfast. Charles Greenlee, half dazed by the beating he’d endured at the hands of McCall’s deputies, was sitting in his cell. Crusted in dried blood, his shirtless body ached; his eye was swollen shut. He could barely crane his neck when he heard the familiar footsteps of Deputy Campbell. For the second time in twenty-four hours, the boy was told that he’d have to be moved to a more secure jail or else he’d be facing a lynching. He didn’t doubt it was true. The deputy took Charles upstairs, where, according to the plan devised by McCall, Campbell and Yates had the boy change into a prisoner’s work outfit before they took him downstairs to McCall. The sheriff shoved a scythe into the boy’s hands and told him to walk, “as if he was a trusty going out in the yard to cut grass,” all the way out to an unmarked blue 1948 Ford in the parking lot. Limping stiffly along, grimacing in pain, the glass cuts in the soles of his feet burning more with each step he took, he finally reached the patrol car. Campbell grabbed the scythe from the boy’s hand and told him to lie down out of sight on the floor. Campbell and Yates hopped in the front, and the three of them began the long ride to the state prison at Raiford.
    Later that day, McCall received a telephone call from the manager of a Leesburg radio station who wanted to confirm a news story before he put it on the air. McCall listened intently; the manager had been informed that one of the prisoners in the Lake County rape case had been seized from two deputies and lynched. The sheriff was shaken: Had a mob gotten to Greenlee? Had somebody gotten wind of the transfer and tipped off the Klan? Or had Campbell and Yates themselves? Immediately the sheriff called Raiford and learned that less than two hours after the deputies had left Tavares, Charles Greenlee had been safely delivered to the Florida State Prison, where he’d joined Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin behind bars. McCall’s sigh of relief was abbreviated by the noise of the crowd loitering outside the courthouse walls.
    The reporters had come to see the “High Sheriff” who had prevented a lynching just two nights before, and McCall was determined to convey the cool confidence of a man who had his county under control. The local papers had already reported that he had confessions from three of the rapists; that morning’s edition of the Ocala Star-Banner had run the front-page headline “Three Negroes Confess to Rape Near Groveland.”