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

As the news had spread about the sheriff’s call upon the National Guard to quell a potential riot, journalists had begun descending on Lake County, pressing McCall with questions about reports of Klan activity around Groveland. McCall answered that he didn’t know much about the cars that had rolled into town from Orange and Polk counties; nor was he around when any KKK literature was distributed, he said.
    McCall was more interested in conveying the message that he had three rock-solid confessions, and that he would have four if he hadn’t been so busy trying to hold back the mob on Saturday; but for that, he would have apprehended Ernest Thomas by now. “There’ll be no lynching of Negroes in Lake County as long as I am sheriff,” McCall proclaimed. Indictments, he told reporters, would be coming down soon, and he wanted it to be known that the prisoners would be treated well and they’d receive a fair trial. “We’re not going to run anything over on them,” he said. Although he conceded that there might be more “demonstrations” over the next night or two, he wasn’t expecting any violence. McCall was telling the reporters, especially the Northern ones, exactly what they wanted to hear, and he was basking in the adulation.
    Willis McCall was also a man who did not shy away from speaking his mind, even with reporters. In fact, he divulged to them that he had received a call from a woman at, of all places, the New York office of the NAACP. (Most likely, it was from LDF attorney Constance Baker Motley, who would, a few years later, help write briefs for Thurgood Marshall for Brown v. Board of Education. ) She wanted to know what the sheriff’s department was doing to protect the black citizens of Groveland. “I told her we were looking after them all right,” McCall announced to reporters, “and I said we’d take care of half of those in Harlem if they wanted us to. Then I hung up.”

    A T SUNSET, ON Monday, July 18, a mob of more than one hundred men was spotted just a few miles north of Groveland. They’d set up a roadblock and were stopping cars, searching for blacks. Rumor reached McCall’s office that the “Ku Klux Klan was planning to wipe out the entire Negro community of Groveland.” The sheriff grabbed a handful of deputies and made a dash to Stuckey Still, where they waited with the National Guard, watching as cars loaded with whites circled the streets. Suddenly there was a volley of gunshots as riders began firing their guns indiscriminately into houses. Most of the black residents had already cleared out of the area, but some continued their nightly retreat into the swamps and woods, fearful of more violence. Joe Maxwell wasn’t one of them. He had stayed behind with his family, in the small house that he had built himself, determined to ride out the night. Maxwell had recently returned from military service; with a wife and three small children to provide for, he was planning on being in the groves the next morning, where it was entirely possible he’d be working for some of the same whites night-riding in that long line of cars menacing Stuckey Still. He could hear the roar of the motors, the ugly shouts of fired-up men.
    There were at least three cattle trucks packed full with men, all of them screaming and hollering, their guns poking out from the slotted sides. Behind them followed countless cars with long guns poking out the windows. Maxwell heard a frightening cry: “That’s old Joe Maxwell’s house over there!”
    Maxwell told his children to hide under the bed, and trying to keep them safe, he piled mattresses up around them. He “heard a window break and that’s when they shot in the house,” Maxwell later recalled. Shotgun fire pelleted a bag of crayons just inches above his six-year-old daughter’s bed. Glass shattered everywhere. The screams of Maxwell’s children inside counterpointed the horrific rebel yells from outside.
    McCall and his deputies sped toward the shooting. When someone warned, “You better not go down there, they’ll kill you,” he replied, “I don’t have any choice.”
    Shots were echoing nonstop in the dark, but the sheriff could make out the flickering figures of men running in the glare of headlights. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “Now they got me mad.”
    The sheriff jumped out of his car and fired a tear-gas canister into the crowd—to no effect; the mob just moved farther ahead. McCall reloaded the tear-gas gun and fired