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

at a truck; this time the smoke cleared the crowd from the area. When the sheriff and his deputies made an attempt to follow the mob, the wind blew the tear gas back at them and they were temporarily incapacitated.
    By this time reporters had also made their way to the scene. The mob had parked along Route 50 to regroup and clear their eyes. Deputies Yates and Campbell and Lieutenant Herlong of the National Guard joined McCall, and together, with reporters in tow, they approached the mob. McCall recognized many in the crowd as the same Bay Lake men who had descended on the Lake County Court House two nights before, including Flowers Cockcroft, the man who had accompanied Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett up to the jail in their search for Shepherd and Irvin. Cockcroft, the proprietor of a general store and filling station in Mascotte, had sold out all of his ammunition earlier in the day; he was leading the mob.
    “You fellas don’t want to do this!” McCall shouted. “You’re breaking the law, and I want you to know I’ll arrest you. You got no business here. Go on home.”
    A voice pierced the darkness. “We wanna wipe this place clean of niggers!”
    The men were riled up, and McCall could sense that they were in no mood to abandon their plan as they had two nights ago at the jail and the night before when the National Guard had appeared. The men were shouting McCall down; his threats of arrest were making no impact on them. He tried one more time to appeal to reason, telling them that their families would suffer if they did anything rash. “Don’t go out there and do something you’re going to be sorry for.”
    But they didn’t retreat. Exasperated, McCall huddled with Herlong. The sheriff and the guardsman had to come up with a plan—fast. As McCall surveyed the crowd, among the unmasked faces he sighted many men he knew, some of them as law enforcement officers, like C. E. Sullins, the police chief in Clermont. Groveland’s Curtis Merritt was one of the leaders, as was Wesley Evans, the stout, illiterate citrus grove caretaker the sheriff himself had on occasion recruited: proficient with a leaded hose in his treatment of black pickers, Evans proved to be useful in helping the law obtain confessions from black suspects in the basement of the Lake County Court House. McCall also recognized Sumter County’s deputy sheriff, James Kimbrough—he’d be forced to resign when state patrolmen identified his car as the source of shots being fired at black residences—and Klansman William Jackson Bogar, who “was the chief of the Klokann Committee,” an investigative unit within the Klan. McCall had attended meetings with Bogar at the Apopka Klavern of the Association of Georgia Klans, where many central Florida law enforcement officials were initiated into the Ku Klux Klan. As one reporter noted, it was impossible “to tell where the mob left off and law enforcement began.”
    Mass arrests being out of the question, McCall and Herlong were considering a more prudent alternative when, behind them, one of the riders offered his solution to a guardsman. “Why don’t you take that peashooter and go home,” he said. “You look like a Boy Scout.” In reply, the guardsman popped several loud rounds from his M3 submachine gun into the ground and asked the rider if that sounded like a peashooter. The air was thick with smoke and tension.
    McCall and Herlong decided they’d best confer with the apparent leader of the riders, Flowers Cockcroft. After a few minutes of bargaining, the obdurate Cockcroft nodded, but his eyes hardened. Apparently he and McCall had struck a deal. Herlong ordered the guardsmen to withdraw.
    If the guardsmen were confused by Herlong’s order, reporters were more so, especially as the sheriff appeared to be unprepared to make any arrests. One writer from the Associated Press asked McCall for the names of the rioters. “I don’t know the names,” McCall replied. “I don’t know who they are.” Pressing McCall, the reporter asked why a mob firing weapons into homes of blacks in Stuckey Still warranted no arrests. McCall brushed him off.
    Word of the inquisitive reporter reached Cockcroft, who confronted the sheriff. “Where is that son of a bitch that wanted our names?” Cockcroft demanded. Knowing that “all hell would break loose” if he fingered the journalist, McCall merely shrugged. And Cockcroft fumed: “I’ll tell him my goddamn name and I’ll fix his ass, too.” As