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

if on cue, the rioters began threatening all the newsmen, telling them to get out of town and warning them not to print any lies about what was happening in Lake County.
    McCall urged Herlong to execute his order and withdraw his troops “down the road toward Leesburg and wait out of sight.” The sheriff, as agreed, pulled his deputies back; reporters tagged along for safety. Cockcroft stood glaring while the law and the Guard withdrew. Then he turned to his men. “Go and get more ammunition,” he barked, “and clear the streets of women and children.”
    The cattle trucks, again packed with armed men, started rolling away, with dozens of cars following behind. The National Guard and Lake County law did not pursue. In less than half an hour, driving along “miles of clay roads into the backwoods farmlands” of Bay Lake, the rioters were igniting bottles of gasoline and tossing them through the windows and onto the roofs of the Negroes’ deserted homes. By the time McCall and the journalists caught up with them, a church had been shot up and two houses were in flames. A third, the home of confessed rapist Samuel Shepherd, was smoldering—it had already burned to the ground. The Klan and the Bay Lake whites watched in indifference as the flames licked the pines and the heat exploded the crackling sap. A nine-year-old girl, “Little” Mary Hunter Valree, was separated from her family as she fled from the mob. Terrified by the angry shouts and explosions, she hid for hours, then fell asleep alone in the woods. (The missing Valree girl turned up the next afternoon when she returned to the site of her charred home to look for food.)
    At midnight, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Baya arrived in Bay Lake with more than two hundred National Guardsmen from Tampa. He immediately reported to McCall, who refused to identify any of the men involved in torching the Negroes’ homes, although “he knew all of the ringleaders who were responsible for the mob’s actions.” The sheriff allowed that many of the men were from Bay Lake and were related to either Norma Tyson or Willie Padgett, but he was unwilling to have any of them arrested or even brought in for a conference. McCall justified his refusal to identify or arrest Coy Tyson, Flowers Cockcroft, and fellow Klansmen like William Jackson Bogar as necessary steps in ensuring peace and preventing a full-blown race riot. Handled his way, McCall reasoned, the riders, by torching deserted houses in the Negro section of Bay Lake, were able to blow off steam without causing any bloodshed.
    Baya’s meeting with Flowers Cockcroft was no more satisfying. Cockcroft’s riders would take no further action against the blacks as long as the National Guard maintained its presence, but once it withdrew, they would resume until they accomplished their goal of “terrorizing the negroes” and driving out “five or six negroes whom they believed were undesirable.” Cockcroft added that he could not speak for any of the other “out of county” people who were pouring into Groveland by the carload, heavily armed. Nonetheless, the riot and its evident destruction of the Negroes’ homes, and especially the Shepherd property, seemed to have appeased Cockcroft’s mob for the time being, and by 1:30 a.m. Lake County had quieted down again.
    Cockcroft had advised his men that their work was done for the night, that they should return to their cars and disperse. Muttering darkly, he had given a glimpse of his true resolve to a lingering reporter.
    “The next time,” he said, “we’ll clean out every Negro section in south Lake County.”

    I N GROVELAND, L. D. Edge, Norton Wilkins, Mayor Puryear, and other prominent white citizens and business owners brooded over the terror unfolding in their community. Whatever racial views they held, they held them secondary to economic interests, and the shooting, razing, and torching of homes in black communities could have devastating economic consequences. Edge and Wilkins both owned businesses that relied heavily on black labor in a county where labor shortages were already a serious problem. Puryear, who owned a number of homes that he rented out in black neighborhoods, “had all of his life savings tied up” in the Negro economy.
    For these pillars of the white community, the situation in Groveland’s black enclaves was unfolding in a manner uncomfortably close to the events of the Rosewood Massacre in Levy County, Florida, twenty-six years