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

earlier. With law enforcement in Rosewood complicit in the rioting, white owners of turpentine and lumber mills, whose businesses would be devastated by a black exodus, appealed to the governor for help. The sheriff, however, insisted that it was unnecessary to call in the National Guard, as he had the situation under control. Any control he may have had, though, he lost when hundreds of unmasked Klansmen joined local whites in driving out black residents by gun and torch. The vigilantes destroyed every Negro home in Rosewood.
    The trouble that began in Rosewood in January 1923 bore eerie similarity to what occurred on Friday night in July just outside Okahumpka after Willie Padgett left the dance hall with his seventeen-year-old estranged wife. In Rosewood, neighbors discovered twenty-two-year-old Fannie Taylor bruised and beaten in her own home one morning; she’d claimed that a black man had forcibly entered her home and assaulted her. Coupled to the rumors that the white girl had also been raped was the dubious report that an escaped prisoner was hiding in the same area. Both stories spread like wildfire throughout Levy County, and a mob of hundreds gathered. Torching homes, the mob sent blacks fleeing into the swamps. The violence escalated when blacks attempting to defend their homes fired back at the mob. Churches were burned. A white turpentine mill owner, W. H. Pillsbury, helped blacks escape the area—he even hid a black man in his home—at the same time that he pleaded with whites to cease the riot. Unfortunately, rioters learned that Pillsbury was harboring a Negro. They made the black man dig a grave; then they shot him dead. One woman was shot in the face while hiding under her house; Fannie Taylor’s brother-in-law took credit for her death. An undetermined number of blacks were killed in the rioting, but no escaped convict was ever found. Nor was it ever proved that a rape, or even an assault, had occurred. In a forced migration, the blacks who survived the massacre moved on, never to return, and the white businesses that depended on their labor or patronage suffered tremendous losses.
    Twenty-six years later and a little more than one hundred miles to the south, L. D. Edge and Norton Wilkins and their cohort of wealthy business owners wanted no repeat of Rosewood in Groveland.
    T HEY TELL ME my chickens and ducks are all gone,” Henry Shepherd said.
    The father of Samuel Shepherd had holed up with his family at a daughter’s home in Orlando and was listening to the radio when he learned that his house had been burned to the ground during the violence in Groveland the night before.
    Not long ago Shepherd had been a proud, successful farmer. He had raised a large family and dramatically improved its economic lot by rising from tenant farmer to landowner, but events over the last few years had left him broken and despondent: a “ravaged ghost” of a man, who was often heard to mumble that he wanted “no more trouble.” Henry Shepherd was convinced that the previous night’s terror in Groveland was more about him than about his son Samuel’s alleged rape of Norma Padgett. His own neighbors, he later learned, were the very men who’d thrown lit kerosene-filled bottles through his windows.
    To Henry Shepherd, a lifetime picking fruit in groves owned by wealthy whites in Groveland did not seem like much of a future. Though forced labor and peonage conditions continued in Lake County, there had also been a movement toward “Negro self-emancipation” over the last several years. Some blacks had purchased swampland around Bay Lake as cheaply as eight dollars an acre, and in their spare time drained the swamps and cleared the land to create sustaining farms. Once the land was drained, the surrounding acreage was automatically relieved of water, and white farmers bought up the adjacent land at bargain prices. The unintended consequence of the wasteland drainings was a breakdown in segregation in Bay Lake. As a result, Henry Shepherd’s northernmost land bordered the Padgett farm. The two families were no strangers to each other.
    Determined to escape the backbreaking work in the groves, Shepherd lived thriftily and augmented whatever meager savings he could muster from tenant farming with Samuel’s army allotments. In 1943, for $255, he purchased fifty-five acres of swampland in Bay Lake. Working tirelessly to drain the swamp, not to mention enduring countless snakebites on his legs, he was