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

eventually able to cultivate rich Florida soil. Before long he had good crops, hundreds of chickens, and a few cows, while his wife, Charlie Mae, had “the best preserve cellar in the area.” He also built a relatively modest six-room house on the property.
    Not by intent, Shepherd also drew the resentment that festered among the poor white farmers in Bay Lake. Neighbors tore down Shepherd’s fences, thus allowing cows to graze on his farm—and to destroy his crops just before harvest. Shepherd confronted them, but to no avail, and when it happened again he called upon Sheriff McCall to help him with the dispute. McCall merely confirmed what Shepherd already knew: “No nigger has any right to file a claim against a white man.”
    For want of any legal recourse, Charlie Mae tried appealing to civility. She suggested to Oscar Johns, whose cows had again ravaged Shepherd’s crop, that they might come to some sort of agreement regarding compensation for loss. Johns responded by cussing and threatening to kill her.
    The harassment continued. Fences were torn down and rebuilt, crops replanted. And the Shepherds refused to leave Bay Lake.
    Despite the setbacks, Henry Shepherd continued to prosper, in part because the older of his six children worked on the family farm rather than in the citrus groves: another irritant to many whites. So was Shepherd’s refusal to allow his teenage daughter, Henrietta, to do service in the home of a white neighbor who, Shepherd knew, had attempted to rape a prior teenage maid. When James Shepherd, the oldest son, found work as a mechanic and started driving a late-model Mercury around town, the Shepherds had become, in the eyes of local whites, “too damned independent”: an “uppity nigger” family with two cars outside their house.
    Envy of Shepherd’s prosperity and growing bargaining power intensified when Samuel, home from the army in 1949, did not return to the citrus groves but worked with his father instead. The sight of that “smart nigger” Samuel, still in his military uniform, driving around town in his brother’s Mercury, rankled whites. It was about time “that somebody put both Henry and Sammy in their places.”
    Terence McCarthy, a British economist and writer studying peonage in the South, arrived in Groveland in the aftermath of the rioting. On a tour of Stuckey Still and Bay Lake, his driver, a Klansman, pointed out the ashy remains of Henry Shepherd’s home. McCarthy noted “three twisted bed frames warped by the fire’s heat, a smashed camp cot, an upturned stove”; he could hardly believe anyone had ever lived there. Marauding neighbors had stolen Shepherd’s chickens and Charlie Mae’s preserves. When McCarthy asked why, his driver replied, “They should never let those niggers live here. We should keep ’em together where we can keep our eyes on ’em and not let ’em buy white man’s land.” McCarthy learned that whites in Groveland (who accounted for about 60 percent of the town’s population of one thousand) were tolerant of blacks, as long as they continued to work in white-owned citrus groves. “The Negroes do most of the work around here,” the Klansman told McCarthy. “It’s these nigger farmers—they’ve got to go.” Black farmers like Henry Shepherd and his family threatened, “by their example, the whole system of servitude and forced labor which is the base of the local economy,” McCarthy wrote. He noted that the whites he spoke with were less interested in seeking revenge for the rape of Norma Padgett than in seeing the demise of “all independent colored farmers.”

    A FEW OF HENRY Shepherd’s children, reluctant to leave the farmhouse undefended, had decided to stay in Bay Lake. Worried by the radio report of the riot, Shepherd went back to Groveland the next day to look for them. He arrived at his property and discovered that more than a thousand dollars in tools and equipment had been looted, as well as a hand drill press, a gristmill, and thousands of auto parts. He found his family; they were still hiding in the woods.
    And his son Sammy was locked up in jail, staring at a death sentence. No one in his family was safe. “I keep getting orders to stay away from Groveland,” Shepherd said. “They say the mob is after everyone in my family and that they was going to kill us.” Henry Shepherd knew he had to leave his farm, and he knew he could never return. As proud as he was of his house and the farm that