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

stop—that Tyson had to make it stop. They’d made their point, McCall told him—houses had been burned to the ground, property destroyed—but if they rode out looking for trouble again, McCall couldn’t guarantee he’d be able to keep them out of jail. He told Tyson he had three Negroes locked up at Raiford, and he and Jesse Hunter were going to see to it that all three boys were found guilty and sent to the electric chair for raping his daughter. He’d get the fourth one, too, McCall promised.
    Coy Tyson talked it over with some of the ringleaders. He reported to the sheriff that they “had agreed to stop any further violence.” With that news, McCall phoned Governor Fuller Warren. He convinced the governor that he had the situation in Groveland under control. But, he added, he’d like to keep the Guard around through the weekend, just to be safe.

CHAPTER 8: A CHRISTMAS CARD

    Sheriff McCall and Deputy Yates ( behind him ) confer with the National Guard in Groveland. ( Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images )
    Y OU CAN EITHER jump into the river, or take what is in this gun.”
    Standing at the rock’s edge, the white man held the pistol steady and waited for the boy to make his choice. James Howard, helpless, watched his sobbing fifteen-year-old son—hands and feet bound by rope—shuffle back off the edge of the embankment, watched him plunge into the cold, deep water of the Suwannee River, where he disappeared.
    The lynching of Willie James Howard in January 1944 occurred more than a decade before the fourteen-year-old black youth Emmett Till was beaten and shot, and his body then dumped in a river in Tallahatchie County in Mississippi for reportedly whistling flirtatiously at a young white woman. Tens of thousands of mourners viewed Till’s disfigured body in an open-casket funeral in Chicago, and the ensuing investigation and trial of two white men accused of the murder generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage and outrage that crossed racial lines. Both suspects were acquitted, and young Emmett Till became a civil rights martyr.
    By contrast, the killing of Willie James Howard barely attracted any attention inside or outside Florida, and presented Thurgood Marshall with one of his earliest introductions to violence and whitewashed investigations in Florida. In December 1943 Willie had a job sweeping floors at Van Priest’s Dime Store in the sleepy city of Live Oak. He was a precocious boy with a round face and a sweet singing voice, and his good-natured disposition had prompted his family to nickname him “Giddy Boy.” It also prompted Willie to present his coworkers at the dime store with Christmas cards.
    Among the recipients of Willie’s cards was a fifteen-year-old cashier at Van Priest’s named Cynthia Goff, a student at the town’s all-white high school. Offended by the black boy’s gesture, she reported it to her father, Phil Goff, a former member of the Florida House of Representatives and the postmaster in Live Oak. Willie, meanwhile, aware that he had displeased Cynthia, wrote her a note in which he attempted to explain himself. He gave Cynthia the note on New Year’s Day 1944. It read:
    Dear Fried:
    Just a few line to let you hear from me I am well an hope you are the same. this is what I said on that christmas card. From W.J.H. with L. I hope you will understand what I mean. that is what I said now please don’t get angry with me because you can never tell what may get in some body I did not put it in there my self. God did I can’t help what he does can I. I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you all we want to be your all friends but you want let us please don’t let anybody see this I hope I haven’t made you made if I did tell me about it an I will for get about it. I wish this was an northern state I guess you call me fresh. Write an tell me what you think of me good or bad.
    Sincerely yours, with,
    From. Y.K.W [you know who]
    For Cynthia Goff
    I love your name. I love your voice,
    For a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice.
    Willie Howard’s choice of Cynthia as his sweetheart incensed the Goff household. According to Lula Howard, the boy’s mother, on the morning of January 2, Phil Goff and two other white men arrived at the Howards’ house and asked for her son Willie. When the two men tried to drag Willie off the porch, Lula Howard struggled to hold on to her boy—until Goff pulled a gun on her.