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

She released Willie, who was then shoved into their car.
    The three men drove to the Bond-Howell Lumber Company. There they picked up the boy’s father, James Howard, a company employee, and then drove the father and son down a red clay road in the woods. They stopped at an embankment on the Suwannee River. Inside the car, once the boy admitted that he’d written the letter to the girl, Goff and the two white men bound the fifteen-year-old’s hands and feet with rope. When James Howard tried to speak to his son, he was ordered, at gunpoint, to keep his mouth shut.
    The next order forced James Howard to remove his son from the car and stand him up several feet from the riverbank. With the boy in place, bound and now crying, Goff asked him if he understood “the penalty of his crime.”
    Willie sobbed. “Yes, sir.”
    By now, James Howard knew his boy would find no mercy in these woods, and finally permitted to speak, he said to his son, “Willie, I cannot do anything for you now. I’m glad I have belonged to the Church and prayed for you.”
    Goff allowed the boy a last request, and Willie asked his father to take his wallet from his pocket. The postmaster lifted his gun and forced the boy to choose between a bullet and the Suwannee. Bawling and terrified of the gun, Willie staggered backward and toppled over the rock’s edge, into the river, where the deep, dark water swallowed him.
    The three white men returned James Howard to the lumber company. In the Bond-Howell office Lula had been waiting, hysterical, for about an hour. Looking “terribly afraid of something,” James Howard told his wife, “Willie is not coming home.” He would say nothing more.
    Later that evening, Phil Goff and his two friends, along with James Howard, appeared before the Suwannee County sheriff to give an affidavit. The three white men claimed that they had taken Willie James from his home in order to have his father punish him for the offensive note he’d written to teenager Cynthia Goff. The three men had bound the boy’s hands and feet only to prevent him from trying to run from the whipping he deserved, but the boy had become hysterical. He’d refused to be humiliated by anyone, including his own father. He had stated he’d “rather die,” and with that he had jumped into the river and committed suicide. The three men entered their signatures on the affidavit, which James Howard was also required to sign so as to indicate that he agreed with the version of events therein. A second document stated that James Howard had recovered the body of his son and that he did not desire a coroner’s inquest.
    Three days later the Howards sold their house and moved to Orlando.
    The lynching of Willie James Howard soon came to the attention of Harry Tyson Moore, who had grown up just outside Live Oak and had attended school with Lula Howard. With two daughters, Peaches and Evangeline, close in age to Willie James, Moore was infuriated by the murder of a fifteen-year-old boy. On learning that James Howard was willing both to testify he had been threatened into signing the affidavit and to provide the true version of the events surrounding his son’s death, Moore, who was president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, contacted the national office. To Moore’s surprise, not only had the New York office already caught wind of the lynching but also Thurgood Marshall was already working on the case.
    Armed by Moore with an eyewitness to the lynching, Marshall wrote a letter to Governor Spessard Holland requesting an investigation. The governor assured Marshall that protection would be provided for James Howard during his testimony, in light of which Holland roundly condemned the murder but at the same time warned Marshall not to get his hopes up, stating, “I am sure you realize the particular difficulties involved where there will be testimony of three white men and probably the girl against the testimony of one negro man.”
    Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America’s international reputation: “the type of material that radio Tokio [ sic ] is constantly on the alert for and will use