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

effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war.” Claude Pepper refused to get involved.
    In Florida, Harry T. Moore continued to press for action, even though past experiences in lynching investigations had convinced him that it would be “a waste of time to seek help from state authorities.” On May 8, 1944, the state of Florida convened a grand jury in the death of Willie James Howard. Sheriff Tom Henry did not appear pleased that the boy’s father showed up to testify. Nonetheless, Howard’s testimony failed to return an indictment against Phil Goff and his two friends. Moore could have predicted it; the case would not even go to trial.
    Still, Moore refused to quit. Commenting upon the grand jury proceedings, he wrote to Marshall, “We are forced to wonder if the sheriff himself is not involved in this crime. It is very probable that he at least has tried to help cover up the facts in this case.” Nor was Marshall ready to give up on Willie Howard. He dispatched new affidavits to Attorney General of the United States Francis Biddle and requested a federal investigation. A few weeks later, Tom C. Clark, the assistant attorney general, replied that the Justice Department had begun a preliminary investigation into the boy’s death. Weeks turned into months, months into a year, and the Justice Department had not yet any progress to report. Moore could not hide his disappointment; in a letter to Clark he opined, “The life of a Negro in Suwannee County is a very cheap article.”
    The death of Willie James Howard was effectively shelved in 1945. Beyond the Justice Department, Moore and Marshall had nowhere to go. The process of the case, frustrating in the extreme from its deplorable beginning to its unjust end, was a repulsive reminder to Moore and Marshall of the ruthless measures men took to protect the flower that was “Southern white womanhood.” It was a lesson no doubt made more bitter that same year in the case of a Suwannee County constable who had forced a black man, again at gunpoint, to jump off a bridge to his death by drowning in the Suwannee River. Not surprisingly, a local grand jury refused to indict. In federal court, however, the constable was tried—and convicted, but not of murder. The sentence—for civil rights violations—did not satisfy Harry T. Moore: “Thus a man gets off with only a year in jail and a fine of $1,000 for committing first degree murder. So long as these conditions exist in America, our democracy is little more than ‘sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”
    Moore’s tireless work did not go unnoticed by the national office of the NAACP in New York. “Your letters on lynching and mob violence in which you point out cases within your own state are excellent and help us focus the attention on the need for Federal legislation,” wrote Gloster B. Current, director of branches. Current, like Marshall, knew that the state of Florida, despite recording a higher number of lynchings and registering more members of the Ku Klux Klan than any other state in the South, inexplicably remained in the shadows of Dixieland in the 1940s. Florida was epithetically “south of the South,” and racial incidents that would have likely attracted national attention had they occurred in Mississippi or Alabama somehow managed to escape scrutiny because they’d taken place in the forgotten land of sun and surf. The postwar years would find Moore involving himself in more and more criminal cases, including the (often confessed) rapes of black teenage schoolgirls and maids by whites who’d be sprung from jails not by angry lynch mobs but by family members posting bail. Without Moore’s voice, his agitating letters, and his telegrams of protest, the all-too-frequent atrocities committed in his backyard would have been that much easier to conceal or ignore.
    He would raise that voice, too, when another Florida sheriff demonstrated his contempt for the civil rights of blacks and justice for all, in Groveland in 1949.

    S EVENTY-FIVE MILES TO the east, in the small town of Mims, just off the Atlantic Ocean, Moore had been following the events in Lake County with much distress but little surprise. As the NAACP’s executive secretary in Florida, he’d been traveling the state for more than a decade: holding meetings, raising money, investigating lynchings and incidents of police