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

public school budgets and facilities—to demonstrate that “the law functioned to sustain white supremacy.”
    Harry Moore had been following events at the national office of the NAACP closely, and in 1937 he wrote a letter informing Walter White that the association’s Brevard County branch had hired a lawyer to file suit for equal pay for teachers in that county. When the letter landed on Marshall’s desk, the young lawyer could barely contain his excitement. It was exactly the type of case he and Houston were looking to pursue, and it appeared that Moore not only was fully committed to the lawsuit but also had already done much of the legwork. The letter occasioned the first of many meetings between Marshall and Moore over the next decade, some of them at Moore’s house in Mims. There Moore played host to Marshall (in part because the local hotels were closed to blacks) as they prepared the case against the Brevard County school board.Marshall said of Moore, in a letter to Walter White: “He seems to be a fine sort of fellow,” if “under tremendous pressure because of his actions in the teachers’ salary case.” Moore in many ways perfectly complemented the ebullient, self-assertive, larger-than-life New York lawyer Thurgood Marshall in that the erstwhile teacher was exactly the selfless, committed, and detail-oriented sort of person on whom the attorney depended. The two men thrived on their mutual respect. In time the school case in Brevard County would inspire similar lawsuits in counties across Florida, and Harry T. Moore would be the first to credit their success to Thurgood Marshall’s energy and dedication. “Thurgood was the savior,” said Dr. Gilbert Porter, Moore’s friend and colleague. “We never started winning any cases until he came. But after he won a few, all you had to say to a white superintendent, ‘Well, I’m gonna talk to Mr. Marshall,’ and they’d cooperate.”
    Marshall’s visits to Florida had an undeniable impact on Moore. With even more ardor he discharged the monotonous tasks at his local branch—collecting signatures, raising a few dollars here and there from the poorest blacks in the state—because he saw it did make a difference. He spent hours at night bludgeoning countless typewriter ribbons, writing letters to politicians and membership reports to the New York office, whose field administrators saw in Moore a valuable point man in a state with unlimited potential for growth. In the postwar decade Florida would also prove to be a state with a boundless capacity for racial inhumanity, even by measure of the rest of the South, and Marshall and Moore would find themselves challenging law enforcement officers and elected officials determined, without conscience, to whitewash some of the most horrific lynching cases of the twentieth century.
    From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana. But neither Marshall nor Moore needed statistics to know that by World War II, Florida still ranked high among the most violent states in the South. Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida history professor who studied racial violence in the South, concluded that “a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country.” Alarmingly, despite the shocking and heinous nature of the lynchings in Florida, the crimes and the cover-ups generated little attention, let alone outrage—beyond the black newspapers. The state of Florida—that tropical vacation territory lying south of Georgia and, it would seem, of the Jim Crow South—appeared to be immune to media scrutiny.

    H ARRY T. MOORE saw no hero in the newspaper accounts of Willis McCall’s stand against mob violence in Groveland following the supposed rape of Norma Padgett by four black men. To Moore, the devastation of the black homes and property occurred not in spite of the sheriff’s brave watch but because of his blind eye: it simply wasn’t plausible that McCall neither knew nor could discover the parties responsible for the rioting in Lake County. On Wednesday, July 20, 1949, Moore sent a telegram to Governor Fuller Warren urging “prosecution of mob leaders responsible for terrorism and vandalism against innocent Negro citizens of Lake County.”
    Warren at least seemed to be more sympathetic to the Negro cause than his predecessor,