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

the segregationist Millard Caldwell, who viewed the murder of blacks as a political nuisance, and once had his executive secretary request a local judge to launch an investigation because “[l]ynching of negroes is really beginning to give the Governor a terrific headache. . . . ”
    Fuller Warren had won the 1948 election by running as a moderate and promising to ease racial tension and violence in Florida. He’d denounced the Klansmen who paraded through Lake County on election night (with Sheriff Willis McCall following behind) as “hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks,” and Moore cautiously held out some hope for the new governor. Warren had admitted to being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but renouncing his past, like many a politician before and since, he’d stated that he had joined years before “as a favor to a friend” and that he “never wore a hood.” Moore did not adopt a wait-and-see approach with the new governor. On July 22, 1949, two days after his original telegram to Warren in regard to Willis McCall, Moore wired a second message to the governor, in which he used the sheriff’s own words to make his point. “Since mob leaders are known,” Moore wrote, “we again urge that they be arrested and vigorously prosecuted for the damage done to innocent Negro citizens. . . .”
    Moore’s telegram was intercepted by a staff person at Warren’s office. “Have written him enough,” the aide scratched across the top and filed the telegram away.

    W ITH HUNDREDS OF National Guardsmen camped around Stuckey Still, Mascotte, and Bay Lake, and with only one arrest (for public intoxication), Tuesday night had passed without incident. Convinced that speedy indictments of the three Negroes in custody would significantly curb the violence around Groveland, McCall and State Attorney Jesse Hunter had met with Judge Truman G. Futch on Wednesday, July 20, to expedite the formal charges against Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, and Charles Greenlee for the rape of Norma Padgett. By late afternoon the grand jury, which included the first black ever to so serve in Lake County, had been seated in the courtroom to consider the evidence. Norma Padgett told the court she’d been raped by four men. Willis McCall testified that he had confessions from three of them. By midnight, Hunter had his indictments.
    The only reporter present, Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic , who’d been invited by the state attorney, was impressed with the strength of the case against the accused. She had only praise for “sage and trial-trained Jesse Hunter” and Sheriff Willis McCall, who, she wrote, had “earned a badge of honor” for the way he conducted himself during Lake County’s “eye-blackening rape case.”
    Things were beginning to quiet down around Groveland. McCall could finally focus on hunting down the fourth rapist.
    F RANKLIN WILLIAMS HAD been following press reports of the violence in Groveland from the NAACP’s midtown Manhattan office, but with most of the staff counsel still in Los Angeles for the annual conference, he could do little more than gather information so he’d be prepared to answer any questions Thurgood Marshall might raise. Constance Baker Motley had already spoken with Sheriff Willis McCall about protecting blacks in Lake County from rioting whites; the conversation had not gone well. Harry T. Moore, down in Mims, had learned that Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee had been indicted for rape with a trial date set for Monday, August 29. That left barely a month to prepare for a capital case that would most likely sentence three men to the electric chair, and they didn’t even have legal representation yet. Moore had dispatched a young black lawyer from Tampa to Florida State Prison in Raiford for the purpose of taking down statements from Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee.
    Marshall returned to a New York office in chaos. The phones were ringing nonstop with calls from the Florida branches about the assaults upon the Negro communities in Lake County, as well as from NAACP members who had concerns about events at the annual convention in Los Angeles, where delegates had just passed a resolution to permit its board of directors to weed out known communists from local branches. Marshall had begun a tricky political dance with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. With Hoover’s agency being the key to the public’s perception of the Red Scare, Marshall was eager to demonstrate the NAACP’s