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

finally persuaded Marshall to travel to Washington to meet Hoover, and the director, in his turn, extended an olive branch of future cooperation. It didn’t take long for Marshall to win Hoover over “with his charming, good-ol-boy, ‘I’m a little ol’ Baltimore lawyer’ persona, which worked so well with southern sheriffs and politicians.” He made it clear to Hoover that the NAACP could help him avert criticism that the FBI was uninterested in race crimes, and Hoover recognized the value that an endorsement from someone of Marshall’s stature in the black community would have on the public’s perception of the bureau and, concomitantly, on the agency’s reputation. Marshall asked only that the FBI recommit itself in cases where the civil rights of blacks were clearly violated.
    By the time the Groveland case memos first crossed Hoover’s desk, the director was disposed to write, “Give this matter your full attention,” across the bottom, ordering a full investigation. Soon thereafter, FBI field office directors were reporting to Hoover that “Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP complimented the Bureau on its hard work in this case.” The two men appeared indeed to have reconciled their differences. The NAACP’s Jack Greenberg took a more cynical view. “The Association and Hoover were using each other,” he said.

CHAPTER 9: DON’T SHOOT, WHITE MAN

    Just days after the alleged rape, Florida newspapers were calling for capital punishment of the Groveland Boys. ( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records )
    B LOODHOUNDS HAD PICKED up the scent of Ernest Thomas. Willis McCall had led more than one thousand armed men into a cypress swamp in northern Florida where they had the fourth Groveland Boy trapped. Around dusk, one group of men on horseback spotted Ernest running across a field two hundred yards in the distance. When they yelled at him to stop, he only ran faster, and six to eight men, spurring their horses to full speed, started firing their guns, McCall noted, “like you see in a western movie.”

    E RNEST THOMAS NEVER made it back to the train depot in Groveland on the night of July 15. He’d left behind the mosquito-bitten sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee with a gun tucked into his pants, and then he’d as good as disappeared. He was nowhere to be found the following day. Something must have spooked him by the time the sun came up. He may have heard about Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin being picked up by Lake County deputies early that morning for the rape of a white woman, or heard about the mob gathering outside Groveland jail, where Charles Greenlee had landed in a cell. There was talk around town that Ernest had returned to Groveland with an eye to getting more involved in the bolita business—perhaps running it from his mother’s juke joint, the Blue Flame—and in that, he had maybe upset certain parties, Henry Singleton in particular. The owner of the only other alcohol-serving Negro juke joint in town, the Blue Moon, for years Singleton not only had run a lucrative bolita operation but also had managed to stay on the good side of Sheriff Willis McCall. Had Ernest Thomas and Henry Singleton perhaps faced off in a confrontation the night before? Might that have been why Ernest had thought it wise to leave Groveland the following morning on the first bus out of town?
    A picture began to emerge after Richard Carter, a reporter for the Daily Compass , a short-lived leftist newspaper in New York, arrived in Lake County to investigate. Carter had been reporting on the dockside rackets of New York’s waterfront when he turned his sights to Groveland. With a keen understanding of organized crime and its political and economic effects, Carter quickly focused on the bolita business in Lake County in an attempt to understand why Ernest Thomas might have fled Groveland on the morning of July 16.
    In the course of his investigation, Carter discovered that Ernest Thomas had been “peddling bolita ” in Gainesville for a man named Leroy McKinney, when the two men decided “that there was money to be made by paying odds higher than the traditional 70–1 on a winning bolita number.” By returning to Groveland, Carter learned, Ernest had hoped to expand his bolita business, but he would need a partner in Groveland, so he turned to George Valree, “a bearded, fantastic Negro, who had amassed a fortune in voodooism.” Valree owned two