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

houses in Groveland. In one of them “he looked into his crystal ball” for both local blacks and wealthy whites who came from miles away to pay for his clairvoyant services. The other house “was known to be the headquarters for bolita in South Lake county.” Business was so good that Valree “had recently bought himself a Cadillac.”
    Ernest Thomas, according to Carter, had worked out a “cozy arrangement” with Valree, who began sending business to him. But the new partnership didn’t sit well with the “well-entrenched local bolita hustler” in Groveland, Henry Singleton. In addition to running his own juke joint, Singleton had his hand in bootlegging and the numbers game, and “the law enforcement officers whom Singleton paid for protection” were not pleased with the new competition, Carter wrote. Ernest Thomas would not be allowed to come back into Lake County and take money out of their pockets. Not without a fight. “Things were coming to a head in the bolita war,” Carter wrote, when Singleton and Thomas ran into each other on the night of July 15 and quarreled on the streets of Groveland. “Thomas was feeling his oats and Singleton was resentful,” but Singleton had a powerful Lake County ally who had a definitive interest in the bolita dealer’s continuing prosperity. All Singleton would have to do was pick up the phone and call Willis McCall and let the sheriff know he was having some bolita trouble.
    Three nights after the alleged rape of Norma Padgett, a Bay Lake mob had torched both of George Valree’s homes to the ground. Ernest Thomas had already fled Groveland in fear for his life. And Henry Singleton no longer had to worry about the crystal-gazing seer or the cocky Ernest Thomas cutting into his bolita throws.

    B Y THE END of the week, the mobs having finally vacated the streets of Lake County, Willis McCall had released the National Guard: and with the three confessed rapists now indicted and secured at Raiford, the sheriff turned his mind to Ernest Thomas. A phone call to the Gainesville Police Department apprised the sheriff that Ernest had been seen in town recently with his wife, Ruby Lee. Promptly, with his deputy James Yates, McCall was heading up to Gainesville.
    Ruby Lee Thomas claimed she had not seen her husband since the day he had left for Groveland. “It was obvious she was lying,” McCall noted, and after spending the next day pursuing leads that went nowhere, he decided to further question Ruby Lee. As it happened, she was not home, and for the first and “only time in the whole investigation,” as McCall would later say, “I violated the law.” A letter in the Thomas mailbox caught his eye. It “was not sealed very well and came open with very little effort.” It was from Ernest Thomas. The letter told Ruby Lee where her husband would “be until things cooled off” and how she could reach him, under the assumed name of Willy Green, at an RFD mailing address with a box number in Shady Grove, which lay about two hours northwest of Gainesville, near the Georgia border. Thomas would be staying there, he said, “with some kin folks” deep in the swamps.
    The letter being a sure lead, McCall contacted Simmie Moore, the sheriff of Madison County, as well as the sheriffs in neighboring Lafayette and Taylor counties, and together they formulated a plan. Once McCall and Yates, who both had no jurisdiction beyond Lake County, had been deputized by local sheriffs, they set out on their manhunt along with several patrolmen from nearby Perry and Mayo. They’d narrowed Thomas’s whereabouts to a tenant house on a woodland farm near an old turpentine still, where they decided to lie low until their quarry had “settled down for the night”—they’d move in on Thomas when he was sleeping.
    They broke into the tenant house at three in the morning on July 25. They found Thomas’s clothes and a few personal effects, but not Thomas himself. He had switched to another house nearby, but he’d heard the lawmen’s commotion. Roused from his sleep, he had slipped out a window and made a dash for the woods. McCall admitted, “We had not cased the place as well as we would have liked.”
    The lawmen put in a call to the State Road Camp at Perry for bloodhounds. An hour later trucks arrived with men, dogs, and horses; by then Ernest Thomas had had a two-hour head start. The hounds picked up Thomas’s scent at the house where he’d slept, then led his pursuers