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

he had been nowhere near the spot where Thomas was killed, telling investigators, “I was across on the opposite side of the swamp when the shooting occurred.” He didn’t know who fired the fatal shots, he later told reporters, “but it was a bunch of good fellows.”
    Called as a witness before the inquest, Sheriff Simmie Moore stated that when he arrived at the scene, Thomas was already dead with a bullet hole in the back of the head, two bullet holes in his right temple, and bullet wounds in the forehead, “above the eyes.” Moore had laid down newspapers “because it was a little bloody” and covered Thomas with a cloth. The actual number of bullet wounds sustained by Ernest Thomas was never clearly established, although the Baltimore Afro-American estimated that “nearly 400 slugs” were found in the body. The coroner’s report found that “there were other holes in the body” and that Ernest had been “shot with buckshot, as well as with rifle or revolver bullets.”
    At the end of the testimony, Sheriff Moore was recalled as a witness in the Ernest Thomas inquest. Apparently Moore had been discomposed by the chronic amnesia that had plagued witnesses throughout the hearing, and he wanted something on the record to show which sheriffs were in the vicinity “when this negro was shot.” When asked, Moore replied, “Sheriff McCall of Lake County, and Sheriff Towles of Taylor County.”
    “How many deputy sheriffs were down in that area?” the state attorney then asked.
    “One,” Moore said.
    “Who was that?”
    “Sheriff McCall’s deputy.”
    Ormond Powers, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel , had been covering the Groveland story and he told Milton C. Thomas, a former editor from the newspaper, that he had become frustrated with what he perceived were “glaring flaws” in Willis McCall’s versions of events. To start, Powers had never seen any of the confessions McCall claimed to have obtained from the Groveland Boys. He just printed what the sheriff and his deputies told him, but he doubted the defendants had so freely admitted their guilt. Powers believed that reporters were “being told just the things they [law enforcement] wanted written” and that his own “probing questions were never welcomed.” The Sentinel reporter also suspected that Ernest Thomas’s involvement with bolita was the reason the young man had fled Lake County, not the fact that Norma Padgett claimed to have been raped. Powers had questions for Sheriff McCall about the specifics of Thomas’s resistance at the time the Groveland native was gunned down, and those questions “have never been answered.”
    The reporter had come to suspect that McCall was “desperate to seal Thomas’s lips” and that the reason for such an extensive manhunt “was for the purpose of shutting up Thomas permanently.” Officers in northern Florida, Powers believed, “could have taken Thomas,” but Powers suspected “a plot to GET Thomas—and they did. The ‘they’ in this case being organized gamblers.”
    The authorities, Powers said, viewed Thomas as a “definite threat to the established and entrenched gambling set-up in that section of Lake County,” and the posse was organized to make “absolutely sure Thomas had no chance to TALK.” The reporter also observed, “It seemed there was relief that Thomas was dead.” Finally, Ormond Powers told the editor that McCall “was present—and probably shooting—when Thomas was killed,” and that “this might have been cold-blooded murder.”

    T HE CORONER’S JURY found that Ernest Thomas had been “lawfully killed” and ruled his death a justifiable homicide. Two hundred miles to the south of Moseley Hall, many of Thomas’s neighbors found the evidence supporting the jury’s ruling to be suspect. One of Groveland’s white elected officials “broadly hinted” to a reporter that it was unlikely that Ernest Thomas had attempted to shoot his way out of the swamp, as “Thomas was a bright, well-dressed, college-educated man. He wasn’t a rough of any sort.” Beyond dispute, though, was the fact that the “Groveland Four,” as the newspapers referred to the Lake County rapists, were now the Groveland three.
    After the inquest, on the drive back to Bay Lake, Willis McCall asked Norma Padgett to hold out her hand. He’d retained a token from the crime scene: something to ease the pain of the seventeen-year-old farm girl. Norma extended her pale, white palm.