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

The sheriff plunked into it a .38-caliber slug that had recently been pumped into the black body of Ernest Thomas.

    I T DIDN’T TAKE much for Franklin Williams to convince Thurgood Marshall that events in Groveland resembled a Little Scottsboro and that NAACP counsel ought to intervene. On first hearing, the case for the most part fulfilled the three requirements Marshall had established to guide his staff. For one, the injustice stemmed from race. Second, while the innocence of Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee might be open to question, Marshall had argued enough cases to be suspicious of confessions obtained by law enforcement in Southern jails—especially if the crimes carried a death penalty. Lastly, the case obviously raised due process and equal protection issues.
    Williams presented a persuasive argument, but the New York office was shorthanded. With White, Wilkins, and Marshall’s assistant special counsel, Robert Carter, unavailable, options were limited. In 1949, Constance Baker Motley was still “learning to try cases,” under Marshall, and the prospect of dispatching her to Florida to try a criminal case did not appeal to Marshall. Nor could he enlist a more experienced attorney like William Hastie, the former dean of Howard University School of Law and cousin to Charles Hamilton Houston, as Hastie was still serving his term as governor of the Virgin Islands. (President Truman would soon appoint Hastie to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, thus making him the nation’s first black appellate judge.)
    In the end, Marshall assigned the case to Franklin Williams himself. Williams had argued Watts v. Indiana with Marshall before the Supreme Court a few months earlier—another instance when the NAACP was shorthanded—and the young lawyer effectively convinced the justices that a murder confession had been obtained involuntarily. So it was that Williams found himself on a plane to central Florida.
    The thirty-one-year-old assistant special counsel had been hired by the NAACP in 1945, when he’d impressed Walter White by passing the New York state bar examination before receiving his degree from Fordham University Law School. Williams, a native of Flushing, Queens, New York, and like Marshall, an alumnus of Lincoln University, had served in a segregated unit of the U.S. Army during World War II, his military experience being particularly useful to Marshall at a time when the NAACP was handling numerous cases in which black servicemen appeared to have been unjustly court-martialed. Like all counsel under Marshall, though, Williams had soon found himself working on briefs and appeals for cases involving school desegregation, restrictive covenants, and transportation. A 1946 case that had especially commanded Williams’s attention concerned a young former sergeant in the U.S. Army, Isaac Woodard, who had been maimed by police just hours after receiving his honorable discharge.
    On February 13, Woodard, in uniform, had boarded a Greyhound bus at Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, and was heading to South Carolina to pick up his wife so they could travel on to New York together to visit his parents. Not long into the trip he and the bus driver got into a dispute over Woodard’s need to use a drugstore bathroom during a stop. The argument was brief, but when the driver stopped again in Batesburg, South Carolina, Woodard was removed from the bus and taken to a nearby alley, where the policemen beat him with their nightsticks. They then arrested Woodard for disorderly conduct and threw him into a cell, where he was again drubbed with a nightstick, by the chief of police, Linwood Shull. When Woodard awoke the next morning, both eye sockets had been ruptured and his corneas irreparably damaged, but police denied him any medical attention for two days. Woodard had already been blinded for life when, two days after the beating, he was dropped off by police at a hospital in Aiken, South Carolina. The substandard medical care he received there resulted in amnesia, and it was several weeks before his relatives, who had reported the sergeant missing, were able to find him.
    While Williams was eager to take Woodard’s case, which certainly met Marshall’s guidelines, he knew that any investigation would be difficult given that his client was both blind and unable to remember many of the details of his ordeal. Eventually Williams managed to locate a student from the University of South Carolina who had