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

back down to that strange, lawless other land where people didn’t take kindly to niggers wearing suits and talking back to judges just like they were white men.

CHAPTER 10: QUITE A HOSE WIELDER

    Willie Padgett, Mabel Norris Reese, and Jesse Hunter. Life magazine photographer Wallace Kirkland protected Norma Padgett’s identity by hiding her behind Hunter. ( Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images )
    D ON’T WORRY, MAMA. I haven’t done anything.”
    Walter Irvin spoke calmly, then walked past his sobbing mother toward Deputy James Yates and the patrolmen who were waiting outside the house to take him and Samuel Shepherd away. He had only gotten a few steps from the front door when Willie Padgett darted from a black sedan and charged.
    “You little son of a bitch. You were there. You had better get my wife or I am going to kill you.”…
    Irvin, confused, told Padgett he didn’t know anything about his wife.
    “Yes you do,” Padgett fumed, and as he rushed toward Irvin, Deputy Yates and Deputy Leroy Campbell pulled the sputtering Bay Lake farmer away and sat him back in the car.
    The patrolmen ushered Shepherd and Irvin into the backseat of another car, and a caravan of squad cars sped its way through Groveland. Meanwhile, James Shepherd’s Mercury, which Samuel had been driving the night before, was confiscated by the police; Deputy Campbell had it taken to a filling station, where a search was begun on it for evidence. By then the caravan, which had been heading toward Mascotte, had turned onto a deserted clay road. Four or five miles got the patrol cars to a secluded spot. They stopped alongside the road.
    It was Yates who opened the door on Irvin’s side. “Get out of the car, boy,” he ordered, and Irvin did.
    “Why did you rape that white woman?” Yates demanded, but Irvin didn’t have a chance to answer. Yates smashed him across the forehead with a nightstick.
    Shepherd had watched his friend collapse on the road before he, too, was ordered out of the car. The patrolmen were standing in a semicircle before him. “Better talk,” Yates advised, and Shepherd replied that he didn’t know anything.
    At that the patrolmen converged on both Shepherd and Irvin, who had pulled himself up from the ground. With some patrolmen holding the two of them and others beating them with blackjacks and fists, Shepherd and Irvin ended up eventually on the roadbed. Curled up, they were kicked repeatedly, then dragged again to their feet.
    “Nigger, you the one that picked up this white girl last night?” someone asked.
    “What white girl?” Irvin replied before being struck again.
    “Well you might as well tell us you’re the one did it,” another one said, “ ’cause we gonna beat the hell out of you until you tell us you did do it.”
    Shepherd’s vision was blurring, and Irvin was drifting in and out of consciousness. As best they could, they denied having anything to do with the missing white girl.
    One of the patrolmen brought Willie Padgett over to the beaten men and asked if he was sure these two were “the right ones.” Padgett paused, grimacing at all the blood.
    “The hell with it,” the cop said, lifting his blackjack and bringing it down hard on skull and bone.

    W HEN FRANKLIN WILLIAMS arrived in Orlando, before he could even think about investigating the Groveland case he had to attend to the basics of housing and transportation. Blacks traveling by car commonly relied upon The Negro Motorist Green Book as a guide. The eighty-page booklet, published by Victor H. Green & Company in New York, under the sponsorship of Esso and the Ford Motor Company, listed by city and state the names and addresses of hotels, restaurants, taxi services, and gas stations that would accommodate blacks: thus it aimed to “solve your problems” if you happened to be traveling in unfamiliar territory, especially in Jim Crow states. The 1949 Green Book confirmed Williams’s suspicions. Not a single hotel in Lake County was open to blacks. Further, because he had been advised not to spend too much time near the courthouse in Tavares—Willis McCall country—especially after dark, Williams’s misgivings far exceeded the assurance of the Green Book ’s tagline, “Now We Can Travel Without Embarrassment.”
    Through the NAACP’s network of Florida branches, Williams lined up a room at an Orlando “tourist home,” akin to a black-run bed-and-breakfast. It was here that Williams met and