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

befriended Joe Louis, who was visiting Orlando for a boxing exhibition. On learning of the Groveland case, Louis aided Williams in his work with some ready cash and subsequently donated five hundred dollars to the NAACP for the defense of the Groveland Boys. A picture of Louis and Williams appeared in the New York Post below the caption “Slugs for Equality,” for news of Ernest Thomas’s killing had made headlines in Northern newspapers, like that in the July 27 New York Times , which ran “Posse Kills Negro, Florida Fugitive; He Was Hunted in Groveland Rape Case.”
    In New York, too, Thurgood Marshall, after consulting with Williams in Florida, attached his notable name, for the first time publicly, to the Groveland case. He fired off a telegraphed request for a federal investigation to U.S. attorney general Tom Clark, stating, “This wanton killing by a deputized mob is worse than a lynching.” He followed with a protest to Governor Fuller Warren of Florida, charging, “There is serious doubt that the man killed was in any manner connected with the alleged rape.” The national press accounts of Marshall’s actions included his phrase “alleged rape,” which was another first, for until then, except for black newspapers, coverage of the events in Groveland had eschewed the word alleged in connection to the plight of Norma Padgett on the night of July 15.
    In Florida, in order to proceed with the investigation, and working with a limited NAACP budget, Williams had to retain a lawyer who was a member of the state’s bar: not any easy task, given that the state registered a total of less than two dozen black lawyers, with most of them practicing in Miami or the larger cities and none of them in Lake County or any county nearby. Williams nonetheless managed to find two young law school graduates—William Fordham from Tampa and Horace Hill, a Howard University Law School graduate, from Daytona Beach—who had been admitted to the Florida bar the year before. Of course, they had been reading the papers, too, and were not so sure they wanted to be involved in a Lake County rape case. Williams, though, could detect the excitement in twenty-four-year-old Hill at the prospect of working alongside an attorney from the national office of the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall’s legal defense team. Still, fully aware of the Lake County rioting, the renegade posse, and especially the vindictive Big Hat Man sheriff, Hill was reluctant. “My aunt wanted to know if I had lost my mind,” Hill recalled. “I even called my parents, and they wanted to know whether or not I was crazy, and they said how dangerous it was.”
    On Friday, July 29, the smooth-talking, persuasive Franklin Williams was driving north to the Florida State Prison in Raiford not only with his new recruit Horace Hill but also in Hill’s 1948 Chevrolet and with Hill’s wife, Dorothy, whom Williams had convinced to serve as their stenographer. And with William Fordham, too. By late afternoon they’d arrived at the prison farm known as “the Rock” and had settled in a room where they met the three defendants one by one. Although Fordham, who had previously been dispatched to Raiford by Harry T. Moore, had tried to prepare the New York attorney for the visit, Williams was profoundly shocked by his first sight of Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, and Charles Greenlee. It had been nearly two weeks since they had been transported to Raiford, but their faces and bodies still bore the effects of the beatings they’d suffered in Lake County. “Their heads were a mess” and caked with “encrusted dry blood,” Williams observed. “Their hair was a mess. It was shocking to me that in a state prison, they had not even been able to wash their hair.” Bruises, scars, and swellings were the badges of their brotherhood.
    Samuel Shepherd was the first to be interviewed. After taking the lawyers through events on the evening of July 15, when he and Walter Irvin had driven to Eatonville for a few beers, he described what happened the following morning. Samuel had just dropped off his sister-in-law at the beauty parlor in Groveland when he stopped by Walter Irvin’s house around 7 a.m. to see if his friend had gotten up on time for work. At the same moment, two Florida Highway Patrol cars and a third, black car pulled up in front of the house, and several white men emerged, among them the deputies Campbell and Yates. “Where is the guy that was with you last