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

night?” Yates asked Shepherd, and what began with that question led to the beatings he and Irvin endured on the deserted clay road outside of Groveland.
    “They must have beat us about a half hour,” Shepherd told the lawyers, who were at once riveted and appalled by his testimony. After the beating, he and Irvin were shoved back into the patrol car. Irvin’s shirt was drenched in blood, and when he reached his hand up to his head he felt “a big chunk knocked out of it.” A patrolman told them to scoot up to the edge of the seat so their blood wouldn’t drip onto the upholstery. As did Irvin, Shepherd opened his mouth to show Williams’s team his broken teeth and lifted his shirt to reveal still numerous bruises.
    Then Shepherd continued, telling the lawyers how Yates and Campbell in their black sedan led the caravan to the place where Padgett’s car had broken down on that Friday night after the dance. Ordered out of the car, Shepherd and Irvin stood beside Deputy Yates, who was trying to match their footprints to those in the sand and clay. After examining Shepherd’s shoes, which Shepherd avowed he’d worn the night before, Yates once more studied the ground, and declared, “These are not your tracks.” Similarly questioned, Irvin, who was still bleeding profusely from his head, admitted that he had in fact been wearing a different pair of shoes. Frustrated, Yates returned the men to the patrol car, which delivered them to the Tavares jail.
    They had been locked in a large cell with other inmates, who could plainly see that Irvin, sitting in a corner on the floor with his hand pressed against his head, was unable to stop his wound from bleeding. One of the prisoners remarked that it looked like the police had tried to kill them, but Irvin, understandably, was in no mood to talk. Hours had passed when Yates and Campbell showed up at the bullpen. The interrogation of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin was not over yet.
    “Nigger, you are gonna tell us the truth or we are gonna beat the hell out of you,” Campbell warned. “We will make you tell it.”
    They were in the bowels of the jail. Irvin surveyed the basement room; a number of pipes ran the length of the room, which housed “a lot of motors.” The deputies hoisted Irvin up; they cuffed his hands to an overhead pipe. As Irvin stood only five foot two, his feet did not reach the floor. Satisfied that Irvin was hanging securely, Yates and Campbell took turns beating him with a leaded rubber hose.
    “They hit me across my back, shoulders, head, arms and hindpart,” Irvin told Williams and the two young black lawyers, but neither Yates nor Campbell had any questions for him. Campbell just “kept on trying to get me to admit that I had raped some woman, which I would not admit because I did not know what they were talking about.”
    Tossing aside the rubber hose, Campbell pulled out his gun and taunted Irvin, saying “he would get a thrill out of blowing my brains out.” But instead he stepped aside for another man, who held Irvin up by the chin and with his fist made a punching bag of Irvin’s face. Then the man reared back and with his “high top boots,” Irvin said, he “kicked me in the privates.”
    They dumped Irvin in a cell. It was Shepherd’s turn next, and the deputies now led him down to the basement, where he, too, endured another brutal beating. “My mouth was bleeding where a front tooth went through my lip,” Shepherd recounted. “I have three teeth broken in the back of my mouth. Nobody at the prison camp has looked at it, though I asked to see the doctor when I first came here.”
    Williams wanted to know about another critical issue, the much-publicized confessions of the three defendants in the case. Shepherd said he had never signed anything, but the repeated beatings had wrenched an oral confession from him—particularly the blows delivered by the man in the high-topped riding boots, whom he recognized as Wesley Evans, a regular customer at the dairy in Groveland where Shepherd had once worked. Evans had asked for a few cracks at the prisoner, and with a hose he was so vengefully smashing Shepherd’s face and chest that Yates, deeming him “quite a hose wielder,” wondered if Evans might be related to Norma Padgett. Evans said no, he wasn’t related, but he did pause to allow that both Norma and Willie Padgett were “good friends,” before continuing to slash away at Shepherd. Two nights later, Wesley Evans