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

would be standing among the ringleaders of the mob that burned the Shepherds’ house to the ground in Bay Lake.
    “They tried to make me say that I had been with the group of fellows that raped a white woman,” Shepherd said. “It was terrible the way I was whipped, there was just knots all over me. They said they were not going to stop whipping me until I said that I was the one. I kept telling them I was in Orlando where I was. Finally, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I said yes.” Shepherd said yes, he raped Norma Padgett, and the men dropped their hoses. Yates told Shepherd he could have “saved all the beating” if he had just said yes the first time they asked.
    Williams cataloged the still visible evidence of Shepherd’s injuries: scars on his head, broken teeth, tooth puncture of upper lip, lash scars across back and chest, scars on the wrists, which supported Shepherd’s claim that he had been cuffed to a metal pipe above his head. Irvin evidenced similar injuries: body scars, wide bruises, lash marks, scars across the wrists. Also, Williams noted, Irvin’s “right jaw appeared to be fractured.”
    After the beating Shepherd, too, was returned to the fourth floor of the jail, where, like Irvin, he was locked in a separate cell. Irvin, however, did not remain long. Again he was removed to the basement for a second round of beating by Campbell and Yates; for Irvin had not yet confessed. At the end of it “I was bleeding pretty bad,” Irvin told Williams, but to the end he had refused to admit to raping Norma Padgett. The deputies took him back to his cell; on the way up “one of them kicked me in the balls,” Irvin said.
    Around 6 p.m., Yates and Campbell informed the two exhausted, beaten black men that “a mob was on its way”; they were “lucky,” said the deputies, in that they were going to be taken away from the jail so they wouldn’t be killed. Handcuffed together, Shepherd and Irvin were led to a car and ordered to lie down in the backseat so as not to be seen. They could hear the chaos on the police radio, which relayed that colored people were being beaten and killed in the vicinity, while the black sedan made its way to a watermelon field in the woods. There the two prisoners were handcuffed with their arms wrapped around a small pine sapling. They’d expected to be doused in gasoline and set afire, but instead they simply waited. A young girl on horseback passed by; the deputies stayed by the sedan. After a half hour or so, Shepherd and Irvin were again stuffed into the back of the car, then driven to Eustis. The sedan had pulled into a driveway when they heard a voice shout, “Where are those niggers at?”
    The door on Shepherd’s side of the car was flung open, and immediately a tall man in a white Stetson was bashing the prisoner with a large, heavy flashlight and stomping him with his boots. Already displeased—the sheriff had just gotten home from Ohio only to find that all hell had broken loose in his county—McCall became only more provoked when Shepherd entreated him to stop: the sheriff started “really kicking him then.” With venom to spare, McCall went round to the other side of the sedan and with the flashlight gave Irvin a taste of it across his arms and legs. The deputies then resumed their journey with Shepherd and Irvin. In about two hours they arrived at Florida State Prison in Raiford.
    The third prisoner in the Groveland rape case, Charles Greenlee, did not escape a trip to the basement of the Tavares jail. He, too, had wounds to show. Because of his young age, Horace Hill’s wife, Dorothy, was asked to step out of the room while the lawyers examined the boy. Williams recorded that Greenlee’s left eye was “red and bruised”; his right cheekbone bore a double scar and he had “scars all around his neck”; also scarred was the groin area, and his testicles were still swollen; his feet had numerous cuts. The examination complete, Hill’s wife returned to take down the rest of Greenlee’s statement. When he had finished he said to Williams, “All of this is true. I know nothing about this rape. I don’t even know Samuel and Irvin.”
    The lawyers closed their notepads. What Williams had suspected had proved to be true: Sheriff Willis McCall and his deputies had tortured the three Groveland boys in order to secure the confessions that supported the sheriff’s boast to the press, no matter that one of them, Walter Irvin, had refused to