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

confess even to stop the beating. Individually, the three men’s stories were remarkably similar in their descriptions of their torturers and of the basement below the jail in Tavares. But, while Greenlee’s denial that he had ever seen Norma and Willie Padgett on the evening of July 15 was convincing enough, the account that the two army buddies related of their whereabouts that night was indeed problematic, as it included an encounter with the alleged victim and her husband.
    After assuring the three defendants that he would arrange for a physician’s visit so as to have a more complete, professional medical report on their injuries, Williams inquired if they had been offered or had sought legal counsel since their incarceration at Raiford two weeks earlier. Apparently, neither at the jail in Tavares nor in the state prison had any officer or official advised them of their right to be represented by a lawyer. The state attorney, Jesse Hunter, had brought Norma and Willie Padgett to Raiford so that the young couple could identify the three suspects, and before the indictment, when he had interviewed each of them, Hunter had asked only if they had lawyers. That both Irvin and Greenlee had replied, naively, that they didn’t need lawyers because they hadn’t done anything wrong—that it was merely a case of mistaken identity soon to be cleared up—left Williams incredulous. No less naive had been Shepherd’s response that he was a member of a church and “was going to tell the thing just like it happened.” The defendants’ naïveté aside, the oversight on the part of county and state officials bolstered Williams’s confidence that his report from the state prison would prompt the NAACP to commit more substantially to the Groveland case, especially since the hunting and gunning down of Ernest Thomas by a posse of more than a thousand armed men, many of them deputized, had already engaged Thurgood Marshall more actively in the fray.
    It was when the three prisoners stood up, as the lawyers were preparing for their departure, that Williams noticed, first, Irvin’s bare feet and then the bloodstains on the back of his pants, the same pants he’d been wearing the day he was beaten in the Tavares jail. “I have no shoes up here,” Irvin told Williams. “I only have my shirt and pants.”
    Williams and his team had begun the long drive back to Orlando and the attorney from the New York office of the NAACP was still shaken. Unsettled though he naturally was by the defendants’ revelations, the injustices they had already suffered, and the physical pain they had endured, it was a comment the sixteen-year-old Greenlee had made in his stuttery, backwoods accent that Williams couldn’t shake. The boy had implicitly articulated what every black male since the dawn of slavery in the South instinctively knew about race and sex. It could also explain Ernest Thomas’s bolting out of Lake County on the morning of July 16, 1949. On Greenlee’s first night in Groveland, when the deputies picked him up at the train depot and put him in jail, they had left him alone in a cell with a cot and without a lock. “Jesus,” Greenlee had said, remembering for Williams the night he’d lost his future. “If I, if I thought a white woman had been raped within a hundred miles of [Groveland] and Negroes were suspected, I would have opened the door and left.”

    W ILLIAMS’S STAY IN Orlando was proving to be fruitful. His investigation of the case against the Groveland Boys took him to Terence McCarthy, whose coverage of the story for the New Leader ,a leftist intellectual weekly newspaper “devoted to the Socialist and Labor movements,” had convinced him—as he would convince Williams—that the case had more to do with race and the citrus industry, with intimidation tactics and status, than it did with the alleged rape of Norma Padgett. Henry Shepherd, who had long suffered the ire of his white neighbors, and finally their torch-lit violence, agreed. “I been told by a lot of people it was nothing but jealousy and jealousy is what it was,” Shepherd told Williams. Shepherd also had a second theory, one that the World War II veteran Williams understood well: “Sammy is a good boy,” Shepherd said. “All the white people will say he was before he went to the army. Since he come back people didn’t like Sammy and the Irvin boy driving James’s car around. They didn’t like no veterans’ attitude.”
    Both Samuel