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

Shepherd and Walter Irvin had recently returned from military ser vice. As U.S. Army regulations allowed soldiers to continue to wear their military uniforms after completing their service, many black veterans did exactly that, perhaps to remind their communities that they, too, had defended their country. They had also been dispatched to foreign nations, particularly in Europe, where minorities experienced more tolerance and openness than they ever had in America, especially in the South. So, like many black veterans returning home to states in the South and the one south of the South, Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were not prepared to return to the fields or citrus groves of Lake County under the conditions defined by Jim Crow. White Southerners, meanwhile, may have been outraged by the reported egalitarian attitudes of Europeans toward Negroes, but they were flat-out enraged by stories from France of white women sleeping with American black men; they were thus determined to put returning black veterans back in their place. After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance. Fathers of black soldiers warned their sons not to come home in their uniforms because police had made a practice of searching and beating black military men. “If he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, they’d kill him,” one Mississippi man related.
    A veteran himself, and having worked extensively with the blinded veteran Isaac Woodard, Franklin Williams understood fully the antagonism blacks experienced in the United States on leaving military service. That veterans Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin had still been wearing their army uniforms around Groveland was bound to incense the whites of Lake County, Williams knew, and he was also not surprised to learn that Sheriff McCall had expected them to be picking fruit in the groves the way black men were supposed to, with poor pay for long hours of hard labor. Instead, Shepherd and Irvin were driving around town in a late-model Mercury as if the streets were theirs; to the whites, this was gallingly plain “arrogance.” Resentment was general and, according to Williams, that resentment among rural whites “had been communicated to them from the sheriff . . . from Willis McCall.” Henry Shepherd was more succinct. He said that to the whites around Groveland, his son was an “uppity Nigger.”
    The more Williams poked around the Groveland area, the more he considered the likelihood that the alleged rape had simply provided the Lake County Sheriff’s Department with an excuse to do some heavy housekeeping with regard to black troublemakers and potential instigators. “McCall knew exactly who he wanted to get,” Williams said. “He wanted to get Shepherd and Irvin. He wanted to get them.”
    I MMEDIATELY UPON HIS return to New York, Franklin Williams briefed Thurgood Marshall fully on the case of the Groveland Boys: how lucky they were to be alive after the beatings they’d endured; how, two weeks later, “blood was still in their hair and head and the soles of their feet were still cut”; how Shepherd and Greenlee had confessed—but only orally—in order to end their torture, whereas Irvin had not confessed either orally or in writing. None of it surprised Marshall, who had seen enough such cases to know that in the South coerced confessions were more the rule than the exception. Even President Truman’s 1946 Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights acknowledged as much, with J. Edgar Hoover testifying that “lawless police action” against blacks was so commonplace in the South that at one particular jail “it was seldom that a Negro man or woman was incarcerated who was not given a severe beating, which started off with a pistol whipping and ended with a rubber hose.”
    With one suspect dead under legally questionable circumstances and three others severely and lawlessly beaten, Marshall did not hesitate to ratchet up the commitment of the NAACP to the case. He told Williams to enlist the best local lawyer available to try the case, and he told the press, forcefully, “The resources of the association will be thrown behind the defense of these boys, and at the same time, we will insist upon protection of other Negroes in the area.” Marshall had served notice to the state of Florida. If local