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

officials with racial bias had been planning to run helpless blacks through their justice system to predetermined convictions, they were going to have to do so against attorneys with formidable backgrounds in both state and federal appeals. Furthermore, NAACP involvement in a criminal case guaranteed it attention in the national press, which would place the prosecuting state attorney Jesse Hunter in the spotlight of newspapers that, unlike Florida’s local ones, had no investment in maintaining racial tranquillity and the Jim Crow status quo. By then, at a press conference in New York, Franklin Williams would have already told national reporters that his investigation in Lake County had convinced him not only that the Groveland Boys were “entirely innocent” but also that the “trumped up rape charge” against them had less to do with the riots and destruction in Negro communities than did the resolve of the white mob’s ringleaders to intimidate blacks into accepting their designated place in the citrus groves.
    While Marshall and Williams attempted to put together a preliminary legal strategy, the New York office of the NAACP advised Harry T. Moore in Florida that the LDF would vigorously defend the three Groveland boys and requested that Moore rouse local public support for the case. Moore immediately sprang into action. He had already sent telegrams to Governor Warren on July 20 and 22 calling for punishment of the parties responsible for the rioting in Groveland, and now, in a letter to the governor on July 30, he demanded a special investigation and a special session of the grand jury “to indict the guilty mobsters.” Moore also had Sheriff McCall in his sights. While Moore had commended the sheriff for preventing a lynching on July 16, he had been critical of McCall as well, especially of the county lawman’s “lenient attitude toward the mob” in permitting certain of its ringleaders to search the jail for the suspects. Moore had inquired, too, if the sheriff, who’d claimed to have known or recognized all the armed men in the mob, planned to bring charges against those who did not have permits to carry weapons. Now that Moore had learned the defendants had been physically tortured, he composed a circular that he released to the press. It charged that the blacks indicted in the Groveland case had been “brutally beaten by local officers in an effort to force confessions from them” and it called upon Governor Warren to suspend the officers responsible.
    Sheriff McCall did not react kindly to Moore’s accusations. He had carefully crafted an image of himself for the press as an unimpeachable county official, a man “duty bound” to run the sheriff’s office by the rule of law, even if that included his standing up to an angry white mob in order to protect black rapists in his jail. Indeed, obsessed with his public image, McCall clipped every newspaper article that, favorably or not, mentioned his name, and he was quick to correct reporters on issues of fact as well as to dispute any negative statement or opinion written about him—on occasion in person, as he did when he stomped unannounced through Mabel Norris Reese’s door at the Mount Dora Topic and accused her of writing lies about him. When the Ocala Star-Banner reported Harry T. Moore’s charge that local officers had systematically beaten the suspects in the Groveland rape case in order to obtain the confessions McCall had been vaunting not three weeks before, the sheriff was apoplectic. “It’s a damn lie,” was his answer to the charge. “There’s absolutely no truth to it.”
    After the consultations with Marshall in New York, Williams returned to Florida and traveled again to Florida State Prison in Raiford, this time with a physician and a dentist, both black, in order to complete the medical report of the prisoners’ injuries. Dr. Nelson Spaulding did the driving, on a hot August day, in his yellow convertible, sporty but with no air-conditioning. When Williams suggested they might at least ride with the top down, the doctor explained that if the police in rural Florida spotted them, three “negroes in a yellow convertible Cadillac,” they could only expect trouble. With the top up, Spaulding said, the police “will not notice us.”
    The evidence, medical and otherwise, gathered by Williams was convincing. Due process in the case of the Groveland Boys had been violated; infractions of the law by law enforcement