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

officers could be substantiated. Williams’s interviews thus far had produced sound testimony. But Marshall’s man in Orlando had yet to find an experienced lawyer willing to represent three black men accused of raping a white woman in Lake County. Shortly after Williams’s first trip to Raiford with Horace Hill and William Fordham, the latter had withdrawn from the case. Although Hill was more than willing to go forward, Williams still needed a seasoned attorney to navigate skillfully a case that would most likely rush the three defendants through a trial to conviction with a death sentence. The case was scheduled to go to trial at the end of August.
    In early August, Williams’s search for a local lawyer turned up a qualified CIO attorney, but he wanted ten thousand dollars to take the case—a figure well beyond the limited means of the NAACP. Next, a “very distinguished criminal lawyer in Daytona Beach” appeared to be willing to consider representation of the three defendants, until he learned the venue for the trial. Scared off, the white lawyer said to Williams, “You know, Franklin, those clay eating crackers down there in Lake County would just as soon stand off and shoot me with a high power rifle as they would you.” Another attorney agreed to take the case but refused to raise any technical issues. He stated that “he would not raise any issue of change of venue or jury selection or anything like that,” recalled Williams, who viewed all such issues as being essential to challenge, especially in the very likely event that they would be appealing a guilty verdict in a higher court.
    Spessard L. Holland Jr., the twenty-nine-year-old son of the former Florida governor and current U.S. senator, had caught the attention of the NAACP after he’d represented several black migrant workers who had been held in confinement and forced to work in the orange groves. He’d even filed charges with the Justice Department on behalf of the workers. In light of Holland’s apparent sympathies with civil rights cases, Williams thought the young white lawyer might be interested in representing the Groveland Boys. He was, and agreed to meet with Williams and Hill the next morning. When they arrived, as arranged, at Holland’s office in Vero Beach to discuss the case, the attorney had reconsidered.
    “I can’t do this, Frank,” he said, sitting down at his desk.
    “Why not?” Williams asked.
    Holland sat in silence, the two black men contemplating him from across his desk. Suddenly he dissolved into tears. Once he’d begun to compose himself, he struggled to explain. “You may not understand this, but my wife is a typical flower of southern womanhood and this is a rape case and I can’t take it.”
    There was nothing more to be said. Williams and Hill left Holland’s office for the long drive back to Orlando. If finding a black attorney with criminal trial experience in Florida had proved to be a futile task, that of finding a reputable white lawyer who was willing to risk his career in order to represent three black men accused of raping a white teenager was proving to be herculean.
    Days were slipping by. As Judge Truman Futch had already promised the citizens of Lake County a speedy trial, it was bootless to think he might delay the trial to allow a black New York lawyer more time to prepare a defense for three confessed rapists. In the South the bargain between justice and the public was implicit: an expeditious trial with swift punishment by death or else a riot and lynching. With less and less time for the daunting sum of it, Williams had to continue his investigation, locate and interview potential alibi witnesses, and sign on a top-notch criminal lawyer for the defense. Add to that the fact that the New York–based lawyer Williams had little stomach for his necessary, if infrequent, ventures into Lake County either alone or with Horace Hill. If the two attorneys had to speak with someone in the Groveland or Bay Lake area, they would sneak in and out of the county, for they had been duly warned about those trigger-happy, clay-eating crackers. “I was not completely at ease,” Williams later recalled. “We just did not tell anybody we were in town.”
    On one occasion, while preparing to make the dreaded journey from the rooming house in Orlando to Tavares in order to interview a woman who’d had a dispute with Sheriff McCall, Williams had an inspiration: he would ask Joe Louis, who was also in