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

residence, to accompany him. For surely the presence of the world heavyweight boxing champion “would give me some unusual kind of protection,” Williams figured, and noted: “Joe would not go.”

    O N AUGUST 5, at a Federal Housing Authority conference in Washington, D.C., Thurgood Marshall argued that, despite his victory in Shelley v. Kraemer , the war to end legalized housing discrimination against blacks went on, and he sharply criticized the FHA “for failing to follow through on the implications” of the Supreme Court’s decision. He was not of a mind to be his most patient self when he addressed the conference, as was noted afterward by one NAACP associate, who remarked to Marshall, “You were in rare form last Friday and handed out liberal education all over the place.” (During the address, a slightly annoyed government lawyer passed a note to the same NAACP associate that read, “Who’s that guy?” Barely had the associate uttered the second syllable of Marshall’s first name than the lawyer responded with an “Oh!” and then “closed up like a tongue-tied clam.”)
    While in Washington, Marshall also pressed the Justice Department and the FBI to initiate a civil rights and domestic violence investigation into the beatings of the three surviving Groveland boys. Marshall by then had been unable to gain support in Washington for a full investigation into the killing of Ernest Thomas; the FBI had conducted a preliminary investigation but concluded “it would appear undesirable to become involved in the killing of Victim Ernest Thomas as there is no indication, with the exception of the statement by Thurgood Marshall, that there was serious doubt that Thomas was involved in the rape. On the other hand, the state has apparently produced evidence to indicate that he was involved in the rape.” More successfully, Marshall convinced the Justice Department that the beatings had seriously violated the Groveland Boys’ rights.
    Within two days the FBI had dispatched Special Agents John L. Quigley and Tobias E. Matthews to the Raiford prison, where they interviewed and photographed Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee. Their initial reports back to headquarters prompted J. Edgar Hoover to order a “full and exhaustive investigation into the entire matter of the arrest and mistreatment by the authorities of all the victims.” The agents meanwhile continued downstate. They interviewed residents of Lake County by the dozens; they took down statements from witnesses, law enforcement officials, victims of the mob violence, and even Norma and Willie Padgett. In the course of their investigation, Quigley and Matthews began to notice some disturbing elements. For one, “all of the persons interviewed who were allegedly implicated” in the beating and torture of the three Groveland boys “refused to furnish any information whatsoever unless they made it in statement form,” thus indicating that Sheriff Willis McCall, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell, and Wesley Evans—the four suspects positively identified by Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee—had all received legal advice not to provide complete cooperation with the FBI’s investigation.
    Not surprisingly, the statements of McCall, Yates, Campbell, and Evans, though totally consistent with one another, differed dramatically from those of the three rape suspects. For example, both deputies and Evans stated that all the interrogations took place in a radio room on the same floor as the jail, rather than in the basement with the three prisoners handcuffed to overhead pipes or, as was the case with Greenlee, in the elevator. Also, whereas Shepherd and Greenlee admitted that they’d confessed to the rape of Norma Padgett only when they could no longer tolerate the painful beatings, and while Irvin stated he did not and would not ever confess to a crime he did not commit, Campbell, Yates, and Evans shared a different account. They claimed that during the interrogations, when the suspects were shown “a pair of pants, a handkerchief and some other evidence,” each of them readily confessed to robbery and rape (punishable by death in the state of Florida) and each of them named Ernest Thomas as the fourth accomplice. Further, Irvin and Shepherd, on the one hand, stated that they were seated in the back of Deputy Yates’s car when the door was flung open and Sheriff Willis McCall began striking them with a large flashlight; the sheriff, on the other hand,