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

Informally, however, Mays confirmed it was common knowledge that deputies Yates and Campbell had participated in the beating of the three rape suspects, as had Wesley Evans, who’d been witnessed laughing “heartily” at the banter among some locals about Evans being “quite a hose wielder.” Mays also apprised the agents that if anyone were to discover what he had relayed to them, “his life would be in serious danger and he would probably lose his job and have to leave the area.”
    During the agents’ interview with Lieutenant Colonel Harry Baya of the Florida National Guard in Tampa, Matthews and Quigley could sense the frustration that the commanding officer had experienced in trying to bring order to unruly Groveland in July, with much of that frustration being centered upon the unwilling Willis McCall. The sheriff’s refusal to identify the mob’s ringleaders, let alone take any “affirmative action” in regard to them—because, as he’d informed Baya, he was “too busy” to concern himself with arresting the ringleaders—had baffled Baya, who could not tell for sure whether McCall “knew who they were or not or was just withholding them from him.”
    In rural counties and parishes across the South, as the FBI was well aware, the sheriff’s office was the seat of power. Elected to office by a countywide vote, the sheriff was viewed by his electorate not only as the county’s chief law enforcement officer but also as a community leader who shared his electorate’s interests. The FBI knew, too, that in Florida in the 1940s and ’50s, “County Sheriffs openly joined the Klan, and law enforcement officers boldly attended Klan meetings armed and in uniform,” as indeed did some of McCall’s good friends like Sheriff Dave Starr of neighboring Orange County. Lake County, though, was Willis V. McCall’s personal territory, and he bullied his county like no other sheriff in the state of Florida. Tom Hurlburt Jr., the former chief of the Orlando Police Department, whose father, a citrus buyer, had served as one of McCall’s deputies, said, “I believe the only thing more powerful than Willis McCall was the Ku Klux Klan in those days.”
    Nor was Willis McCall’s power unallied with that of the KKK. So it was that Lake County’s “leading citizens”—men like Mayor Elma Puryear, Chief of Police George Mays, L. Day Edge, and Norton Wilkins—had no recourse in Sheriff McCall when they received open threats from the Klan. The citrus barons and respected citizens of the county may have been instrumental in McCall’s election to office in 1944, but five years and one landslide reelection later, McCall had made Lake County his own. In 1949, McCall’s always ambiguous allegiances lay less in his oath of office than in the demands of a restive electorate capable of extreme violence. “Bay Lake region people,” Mays told the FBI agents, “were in some manner related to one or the other of the Padgetts. These people are very clannish and stay to themselves, but when any one attempted to molest or abuse their women folk they got up in arms about it and felt that the law should be settled in their own way.” McCall knew his constituents, and he knew what they expected of him if he planned on having them keep him in the sheriff’s office. McCall held the office until 1972.

    B Y MID-AUGUST IN 1949, mainstream newspapers across the state of Florida had joined the black press in the coverage of Harry T. Moore’s charges that savage beating at the hands of local law enforcement had coerced the Groveland Boys to confess to the rape of Norma Padgett. Between the press and the FBI—their agents, no doubt in cahoots with the NAACP, snooping all over his county—Willis McCall was livid. Still, he knew he’d have to come up with some explanation for the bruises, blood, and lacerations that had been plainly observed and reported by witnesses. “They might have got in a fight somewhere in prison or somewhere and had a mark or two on them, but they didn’t get that in Lake County,” the sheriff emphatically told the reporters.
    By mid-August, too, Franklin Williams and Horace Hill had in their investigation been collecting increasingly more evidence and testimony that contradicted the “official” narrative being doled out to the press by McCall and State Attorney Jesse Hunter. With just two weeks remaining before the scheduled start of the trial, however, Williams had still not found a defense