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

lawyer for the Groveland Boys. From the New York office, Thurgood Marshall could offer Williams only moral support until the NAACP had a trial lawyer in place, but Marshall meanwhile continued to keep the Justice Department informed of any leads that developed. One of them was startling.
    Marshall telephoned Alexander Campbell, the assistant attorney general, immediately upon learning that the “physician who examined the alleged victim of the rape reportedly found that this woman’s charges were not true.” Campbell in turn informed J. Edgar Hoover, who dispatched a third FBI agent to Florida, to Leesburg, in order to verify the examining physician’s “Report of Accident” in the alleged rape of Norma Padgett. No matter that the report bolstered the NAACP’s defense case and introduced new issues for Williams’s further investigation, and no matter that Williams had yet to find the defendants legal representation: the overwhelming sense in Marshall’s office was that neither the judge, Truman Futch, nor State Attorney Hunter would allow a delay of the trial. Indeed, for both the judge and Hunter, with the FBI everywhere in the county asking questions and setting everyone from law enforcement to black pickers and packers on a perilous edge, the trial could not happen soon enough.
    Franklin Williams’s knottiest problem began to be resolved on August 22, when he met with Alex Akerman Jr., an experienced Orlando trial attorney with something of a maverick’s reputation in central Florida. The son of a Republican federal judge in Florida—Akerman Sr. had been nominated by Calvin Coolidge in 1929 and served on the bench until his death in 1948—Alex Jr. was the only Republican member of the Florida legislature. More important for Williams, Akerman was currently representing a black faculty member at Bethune-Cookman College, Virgil Hawkins, in his attempt to gain admission into the University of Florida College of Law, as well as five other black graduate school applicants to the university who had been added to the case. Akerman’s concern that the first desegregation lawsuit in the state would be compromised in Florida’s supreme court if he were also representing the Groveland Boys made him reluctant to take the NAACP’s case. So did the fact that Akerman was just beginning to establish a career in state politics. “I knew that this would be an end to that,” he later said.
    After a long, fruitless search for an attorney to try a case now only one short week away, Williams was not prepared to accept no as an answer. If desperate in his appeal to Akerman, Williams also argued soundly that the thirty-nine-year-old lawyer had already risked his chances of a political career when he’d initiated the inflammatory, high-profile law school integration suit. Furthermore, the Groveland Boys had no other legal counsel open to them, and the consequence they thus faced was not a denial of admission to a university but a sentence to death in the electric chair—for, Williams insisted, a crime that they did not commit. Their innocence or guilt aside, the three defendants, all of them facing a death penalty, certainly had a right to counsel, and that, for Akerman, made his representation of them the right thing to do. He also appreciated Williams’s refusal, for all his frustration and the pressure of time constraints, to settle for some indifferent criminal lawyer who might have signed on solely for the fee. Not that the fee was handsome or, at $1,500, even adequate. Akerman negotiated, and with a handshake he and Williams agreed on a payment of $2,500 for the case. It was more than Williams had expected to pay but less than any other attorney had asked, and the New York office would no doubt be counting on Harry T. Moore to continue to raise both awareness of the case and cash to offset some of the legal costs. In closing, Akerman acknowledged that time was short, although he knew that even if he had a year to prepare for the defense of the Groveland Boys, in all likelihood they’d still be sent to the chair. He promised nonetheless to commit his expertise and energies to the case as well as the assistance of a second attorney, Joseph E. Price Jr., Akerman’s nephew, who had graduated from law school the previous June. So Williams might find some comfort in the fact that he was getting two lawyers for the price of one.
    As Alex Akerman contemplated the black New York lawyer from the NAACP, he might well have