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

wondered if Franklin Williams realized fully what awaited him in a Lake County courtroom. For weeks Williams, out of concern for his own safety, had been avoiding visits to Groveland and Tavares, where he had yet to step inside the county courthouse. Nor had he yet had occasion to meet Sheriff Willis McCall, although he had seen the handiwork of McCall’s deputies on the bodies of the defendants they had interrogated. Likewise, State Attorney Jesse Hunter and Judge Truman Futch were still mostly names to Williams. For the benefit of the New Yorker’s education in the courtroom culture of Lake County, Akerman arranged to have Williams and Hill introduced to their opposing counsel, Jesse Hunter, in Tavares the week before the pretrial hearings were to begin.
    Jesse Hunter was born in 1879 in Naylor, Georgia, about two hundred miles north of Tavares, but as a young boy he’d moved to Lake County with his family. At the age of sixteen, after just two years of formal schooling, he proved himself qualified to teach at the public school in Mascotte, and at twenty-two he was named principal of a school in Marion County. Always an avid reader, in his spare time Hunter began devouring books on the law, for he’d set his sights on a new career; but first he had to pass the state’s bar examination. Unable to fulfill satisfactorily the demands of both his full-time job and his intensive study of law, he resigned his principalship and joined the Railway Mail Service as a clerk on the run from Key West to Jacksonville and back. The schedule—“one full day of work and two days of rest”—afforded him the time he needed for the rigorous study necessary to pass the Florida bar without attending law school. Five years of countless mail runs and mountains of borrowed law books later, Hunter felt prepared. While he may not have engaged in Socratic debates on the finer points of law or have established a host of law school friendships and future contacts, he had learned a thing or two about self-discipline. And self-confidence.
    In 1913, appearing before a justice of the Supreme Court of Florida for the administration of the bar examination, thirty-one-year-old Jesse Hunter had listened as one candidate after another rose and stated the name of the prestigious university where he’d studied law. Then Hunter heard his name called, and with no time allotted for elaboration, the erstwhile mail clerk announced with pride and brevity, “The University of Scuffletown.”
    Muffled laughter filled the room. The justice, wielding no gavel, shook a box that he’d “filled with odds and ends” to restore order, and asked, “Young man, WHAT college did you say?”
    Hunter’s reply—“The University of Scuffletown, Your Honor”—brought a pause, then a smile, from the justice. “Mr. Hunter,” he said, “that is the best university in this entire country.”
    Jesse Hunter passed the bar, and that same day so did Truman Futch, another graduate of the “U. of S.”—they met; they became friends. The summer of 1913 took Hunter to Tavares, where, on a loan of a few hundred dollars from a friend, he rented “a tin building” around the corner from the courthouse and furnished it with some used chairs, an old desk, and a secondhand typewriter. In that office he practiced law for ten years, until 1923, when he became county attorney. Two years later, Governor John W. Martin appointed him state attorney, a post he had held for nearly a quarter of a century by the time rape and race detonated the riots in Groveland. In thirty-six years of practicing law in Lake County, Jesse Hunter had gotten past being surprised by mobs and murder. Yet he was maybe a bit startled that day late in August 1949 when Alex Akerman walked into his office with two black men.
    Certainly Franklin Williams was struck by the presence of the seventy-year-old man who occupied the state attorney’s office. “He was almost a caricature of the Southern country boy,” Williams observed. “He literally had red suspenders and no jacket, sleeves rolled up.” When Hunter advanced to shake Akerman’s hand, Williams noticed the sidelong glance the prosecutor cast at him and Horace Hill as Akerman indicated he’d be representing the Groveland Boys. Then, to Williams’s astonishment, Hunter asked Akerman, “Where is the third defendant? Aren’t these boys the defendants?”
    “The dirty bastard,” Williams thought, “trying to belittle us like that!” Now