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

disgust when he’d visited the three defendants. Still, Williams trusted that the Groveland Boys would at least escape abuse during their second stay at the Tavares jail, since the beatings they’d previously endured had been not only well documented but also fully reported in the local and national press, which had laid blame on Willis McCall and his deputies. So it would be in the sheriff’s best interest to ensure that the prisoners appear in court with no visible evidence of abuse, or so Williams reasoned—incorrectly, as it turned out. “Every time” the defendants exited the courtroom, on the stairway back up to their cells McCall would kick the three of them repeatedly, although he’d strike Shepherd with special animosity. “Sammie,” Irvin said, “he hit Sammie with his fist.”
    McCall had sat silently with his deputies throughout the August 25 pretrial hearings at the county courthouse. He’d brooded. For more than a month the case had been his. He’d been pursued by reporters; he’d enjoyed celebrity. After all, he had stood up to a lynch mob; he had policed the riots without the loss of a single life. Within hours of the rape he’d had three of the suspects behind bars, and he’d taken care of the fourth one, too. Only now it was Jesse Hunter’s case. The sheriff had been sidelined, and worse, he’d had to bear the sight of a black New York NAACP lawyer in a fancy suit sitting before the bar, conferring with the judge and prosecutor about the admission of coerced confessions into evidence: more of the same claptrap he’d read in those “disgusting and disheartening” newspaper articles from up north (he’d clipped them nonetheless). Something had been agreed; Hunter wasn’t going to introduce the confessions—as if this weren’t Lake County. Then they’d adjourned.
    The sheriff and his deputies escorted the Groveland Boys from the courtroom. In the stairwell, the sheriff let out a little of his frustration with a booted foot and his fists. Between blows, McCall demanded, “What are those nigger lawyers putting you up to now?”
    The defendants had no answer to the angry question and tried only to protect themselves from the sheriff’s rage, which seemed finally to be directed no longer at them but at the defense counsel. “Nigger lawyers better watch their steps,” McCall told them, or they’ll “end up in jail” along with their clients.
    After the adjournment Williams and Hill, along with Akerman, returned to Orlando to take advantage of every minute available to develop strategies and construct a defense. At the same time a tropical storm was heading for South Florida from the Bahamas, and the following day, August 26, what would now be classified a Category 4 hurricane hit land at West Palm Beach and roared north from Lake Okeechobee. By the time it reached Lake County that evening, hurricane-force winds had wreaked havoc in central Florida, with damages running to millions of dollars. Particularly hard hit was the citrus industry; agricultural losses approached $20 million, as the heavy winds uprooted about one-third of the citrus trees—what would have amounted to 14 million crates of fruit. For two days Williams and Akerman were stranded in a rooming house in Orlando without access to the court or the prosecutor’s bill of particulars or a working telephone. Residences had been unroofed; the streets were obstructed by fallen pines, downed utility poles, and industrial debris. And the defense case was a shambles.
    The prosecution can’t have regretted the losses in time and preparation that the storm had cost the lawyers for the defense. Still, the state was hedging its every bet. As Hunter was planning to call Samuel Shepherd’s brother James as a time line witness for the prosecution, and in order, therefore, to prevent him from fleeing the county or conspiring with other potential witnesses, the state attorney requested that Judge Futch dispatch Sheriff McCall to place and hold James Shepherd in the county jail until he had testified at his brother’s trial. Never a man for half measures, especially when dealing with blacks, McCall had Samuel’s parents, Henry and Charlie Mae Shepherd, jailed as well, and with a phone call north to the sheriff of Alachua County he also had Charles Greenlee’s parents detained. It was the sheriff’s way of guaranteeing that the families of the Groveland Boys did not get together in an attempt to fabricate alibis for the