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

interested in the protection of the rights of Negroes [or] in the particular Negroes involved. . . . We therefore have no intention whatsoever of permitting you to interfere in any of these cases.”
    Marshall forwarded his letter to Stephen Spingarn, who was working in the White House as assistant to the special counsel to the president, with the following note:
    Dear Steve:
    I thought you would be interested in the latest developments in the efforts of the Comrades to move in on our cases. These boys never give up and it is a pleasure to crack their knuckles.
    Sincerely,
    Thurgood Marshall.

    A S THE PRETRIAL hearing proceeded in Groveland, Franklin Williams phoned in the rulings on motions to Thurgood Marshall in New York and updated him on the roster of witnesses and composition of the jury. Williams assured Marshall that in the jury selection process the defense would challenge in any way they could, but he and Marshall both knew that at the end of the day, twelve white Lake County jurors were going to be seated in the box. “I never believed that we would have anything but a verdict of guilty,” Williams said. “It never entered my mind. . . . I hoped that we might get life rather than death. But I never believed that these boys would be found innocent.”
    Marshall had full confidence in Williams, who, he observed, “can come up with more ideas in a minute than most people I know of. And they’re darn good ones.” Williams was ambitious but also dedicated to the mission of the NAACP—a man who willingly “puts in a real day’s work,” Marshall said. Nonetheless, Marshall recognized that Williams was facing heavy odds by having been hobbled with the lightning-fast trial date when he’d barely had time to find a Florida lawyer, let alone map out a sound strategy. The want of time would force Williams and Akerman into reactive lawyering once the trial began, and Williams promised Marshall “every bit of energy and effort [would be] directed toward trying to create an error in the case, so that we could get it reversed on appeal.” The job, Marshall stressed, was, as always, “to cause constitutional error or to find constitutional error in the process.”
    Both the prosecution and the defense were required to submit to the court lists of their evidence before the trial began. Jesse Hunter kept it simple; his list included a mere ten items:
    1.Handkerchief & lint
    2.Cast of left rear tire
    3.Cast of right rear tire
    4.Cast of left front tire
    5.Cast of right front tire
    6.Left shoe & cast
    7.Right shoe & cast
    8.Pants of Walter Irvin
    9.Pistol
    10.Almanac
    The list reflected the simplicity, and strength, of the prosecution’s case as Hunter would argue it for the jury, whoever might be sitting on it. Hunter hardly had to worry about jury selection; as Mabel Norris Reese noted in her pretrial coverage, “Jesse Hunter won’t have to ask probing questions of the jury because he already knows all about them, and probably he could call any of the 100 or so selected jurymen by their first names.” Nor did he have to worry about the credibility of his witnesses or their testimony. He had reviewed thoroughly with the state’s witnesses the testimony they would present, from Norma and Willie Padgett to the sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen. He indeed had reason to feel confident that, as Reese wrote, “Honor Will Be Avenged” in just a matter of days.
    If Hunter’s list was strategically simple, the evidence for the defense was perforce limited: forty-one local newspaper articles published on specific dates in July and August 1949. The list of witnesses for the defense indicated that they would call only three: Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Charles Greenlee. And then they would pray.
    Judge Truman Futch had a list of his own. He had posted his “Special Rules of Court” on telephone poles outside the courthouse. Among the twelve rules for spectators at the trial were bans against loitering in the halls and stairways; the conveyance of bags, bottles, or packages into the courtroom; and hand clapping or outbursts in response to testimony or argument. The judge’s rationale, he stated, lay less in any fear of a disruption in the proceedings by the Ku Klux Klan than in his concern that outside “agitators or agents” may have been dispatched to Tavares, perhaps by the NAACP, purposely to start trouble at the trial so that “critics of the south might have something to base