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

criticism upon.” Judge Futch had also taken other, more visible preventive measures against the unwelcome presence of any suspect strangers, as Williams and Akerman noticed when they arrived at court on the first day of the trial and viewed the heightened security. “They had deputies who stood every 10 stairs coming up the staircase into the courtroom,” Williams recalled. “They were all big characters with guns on. It was a very intimidating scene.”
    It did not intimidate Mabel Norris Reese, however. Nor did the lawyers for the defense, who had called her as a witness in the pretrial hearings so that her exclusive coverage of the “worst crime in Lake county’s history” could be entered on record. On that occasion, under oath, she had indicated that the source for her many articles and editorials about the case had been State Attorney Jesse Hunter. She had also stated that, on the basis of her observations, “there is considerable more satisfaction among the negroes here” in her adoptive South than in her native North and, indeed, she had found no evidence of prejudice in her part of Lake County. On the morning of the trial itself, intercepting Williams and Akerman on their arrival at court, Reese asked them for a statement regarding their expectations in the courtroom. In a rare unguarded moment, Williams responded that he did not hold out much hope for justice in Judge Futch’s courtroom and that anyway, the “Supreme Court is the aim.” Off the record or not, his comments appeared on the front page of the Topic the next day, and the relationship between Williams and Reese continued only to sour thereafter. In the same front-page article Reese looked forward to the relief that would come “to the staunch believers in the wonderfulness that is Lake county when the smudge against her fair name is removed” by the trial, as again she lamented the sensational press stories in the North about beatings and mistreatment of Negroes, which stories, she wrote, strive “to make Lake county sound mean and cruel—unfitted for the God-given loveliness about her.” Of course, since Reese relied on Jesse Hunter as her main source of information about the case, she knew that before Lake County could return again to being the “Garden of Eden” it had always been, the prosecution would have to recount the unspeakable events of that night in July “when the true story of what happened to that young Bay Lake couple will be told, probably in unpretty details so that a jury can be convinced.”
    Relief, for Franklin Williams, at least in regard to the press, came to Tavares in the form of Ted Poston, a black reporter from the New York Post who had successfully lobbied his editor to fly him south to cover the trial for the newspaper. Formerly a resident at 409 Edgecombe, he had long been friends with Thurgood Marshall. In fact, Poston had once accompanied Marshall on one of the NAACP attorney’s late-night adventures, on this particular occasion to obtain affidavits from blacks who were being terrorized by police in Freeport, New York, then (in the 1930s) a hub of KKK activity. On learning that the Klan-infested police were out looking for two troublemakers from Harlem, Poston was, in his words, “damned scared”; but, as much as he wanted to “get out of town fast,” he spent the night dodging the Klan with Marshall as the lawyer continued collecting his affidavits, which he hid in a spare tire, and meanwhile making “more and more outlandish jokes about what [the police would] do to us if they ever caught up with us.” The jokes may not have eased Poston’s anxiety, but the affidavits enabled Marshall eventually to win from the state attorney general “a restraining order to close down KKK activities” in Freeport. Poston could only admire the courage of a man and attorney who “involv[ed] himself in a case to that degree.”
    Nor did Poston want for courage, savvy though he also was in protecting himself. In 1933, when he was covering the Scottsboro trial in Alabama for the Harlem-based Amsterdam News , each night after court he would sneak out to the railroad tracks in order to deposit his stories “in the mail car of the midnight special.” He was evidently not sneaky enough, however, as one night some young white men were waiting near the tracks for the black reporter on the Scottsboro case. They put a pistol to his back and Poston produced fake credentials identifying him as a reverend with