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

the African Methodist Episcopal Church—for which he got a “kick in the pants” but otherwise escaped harm. When Scottsboro had completed the retrial and Poston his assignment, he made a show of reserving a seat on the day coach at the train station so that the ticket seller would be sure to remember him. Then he quietly slipped out of town by bus. He later learned that, as he had feared, about the time the train he’d reserved the seat on was due to arrive, a crowd of angry whites, nearly a thousand strong, had turned up at the depot, obviously not to offer him a friendly good-bye.
    Poston’s own personal experience of the hazardous link between racial and sexual tensions for black males in the South had drawn him to the story of Norma Padgett and the Groveland Boys from its outset. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1906, two years before Thurgood Marshall, the especially dark-skinned Poston found himself assigned as if by nature to a lower social and economic status among both whites and blacks. At the age of thirteen, he was earning fifty cents a week for tending the fireplaces at the house of a dentist in town. On a particular morning he’d entered one of the rooms to clean out the ashes and lay wood to build a new fire when he encountered there a “grown young lady.” She beckoned the boy to her, and with her hand pressed to the front of his pants, she commented on his anatomy, then asked the tongue-tied Poston, “Are you diddling with the nigger gals?” Aghast, the boy watched as she disrobed before him, and he trembled, as much with fear as desire, as she coaxed him into sexual intercourse—as she would again the next morning, and the next, for it became “an every morning occurrence.” And the boy became increasingly traumatized; even thirteen-year-olds knew what happened to blacks caught with white women. When guilt and fear finally compelled him to tell the woman he was going to quit his job, she replied with a threat. “If you quit, I’m going to tell the doctor you raped me,” she said, and for three more years Poston remained a slave to her bidding.
    Weeks before the Groveland Boys were brought to trial, Poston had been writing features for the New York Post under the series headline “Horror in the Sunny South.” As soon as he had picked up the story on Norma Padgett’s claims of rape from the newswires, he had begun investigating the case. He had interviewed the family of Samuel Shepherd; he’d spoken with victims of the mob violence. It was Poston who first compared the events in Groveland to those in a similar rape case nearly twenty years before. It was Poston who called it “Florida’s Little Scottsboro.”
    Ramona Lowe, a part-time Florida correspondent for the Chicago Defender , also arrived at Tavares to cover the trial. Lowe had been the first reporter to break the story of the gross mistreatment that the Groveland Boys had borne while in Sheriff McCall’s custody. If her incendiary pieces on the case had in general won the appreciation of the NAACP, a particular story that ran on the front page of the Defender had Marshall and Williams both scratching their heads. In addition to carefully documenting the “seething jealousy” that fueled the resentment of Bay Lake’s poor white farmers toward more prosperous black farmers like Henry Shepherd, Lowe claimed that, according to an unnamed source, Samuel Shepherd and Norma Padgett had been longtime friends. So distraught was Norma over Shepherd’s arrest, the source said, she had asserted that should anything bad happen, “I will leave this place [Groveland]. I have known Sam all my life.” If Lowe and her source were to be believed, the assertion would certainly alter the complexion of the sheriff’s and state attorney’s official narrative and would buoy Williams’s defense, but in another article, with equal conviction, Lowe had reported that Charles Greenlee had been riding in the car with Irvin and Shepherd on the night of July 15: an affirmation that Williams had determined was simply not true. Lowe’s reporting puzzled Williams, but he was happy to have one more journalist on his side covering the trial.
    For Marshall and Williams—indeed, for any NAACP defense counsel assigned to a criminal case in the hostile South—the presence of a reporter, even from a black newspaper like the Pittsburgh Courier or Chicago Defender , helped to ensure their protection. “The theory was,” Williams said, “if the