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

world knew you were there, you were safe.” (Though it was no guarantee. An FBI informant in a central Florida Klavern later revealed that the Pittsburgh Courier was “generally read from the Klan meeting floor.”) In the event that the press did not find a trial significant enough to warrant coverage, Thurgood Marshall himself would issue press releases from the NAACP’s New York office in which he would announce his own or an associate’s arrival and departure times in a given Southern town. With Poston in Lake County, Williams had a major New York newspaper covering his every move and thus, he felt, a “greater modicum of security.” For a measure of security, too, Poston reserved a suite in a Negro hotel in Orlando for the duration of his assignment, but each night he would steal out the back door of the hotel to sleep instead at one of three secret private homes. Not a man to take any chances in the South, Poston made sure the defense lawyers had the telephone number of the city editor at the New York Post “just in case anything happens.”
    With trial testimony about to begin, Franklin Williams might have envied the confidence of Mabel Norris Reese that the “true story,” however “unpretty” its details, had been uncovered in the case or have wished he could validate Ramona Lowe’s discoveries about Norma Padgett’s past. Rumors and clues and speculation tantalized the lawyer for the defense with possibilities, but they did not constitute sound evidence for the court, so he had to face what for him was the truth: that for all his interviews and investigation, he still did not know what had happened on that Friday night in July. Certainly suspicion densely clouded Norma Padgett’s claim that she’d been raped by the four Groveland boys, and not just among the blacks. Terence McCarthy, the British economist who’d been researching the story for the New Leader , told Williams that Groveland’s police chief, George Mays, had informed him off the record that Norma Padgett was a “bad egg” and that her denial of acquaintance with the Groveland Boys was suspect—Norma, according to Mays, “had grown up as a child next door” to Ernest Thomas.
    Franklin Williams himself had spoken with the Reverend Collis C. Blair, a white Methodist minister in Orlando, who had been in Bay Lake after the rioting. On that occasion, Blair told Williams (as Williams subsequently told the FBI during an August briefing in the New York office of the NAACP), various members of the mob who had “stirred up” the violence and “kept it going” had been pointed out to him, but with no names named. When pressed by Williams as to who they were, the understandably nervous Blair had answered, “The Klan,” adding that the men told him “these niggers needed to be taken down a notch.” Whatever sympathies Blair may have had with the victims of that violence and whatever horror he may have had of the Klan, the minister knew that the KKK could burn a church with as little compunction as they would a Negro home; he needed to limit his risks.
    Sensing that the white minister was holding back perhaps critical information from him, Williams pressed further: Hadn’t Blair, a young Methodist from Florida, pursued his religious studies in the enlightened North, at Yale Divinity School? Didn’t he acknowledge the church’s strategic role in combating interracial violence? With one boy already dead and three others facing the likelihood of execution, would he offer only silence? The lawyer was practically pleading, and the minister, after more than a moment’s hesitation, did finally admit that he had had a met with a few people after Norma Padgett had been found walking barefoot up near Okahumpka. With whom? Williams asked. And Blair replied, “Mrs. Padgett, her husband, and mother in law.”
    Williams, in his conscience, recognized that he could not put Reverend Blair on the witness stand. The substance of Blair’s knowledge, vital to Williams’s insight into the elusive truth of the case, would have to be imparted in confidence. Williams asked what the Reverend Blair had concluded after talking with Norma and the Padgetts? Blair was neither coy nor evasive. He observed that Norma did not show “any traces of having gone through a bad experience,” and seemed “quite thrilled to be the object of so much publicity.” As a native Floridian familiar with the Bay Lake community, Blair also found it curious that