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

“none of the family showed any such resentment [toward the Groveland boys] as one would expect.” He ultimately admitted to Williams that he had “grave doubts as to whether a rape actually occurred.”
    Williams passed on the minister’s name and telephone number to the FBI, whose agents, the New York lawyer was sure, had gathered information equally valuable to the defense, although the FBI investigation had been “considerably affected” once word of the brutality exerted upon the three suspects by Lake County law enforcement had spread. Williams was of course aware that the willingness of some Lake County residents to talk to the FBI had evaporated in the face of rumors and threats and misinformation to the effect that “the investigation will result in defense material for NAACP attorneys.” Williams had in fact attempted to compel agents Quigley and Matthews to testify by serving them an anonymous “Richard Roe and John Doe” subpoena, which was ultimately quashed in the U.S. attorney’s office by reason of “the confidential nature of the FBI’s investigation.” Williams had been frustrated by the state attorney’s office as well, in its strategically sound decisions not to call Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld as a witness or to place into evidence his physician’s report—and likewise, the (coerced) confessions of the Groveland Boys. Jesse Hunter would rely on the probability that the testimony of a young white woman would trump anything the three Negroes might say in their defense. Judge Futch, meanwhile, compounded Williams’s frustration in his rulings not to make the medical report available to the defense and not to allow any testimony about beatings of prisoners at the hands of law enforcement. What the judge called irrelevant Williams considered to be deliberate moves to assure Hunter the convictions he sought.
    On Friday morning, September 2, before the commencement of trial testimony, Judge Futch presided over the completion of jury selection and the defense did the best they could with the few challenges still available to them. Over the past few days, as, one by one, the prospective jurors—Lake County farmers and pickers and truckers, with their meaty hands and their worn work clothes—had appeared before the court, Williams, the sharply attired New York lawyer, had recalled again, and more than once, the words of the Daytona Beach attorney who’d refused the case because “those clay eating crackers down there” would as soon shoot you as look at you. In quizzing the potential jurors, Akerman had been trying to gauge what might be their reactions should they see a black man addressing whites in ways they had never witnessed before, thus implicitly challenging the racial power structure as they knew it. “How would you feel about one of these negro lawyers jumping up and objecting?” he’d asked one. To another he’d posed, “And you would feel that it would be proper for them, as defense counsel, to cross-examine witnesses, even though the witness happened to be white?” (One potential juror had become confused when Akerman pointed to Williams and Hill at the defense table: “They are not on trial, are they?” the juror had asked.) Akerman’s other primary concern had been to discover if potential jurors were “kin” to any Tysons or Padgetts, and the few who were had been excused. Jesse Hunter, on the other hand, focused largely on any objections the prospective jurors might have to capital punishment; most were “in favor of it.”
    Most of the prospective jurors, not surprisingly, were also white. Of the three black men whose names had been pulled from the jury pool, only one made it to court: a “gray haired old handyman” whose father-in-law had recently died. The court clerk implored Williams to excuse the “boy” so that he could attend the funeral, adding that the handyman was “one of the best niggers in Lake County.” Then all the jurors were white, and by the end of that Friday morning in early September both Hunter and Akerman had announced to Judge Futch that they were satisfied with the jury in the box. While it might have been worse, it was, to Williams’s mind, nonetheless terrible. Still, the defense had managed to establish on record that blacks were historically and systematically excluded from jury service in Lake County, so he would be able to tell Marshall on Friday night that the NAACP was well positioned for appeal. It was a small victory