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

and in this trial, Williams feared, most likely his last.
    Testimony in State of Florida v. Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, Ernest E. Thomas began after a recess on Friday, September 2, 1949. Hundreds of spectators packed into the Lake County Court House, among them a few dozen blacks who filed up to the balcony to a section reserved for coloreds. A few days earlier Mabel Norris Reese had written a news piece under the header “Women Beg for Reserved Seats at Trial,” but it was mostly white Lake County men who filled the wooden benches. Ramona Lowe observed: “Through sentiment whipped-up by Florida daily newspapers, the trial has become a side-show for thrill-seeking, sadistic country-bred whites.”
    Williams and Hill shuddered at the entrance into the courtroom of steely-eyed “Bay Lake Crackers with snuff in their mustache,” local men who had been deputized as security police, whose presence was more menacing than reassuring. It was not unlikely that security included some of the very same men who had descended on the courthouse less than two months before with Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett, although Williams could not be sure. When he spotted Willis McCall—strutting around the courtroom like a man in his home at Thanksgiving, shaking hands and welcoming in friends and family—Williams felt a pang of apprehension. McCall “always intimidated me,” the lawyer said.
    Around 2 p.m., the clang of an iron gate quieted the crowd. A door behind the judge’s bench swung open. Slowly, the sheriff’s deputies Yates and Campbell paraded the three solemn young black men to their seats at the defense table, and the people of Lake County got their first look at the men accused of raping Norma Padgett. Weeks earlier, at the arraignment, Mabel Norris Reese had noted for her readers that Irvin was wearing no shoes, his “bare feet making a soft, pattering noise as he climbed the steps,” but he appeared at the trial in shoes and, like his codefendants, dressed in a suit. That September afternoon the temperature had reached the low nineties and a large electric pedestal fan whirred behind the witness box, the sound promising to drown out any quiet testimony. On the judge’s desk lay a pile of cedar sticks; seated, Truman Futch pulled a knife from a drawer and demonstrated, as he would throughout the trial, how he’d gotten nicknamed “the Whittlin’ Judge.” Oppressive heat, old Southern lawyers in red suspenders, whittling judges, a fearsome sheriff, and a crowd of racist, tobacco-stained crackers on the benches behind him—“it was,” Williams observed, “almost to me like a story that I was living through and these were caricatures that I was being exposed to.”
    A glance up to the balcony did not allay any of Williams’s misgivings. In the somber faces of the blacks he read resignation mixed with fear—fear of McCall, “of what he might do and of what he could get away with”—and in no face could he see an expectation of justice. “They were just there watching.”
    Then Williams spotted the girl: Norma Padgett, seated in the front row beside her husband, her blond locks newly curled, lips tightly pursed. There would be no mercy, either, for the Groveland Boys.
    The state attorney called his first witness, whose sole purpose was to attest that he had seen Ernest Thomas on the afternoon of July 26 and that Ernest Thomas had been and was in fact dead. Williams had suspected that the prosecution had a “dying declaration all rigged,” but Hunter was content with the testimony. The defense had no questions, and with one of the Groveland Boys out of the way, the state turned to their next witness, the twenty-three-year-old husband of the rape victim, Willie Padgett. Hunter led Padgett through what seemed to Williams a tightly scripted scenario: how Willie had been beaten and robbed on the side of a road near Okahumpka; how he had come to his senses just long enough to see four black men drive away with his wife; how he’d driven miles, to Dean’s filling station in Leesburg, where he told the attendant, Curtis Howard, about the attack and abduction. Finding room for doubt in Willie Padgett’s story, Williams whispered to Akerman before the Florida lawyer began cross-examination. By the end of his testimony, Padgett had conceded that of the four defendants he was able to identify only two, Shepherd and Irvin, from that night. It was a small gain for the defense, one to be lost in