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

a matter of minutes.
    Hunter next called Norma Padgett. Her chin held high, shoulders back, she strolled more than strode to the witness box. She was wearing a dark party dress with a large corsage flower at the hip, and into an ample white belt Norma had tucked a kind of homemade, sleeveless bolero, the bright, wide fabric slung up and over both her shoulders like wings on an angel costume. To Williams and Hill, she seemed to be “promenading” with no sense of shame or discomfort before the court, as if her purpose were to command, and relish, the attention of several hundred Lake County men rather than to testify that she, a white girl still in her teens, had been recently raped by four black men. If initially baffled by the girl’s appearance and demeanor, Williams in a moment recalled the publicity that another Lake County girl, Lois Driver, had recently been gleaning in the local and national press. Having won a few local beauty contests—Miss Merry Christmas as well as various agriculturally related titles, like Tangerine Queen—Lois had achieved at least countywide fame when Ladies’ Home Journal began scouring small towns across America for a series of covers called “Undiscovered American Beauties.” The magazine urged photographers around the country to be on the lookout at the beach, football game, church, or high school for a girl “whose face would launch a thousand ships or sell a million magazines.” The Journal promised it would pay top dollar to photographers and models who made the cut in the highly subjective business of selecting one beautiful girl each month from thousands of entries. In July 1949, as every girl in Lake County was aware, whether with admiration or envy or aspirations, the Undiscovered American Beauty on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal was Lois Driver. Franklin Williams was also aware of it, because J. E. Driver, Lois’s machinist father, had been summoned and questioned for jury duty on the Groveland rape case (he was not selected). And Norma Padgett was making the most of her moment.
    Just as he had led Willie Padgett through his testimony, Jesse Hunter prompted Norma. Evidently he had coached her, too. When he asked Norma to “rise and point out” her rapists, she seemed first to take a few seconds to compose herself for the task as she directed her gaze toward the defendants. She glanced steadily at each of them in turn before she stood and straightened her dress. She eyeballed the Groveland Boys, then, as Williams recalled, Norma slowly raised an arm and extended her index finger, which, again in turn, she pointed at each of the defendants as unhurriedly she drawled: “The nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee.”
    Williams declared it “probably the most dramatic moment in the trial,” and he, like everyone else in the courtroom, had been riveted by her every gesture. “Christ,” he later recalled, “you could have cut the air with a knife.” What Mabel Norris Reese saw in Williams’s eyes as he followed Norma’s testimony, and indeed throughout the trial, was bitter resentment and hatred. In her articles on the trial, Reese described Williams as being “resentful-eyed” and having eyes “that were so filled with hate as he sat in that courtroom that you could see it, you could feel it.”
    Akerman and Williams had agreed that the cross-examination of Norma Padgett should be restricted to an attempt to raise reasonable doubt in regard to the identification of the defendants rather than to pursue the possibility that no rape had occurred—a futile tack in light of the admissible evidence. Akerman questioned both the accuracy of the time line in the prosecution’s case—she couldn’t be accurate, Norma told him, as she “wasn’t wearing a watch”—and Norma’s apparently absolute certainty as to the identity of her attackers. Norma Padgett proved to be unflappable, however. She left the witness box as confidently as she’d taken it. Whatever Mabel Norris Reese may have read in Williams’s eyes, in his mind he knew that Norma Padgett had just sent the Groveland Boys to the electric chair. That delicate white finger of hers had as good as flicked the switch itself.
    If Norma Padgett had sent the Groveland Boys to their deaths, the state’s next witness was ready to bury their bodies. Deputy James Yates testified that the tire tracks on James Shepherd’s car exactly matched those that were found in the