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

their license plate. Come on. That is too pat. They had the tire mark. Of course, they had the tire mark. They had the car. They made the tire mark and they made it so you have this country jury impressed by all of this high falutin’ FBI type evidence. . . . So, we were up against what appeared to be a firm case . . . that I knew or suspected had been totally manufactured. . . . What were you going to do?”
    They were going to put the Groveland Boys on the stand. They had no other choice.
    Williams and Akerman took their seats at the defense table. The iron gate behind Judge Futch’s desk clanged, the door swung open, and their clients, escorted by deputies, shuffled in. Samuel Shepherd seated himself next to Williams; his brother James and his mother were sitting, attentive, in the balcony. Williams recalled the father, the snakebites on Henry Shepherd’s legs, and the sweat, the toil, he dedicated to draining that swampland in Bay Lake so he could plant fields all his own and build a life for himself and his family away from the citrus groves; his son Samuel had gone off to war, come back, found some trouble, and now the father had lost his house and farm, and his boy was looking at the electric chair and . . . Williams was looking into Samuel Shepherd’s eyes, telling him that Mr. Akerman was going to call him to the box, ask him some questions, and that Samuel should tell the court plain what happened that night.
    When Williams had finished with his instructions, Shepherd turned to him and earnestly offered an instruction of his own. “Mr. Williams,” he said, “when the trial is over, be careful.”
    More words followed, most of them lost by the dazed attorney after he’d heard Shepherd say that someone was “going to get that nigger lawyer.”
    Where did he hear that? Williams needed to know.
    “Willis McCall,” Shepherd told him. “Said he was going to get that nigger lawyer.”
    Williams spotted McCall across the court, and he saw the monster in the man who, behind the badge of sheriff, had “murdered blacks” in Lake County. Williams had heard the stories, like that of the bolita dealer’s widow who’d collected a sum of money on her husband’s insurance policies—money that McCall claimed was owed to him. He went so far as to have the woman arrested, and when she still refused to pay McCall the alleged debt, she fell to her death from the fourth-floor window of the county jail. Williams himself had seen evidence of the beatings on the bodies of his clients, had seen the bloodstained sheets and the blood on the floor in the cells. By the sheriff’s doings as much as anyone’s in the state attorney’s case, in a matter of hours three black men would be convicted by the court and almost surely sentenced to death.
    Judge Futch brought the court to order. Akerman called Samuel Shepherd to the witness box, and Shepherd recounted less plainly than discursively what happened in the course of his night out with Walter Irvin: a narrative about a broken car, a stop for gas, drinking beers in Eatonville, the drive home to get some sleep. Hunter, confident of the state’s case, did not bother to cross-examine Shepherd, or Irvin, whose testimony corresponded with Shepherd’s, though he spared the court the side stories.
    Charles Greenlee was called last. Seated in the box, the look on his face suggesting perpetual shock, the “tall, gangly, overgrown country kid,” who to Williams seemed to be “just this side of illiterate,” adjusted his posture and, with a glance toward Akerman, waited for the questions to begin. As far as Williams could tell, the boy “did not know what the hell was happening to him,” but he’d barely begun his testimony when Williams found himself, literally, on the edge of his seat. In a naive, country-bumbling way, with a childlike attention to detail as amusing as it was engaging, Greenlee recounted the events of his first-ever weekend in Groveland. His “melodious Southern drawl” at once countered and heightened the suspense and danger as well as the gallows humor in his narrative, which frequently elicited appreciative laughter from the benches and the gallery. His guileless, animated delivery prompted Akerman to allow the boy simply to tell “the truth”—because, as Charles reminded his attorney, “if you just tell the good white folks the truth and make them understand, then everything will be all right”—rather than to lead him through his