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

news desk. He was told city editor Jimmy Graham was nervous, pacing the floor like “an expectant father” because he hadn’t heard from Poston in hours. Graham had even phoned Governor Warren, hoping to secure some protection for his reporter.
    “Keep your shirt on,” Poston said. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Tell Jimmy the verdict will be in any minute, and I’ll be heading for Orlando—40 miles away—later tonight.”
    Poston wasn’t the only person on a phone near the courthouse while the jury was deliberating. William Bogar, Sheriff Willis McCall’s fellow Klansman who had been one of the night riders during the rioting in Groveland in July, received a call from another member of the Apopka Klavern at around the same time. The Klansman told Bogar that Sheriff McCall “needed help” to “run the negro lawyers.” A bunch of them were getting together to meet in an open space near a house off Route 441 near Lake Ola, where they’d wait for the car.
    Word began to spread that the jurors had reached a verdict, and at 9:26 p.m. they took their seats in the jury box and waited for Judge Futch to bring the court to order. Before the verdict was read, Futch warned that there would be “no demonstration, handclapping or anything of that sort,” and that all spectators were to remain in the courtroom until the sheriff and his deputies removed the defendants. The judge asked the clerk of courts to read the verdict. Greenlee’s eyes followed the paper that was carried and passed from the jury foreman to the clerk.
    We the jury find the defendants guilty. So say we all, By majority recommendation of mercy for Charles Greenlee.
    Charles A. Blaze Foreman
    Mabel Norris Reese noted, “Hope was gone from the eyes of Shepherd and Irvin. They were looking past the jury as they gazed forward—past them to their journey to the electric chair.”
    There was no outburst, just silence. Franklin Williams reached back and gripped the hand of Charles Greenlee. “Then a smile—a smile of boyish triumph came over the face of the Negro boy,” Mabel wrote. “The play was done. Charles Greenlee had no reason to be acting then. He was accepting the plaudits due any one who kept an audience spellbound.”
    A recommendation of mercy meant that the sixteen-year-old would likely spend the rest of his life in jail. The defense had no interest in having the jury polled. They needed to move.

    A LEX, PSST, ALEX,” came a hiss from across the court. It was Judge Futch, informing the two white lawyers for the defense that they could slip out of the courthouse through his private chambers. Akerman quickly requested that sentencing be delayed for three days so that he could file a motion for a new trial. Futch granted the request, seemingly more concerned with getting the lawyers safely out of his courtroom. As Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee were taken away in shackles, Akerman and Price retreated behind the judge’s desk. Hunter stayed in the courtroom, urging spectators to “go home quietly and not to cause any trouble.”
    Williams could hear the iron gate clang behind him as the Groveland Boys were led back upstairs by Sheriff Willis McCall. Hunter approached Williams to shake his hand, and Williams wanted Hunter to know one thing, off the record, as he watched the defendants leave the courtroom. Those boys, Williams told him, had been severely beaten by the sheriff and his deputies.
    “I don’t doubt it at all,” Hunter replied.
    With nothing more to say, Williams and Hill were escorted by highway patrolmen downstairs and out the back door, where they emerged in the back lot behind the courthouse, right at the spot where McCall had been met by a mob of angry Bay Lake men who demanded to search the jail for Norma Padgett’s rapists back in July. It was hot and humid and dark and quiet, and as they made their way to Hill’s car, the patrolmen turned and walked in the other direction.
    “Aren’t you going to escort us to our car?” Williams asked.
    “No, my job is over,” one cop said. “The trial is finished.”
    It was the first time Williams had truly felt fear during the case. He’d been intimidated by Willis McCall, but “I was young enough and I guess silly enough not to be afraid of him.”
    The two lawyers crossed the lawn just as spectators were leaving the court, and they hopped into Hill’s 1948 sedan. Hill tried to light a cigarette, but the car’s lighter had started smoking.