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

Williams reached over and knocked the lighter to the floor, burning his finger. Somebody had tried to short-circuit the car and “jammed that cigarette lighter in just a few minutes before we got to it.” The two had promised to give Ted Poston and Ramona Lowe a ride back to Orlando, and they waited nervously in the car as spectators came their way.
    “Boy, nigger boy,” said one man with his wife and daughter as he passed by. More and more of them were filing past the car and Williams was past being edgy.
    “Now where the hell is Poston and Lowe?” he muttered.
    Ted Poston was just coming down from the Jim Crow balcony when he touched Lowe’s arm and guided her into a corridor where they almost bumped into Norma Padgett, who clenched her jaw and glared at the Negro reporters. Poston reached the lobby, but he’d lost Lowe in the jostling and “hostile sea of white faces.” He took a side exit and with his jacket slung over one shoulder, he heard Horace Hill, idling his car with the lights out, calling his name softly.
    “Hurry up and get in,” Hill told him.
    “Jesus,” Poston remarked. “I am scared stiff.”
    “Where’s Ramona?” Williams asked.
    Poston opened the door. He had to go back for her, but Hill tried to stop him.
    “Don’t argue now, Horace,” Williams snapped. “Let him go.”
    “Look, Frank,” Hill said. “You’re not in New York now. These clay-eating crackers aren’t joking. I know. I wasn’t born down here for nothing.”
    Poston raced back across the lawn and into the courthouse, where he spotted the heavyset Lowe talking to James Shepherd. “Come on,” he said, leading her back to the car.
    “Now you’ve done it,” Hill scolded, telling the reporters that the state patrol’s escort was gone.
    Even Williams wasn’t pleased at having to wait. “They blame us for getting Greenlee out of the chair,” he said. “You both might have had a chance.”
    Hill continued to curse Poston and Lowe for their “damfoolishness” until they were able to make it out of Tavares. The traffic was thick until most of the cars peeled north toward Eustis, and they got onto Route 441, where the road opened up. Hill was moving the car along at 60 miles an hour where the road curled south toward Lake Ola. They were finally able to breathe and even managed some gallows humor about Hill having to live down here with these crackers, but the joking came to an abrupt end when they spotted two cars parked on both sides of the highway, facing Orlando. Hill shot past them, but “the two parked cars lighted up” and a third car followed behind.
    Hill put the pedal to the floor and was doing 80-plus miles an hour, passing slower-moving traffic, when Williams noticed two cars coming up on them, with lights flashing.
    “Jesus Christ,” Williams said. “There is somebody behind us.”
    Ahead, they spotted a man in the road waving a white handkerchief or a cloth, but Hill had no intention of stopping and the man jumped aside as they passed. Williams spotted three cars in pursuit and in the first car, the silhouette of three men in the front seat. The one in the middle, Williams noted, was wearing a cowboy hat—“the kind that Willis McCall wore.”
    At high speeds, all four cars plowed through a red light.
    “Oh, shit,” Williams shrieked. “This is it.”
    Williams had been through a similar and harrowing experience before, when the car he’d been driving in hit a patch of ice and skidded out of control back in his college days at Lincoln. The crash had been so horrific it made the news, but Williams survived. Still, that car had been totaled, and Williams had been going only at half the speed that Hill was doing.
    Ramona began sobbing. “Oh, God. It’s my fault. I got you into this . . . I should’ve—”
    “Shut up!” Poston yelled.
    In silence, the sedan rocketed toward Apopka, with Williams calmly providing updates. “He’s picking up, Horace.”
    Poston had picked up some “second hand make-shift glasses” but was grateful he could see “no further than two feet ahead.” Three times the city desk at the Post had turned down his request to cover the Little Scottsboro case, but he persisted, and now he was back in one of those moments that had haunted him every time he went south. They were “hurtling forward in a stygian blackness,” as Hill cut the lights, “trusting only the light of the Florida moon.” He’d reached 90 miles an hour, but he hadn’t lost his