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

Klan pursuers, and he ever so slightly zigzagged on the road so they wouldn’t shoot the tires. The cars behind them were close enough that they could hear the drivers honking their horns. Coming into lighted downtown Apopka, Hill ran a few red lights and “missed by inches” a pickup truck near a movie house. Williams noted that one of the cars behind nearly crashed, but straightened up, and “one of the crackers was leaning out the front window.”
    “I guess this is it, then,” Williams said. “No cracker would endanger other crackers—not to mention his own life and limb—just to put a scare into a bunch of Negroes. I guess they really intend to take us.”
    They were still on Route 441, past Apopka and heading south to Orlando, picking up speed again, when Ramona Lowe screamed.
    “They’re not back there now!”
    The Klan cars had peeled off, perhaps unwilling to take the chase any farther. Williams reached for a cigarette, but Hill kept the speed up until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. They reached the familiar Wigwam Hotel, with thirty-one large white teepees off South Orange Blossom Trail, which Hill passed before turning left into Parramore, the black section of town, where they stopped in front of a little hotel.
    “I have never been so happy to see so many black folks in my life,” Williams thought.
    Poston was sitting quietly in the back, where they all looked at each other in silence. He was glad his good glasses were broken, he later wrote. “I couldn’t see my own shame, which must have been reflected in their eyes.”
    Hill parked the car and they entered the hotel, only to go right out through the back door and up to the woman’s house where Williams was staying. They grabbed a drink and sat for about an hour. Once they’d settled their nerves some, Williams and Hill got back into the car to drive to Akerman’s office. “We’ve got to get to work on that appeal,” Williams said.
    When they arrived, Akerman and Price were already going over the case files. Williams told them the story of being chased by three cars at 90 miles an hour through Lake and Orange counties.
    “Aw, you have got to be kidding,” Akerman said.
    “For Christ’s sake,” Williams told him, he wasn’t kidding.

CHAPTER 12: ATOM SMASHER

    Flat Top, also known as the “death house,” at Florida State Prison in Raiford. ( Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida )
    W ILLIS MCCALL HAD decided the time had come for the Groveland Boys to “get right with the Lord.” He’d had his deputies drag Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd to his office below the Tavares jail. The two rapists would soon be transported back to Florida State Prison in Raiford, this time to death row, where they’d be waiting for their date with the electric chair. Now, though, while he had the chance, McCall wanted to have a little conversation with the two boys. He preferred there be no lawyers present.
    McCall pointed toward the wire recorder. He suggested to the boys that the time had come for them to clear their consciences; that it couldn’t hurt to make a statement, since they’d soon be heading to the chair anyway. Shepherd and Irvin both refused, both of them stating, as they had in court, that they were innocent. McCall looked them hard in the eyes; neither man flinched. The sheriff had them taken back to their cells. They’d be gone from Lake County quick enough, and the only way they’d be coming back was in a pine box.
    With Charles Greenlee, the sheriff played hardball. He pointed to the wire recorder on his desk; he told the boy he wanted a statement. The boy’s eyes darted from the recorder to the sheriff to the ceiling, a wall. Was he going to be beaten, he wanted to know, “if he didn’t say what the sheriff wanted to hear.” McCall fumed. No, he told him, not beaten—killed.
    The sixteen-year-old was sufficiently intimidated: “He was going to hand me over to the mob,” Charles Greenlee said later. McCall turned on the wire recorder and proceeded to lead the prisoner through a series of simple questions. Convinced that he could avoid trouble if he cooperated, the boy responded with the answers he figured the Big Hat Man wanted to hear. They were nothing like the boy’s rambling responses from the witness box, which prompted twelve white men on a jury to spare his life. Life on the chain gang—it galled the sheriff that the boy had gotten off easy.
    “You lied on the witness stand?” McCall