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

asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Did you make up that story?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Sometimes it’s better if you tell the truth about what happened,” McCall said. “Who went first?”
    “Ernest Thomas, I believe.”
    “Now, you didn’t take a lot of talking into, did you?”
    “No, sir,” Greenlee replied.
    “Why didn’t ya’ll kill the woman?”
    “Well, I begged them not to, they were talking about it.”
    Seeing an opportunity to embarrass the NAACP with a recorded statement by their defense team’s star witness, he asked, “Now, did these lawyers talk to you, did they put you up . . . What did they say to you?”
    Greenlee didn’t bite. “They just asked us our story. And then they said to don’t worry, that they were going to defend us, that they were going to fight for us.”
    McCall finished with a string of rapid-fire questions: “Now nobody has promised you anything?” “Nobody has offered you, or made any promises to you?” “Nobody’s threatened you?” “You’re not under any threat of any kind?” “Now you didn’t have to say any of this, did you?”
    “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir,” came Greenlee’s prompt replies.
    Willis McCall was satisfied. His voice became quiet, almost reassuring. “I just wanted to know for my own curiosity what had really happened there,” he said slowly. “I just wanted to know for my own curiosity if you had lied.” Then he reached across his desk and switched off the recorder.
    Deputies Yates and Campbell led the lanky boy back to the elevator in the Lake County Court House—the elevator that just two months before had taken him down to the basement where he’d been cuffed to an overhead pipe and mercilessly beaten. He’d survived the question-and-answer session with Sheriff McCall without a scratch. The deputies locked him in his cell on the fourth floor. Yates departed with a sneer.
    Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin watched in silence. The boy sat down. He buried his face in the palms of his hands; his body trembled. He began to cry.

    S COTLAND YARD, PLEASE Don’t Take Our Yates.”
    Mabel Norris Reese wrote her own headlines for the Mount Dora Topic , and she seemed never to tire of advertising the top-notch detective work of Deputy James Yates. To his forensic analysis of the tire tracks and shoe prints at the crime scene Mabel attributed, in her posttrial coverage, the sentences to death by electrocution that the Whittlin’ Judge had so justly delivered to Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. The photo of Deputy Yates standing beside his plaster casts on the front page of the Topic was enough to turn Thurgood Marshall’s stomach, for the Yates that he saw in the photo was the sadistic deputy who had severely and serially beaten the Groveland Boys.
    The only good news that Franklin Williams, on his return to the NAACP office in New York, had to offer to Marshall was that Charles Greenlee had received a life sentence of hard labor: “An unlettered but articulate 16-year-old boy literally talked himself out of Florida’s electric chair,” as one reporter had written. On all other matters, Judge Futch had ruled uncompromisingly, and unsurprisingly, against the defense. He had not only rejected the motion for a new trial but also made a point of noting for the record both that the attorneys for the defense had had “ample opportunity to prepare” and that Williams and Akerman had “inject[ed] the racial question into the record.” Meanwhile, the “vicious,” in Williams’s judgment, Mabel Norris Reese had filled the pages of the Mount Dora Topic with her grossly biased coverage of the trial and its aftermath, which was spiked with quotes by the self-satisfied sheriff Willis McCall, such as his reminder to the residents of Lake County that “the evidence was overwhelming, all three confessed.” The reportage galled Marshall no less than it had Williams.
    In Williams’s absence from New York over the past two months, Marshall had, as usual, been overwhelmed with casework, on top of which had been added the responsibilities attendant to overseeing, along with Roy Wilkins, the day-to-day operations at the NAACP, as Walter White continued to be on leave. In August, Wilkins, as acting secretary, had authorized a three-hundred-dollar annual salary increase for Marshall, but in early September he wrote to Arthur Spingarn, “My feeling is that this is not a sufficient raise” and recommended