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

by Gilbert King

Quigley and Matthews took their investigation in Lake County beyond law enforcement personnel and established witnesses to civic officials, politicians, prominent businessmen, and grove owners in this largely rural area of central Florida with a population of thirty-six thousand. What they discovered was a county controlled not by politics, money, the citrus industry, or the law, but by an embittered contingent of the Ku Klux Klan intent upon codifying a racial caste system, through violent means if necessary, that would effectively deny blacks access to political influence, economic opportunity, and social justice.

“I believe the only thing more powerful than Willis McCall was the Ku Klux Klan in those days.”

McCall held the office until 1972.

“physician who examined the alleged victim of the rape reportedly found that this woman’s charges were not true.” Campbell in turn informed J. Edgar Hoover, who dispatched a third FBI agent to Florida, to Leesburg, in order to verify the examining physician’s “Report of Accident” in the alleged rape of Norma Padgett.

Civil Rights Congress, an organization led by his friend the black communist, lawyer, and activist William Patterson.

Sensitive though Marshall was to the fact that the NAACP did not function as a legal aid society, he was equally attuned to opportunities for the establishment of important legal precedents through the process of appeals.

In Marshall’s eyes, the CRC existed and operated primarily to raise money, lots of it, for the communist cause—by calling attention to racial and economic oppression under American capitalism and “giv[ing] foreign governments something they can yell about.” Unlike the NAACP, the CRC did not apply the bulk of the funds it raised for the actual defense of its clients, what with the production of leaflets, advertising on billboards, and fashioning of “high-powered petitions that the jury will never read” commanding significant expenditures. Patterson, for his part, maintained that nationwide awareness was vital and that “only the movement of the people as a whole guarantees a victory.” Nonetheless, Marshall contended, a noisy mass campaign led by an organization that had been cited as subversive and communist by the Truman administration could only be detrimental to the defendants in appeals to higher courts. Ultimately, Patterson pulled the CRC from the defense of the Martinsville Seven. He chose instead to maximize publicity for the case—and raise consciousness of the communist cause—without risking a possible loss in court. There was no love lost between Marshall and Patterson, personally or professionally. They exchanged letters, and on occasion they attended meetings held by interested third parties hoping to broker a treaty between their two organizations—a futile effort, as both men were equally entrenched in their positions and fiercely committed to their opposing pri...

“Like a Hollywood story. They had it down pat. They had Irvin’s shoe prints. Imagine making a cast at the scene of the crime. That only happens in movies. You know, of course [they] could make a cast. They had taken his shoes when they arrested him. They had the handkerchief that belonged to either Irvin or Shepherd which they claimed they had tied over their license plate to hide 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?”

Satisfied though Hunter, Futch, and McCall were that the hearing had sufficiently debunked Poston’s story as pure fiction—after all, why would the residents of central Florida choose to believe a communist reporter and lawyer from the North over the police and patrolmen of Lake County?—the FBI was not. The FBI chose to believe Bill Bogar, Exalted Cyclops of the Apopka Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan and key informant for the bureau. Bogar fingered Willis McCall as the party who’d initiated the storied but factual chase, and the FBI report indicated that the Klan had “intended to stop car and severely flog occupants, with instructions to leave state.” It also later led to the indictment of four Klansmen by a federal grand jury on perjury charges. The FBI’s

Rarely in the two decades before or four years since had Marshall made an important legal decision without consulting Houston, and with his passing Marshall, too, had lost a protector and a champion. The master’s mantle had fallen onto the pupil’s shoulders. The legal strategy, Houston had told Marshall, was in place; all that was needed was the courage and strength to see it through. As Hastie had so eloquently eulogized him, Houston “guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land . . . closer than even he dared hope. . . .”

With military as with civil cases, Marshall urged his staff to exercise caution in choosing which cases to represent, to look at the person beyond the color. It was a principle Marshall had established early in his legal career at the NAACP, and one he would follow for nearly a quarter century. “My dad told me way back”—way back being when young Thurgood was growing up in Baltimore—“that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Some lessons you don’t forget.

Justice Robert Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, in which he was joined by Felix Frankfurter, scorching the roles that Judge Truman Futch, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and even Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic had played in convictions that “do not meet any civilized conception of due process of law.” Justice Jackson pointed to “prejudicial influences outside the courtroom . . . [that] were brought to bear on this jury with such force that the conclusion is inescapable that these defendants were prejudged as guilty, and the trial was but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which it generated.” So it was, Jackson opined, that “[t]he only chance these Negroes had of acquittal would have been in the courage and decency of some sturdy and forthright white person of sufficient standing to face and live down the odium among his white neighbors that such a vote, if required, would have brought.” In the end, the justice accounted the jury selection issue on which the two convictions were overturned to be of “only theoretical importance.” To characterize aptly Florida’s handling of the Groveland Boys case required, for Justice Jackson, stronger language than that offered by counsel or by the precedent cited in Cassell v. Texas; and in a stinging conclusion, he provided it: “The case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. It is on that ground that I w...

the Saturday Evening Post designated 1951 as “the worst year of minority outrages in the history of Florida or probably any other state in recent times.” For Harry Moore,

Marshall’s vision was grounded in constitutional law and he drew the lineaments of his hope from his personal experience, from battles won and strategies mastered, from the efforts he shared with like-minded men and women determined not to see the future repeat the past.

expressed concern for his friend’s safety. He wondered if maybe Harry wasn’t “going too far” in his work for the NAACP. “I’m going to keep doing it,” Moore replied in his understated way, “even if it costs me my life. Jesus Christ lost his life doing what he thought was right. And I believe the Lord intended for me to do this work for the colored race. I may live to be a ripe old age or I may be killed tomorrow, or next month, or perhaps never, but I intend to do this until the day I die.”

The last words Moore was known to write he had typed in his impassioned letter of December 2 to Governor Fuller Warren, in which he implored the governor to hold Sheriff Willis McCall responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Samuel Shepherd, and the last of the questions he posed in that letter would resonate in the press worldwide in the days ahead. We seek no special favors; but certainly we have a right to expect justice and equal protection of the laws even for the humblest Negro. Shall we be disappointed again?

On the morning after the blast, the New York Times ran a front-page story, “Bombing Kills Negro Leader,” that stated plainly what many Floridians—and perhaps Harriette Moore—thought when it linked Harry Moore’s murder to Willis McCall in its lead paragraph: MIMS, FLA., Dec. 26—A Negro crusader who led a campaign to prosecute a white Sheriff for shooting two handcuffed Negroes was killed last night and his wife was seriously injured by a bomb blast beneath their bedroom. Harry T. Moore, 46 years old, . . . was the third Negro to die in the state by violence believed resulting from the 1949 Groveland rape case.

Harry T. Moore became the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States when he was killed on Christmas night in 1951.

Alarmed at the progress of the NAACP in general, and more particularly of Thurgood Marshall, in the fight against Jim Crow, Hendrix had formed, by his claim, an “American Confederate Army” of ninety-seven cohorts in thirty-one states, all of them prepared to bear arms in the event that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation. At the rally that evening, Hendrix’s “rebel army” voted in support of three measures in its avowed purpose to forestall justice for all: 1. denounce the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League as “hate groups”; 2. retain the hood, robe, and mask as official uniform; and 3. keep the fiery cross as a religious symbol. “Florida must have a few lynchings if its law enforcement officers don’t enforce 100 percent segregation in the state,” Hendrix reportedly proclaimed, after marching his army through the downtown streets of Orlando.

It was Hunter’s galluses that captured Marshall’s eye. Red galluses. Like the ones Herman Talmadge of Georgia wore to honor his father, the former governor Eugene Talmadge. Four years earlier, Herman had honored his father’s racial prejudices as well. In his own gubernatorial campaign Herman made fame out of hate with his signal, one-word stump speeches. He’d stand on a stage, tug on his red suspenders, and shout “Nigger!” over and over until he’d whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “You tell ’em, Hummon,” his redneck constituents would holler back, their tobacco juice spattering their “red Talmadge neckties.” An epithet and suspenders won young Herman Talmadge the 1948 special election decisively. If segregation and white supremacy wanted a symbol in the South, it was found in red galluses.

Allan Platt decided to move his family south, to Mount Dora in Lake County, Florida, where his brother helped him find work picking oranges. He and his wife, Laura, enrolled their five children in the white public school, only to discover they were not white enough. The school did not ignore the complaints of parents expressing concerns that the brown-skinned Platt children might be Negroes; instead, the principal reported the complaints to the county sheriff. So it happened that Sheriff Willis McCall, accompanied by the school principal, paid a visit to the Platts’ residence, where he conducted his own anthropological investigation. He lined the five children up against the wall, and peering down over his glasses, one by one, he studied them. “You know, he favors a nigger,” he decided, thus dispensing with seventeen-year-old Denzell; as for thirteen-year-old Laura Belle, “I don’t like the shape of that one’s nose”—and in as many minutes as children he determined that all five children were indeed Negroes. Despite Allan Platt’s claims to Irish and American Indian descent, and unconvinced by birth certificates as well as a marriage license which designated the Platts as “white,” McCall ordered the children to be kept out of school, pending further investigation. Platt’s objections fell on deaf ears. If there was one thing Willis McCall could do, he bragged, it was identify both “Black Angus cattle and mulattoes.”

sixty-five pupils at the Mount Dora school to sign a petition stating that the Platt children’s “right to an education has been taken away because of the opinions and prejudice of one man.” The next day, when school opened, the children found a chalk line running down the middle of the sidewalk; one side was marked “White People,” the other “Nigger Lovers.” One child who had signed the petition was stoned with pebbles. A deputy meanwhile visited the Platts with a message from the sheriff’s office “that if they weren’t out by that night, their house would be burned down.”

A letter from Sam Buie, the assistant state attorney, urged the governor, now that he was free to issue a death warrant, to “get rid of this case once and for all.” It was not the first time Buie had attempted to influence the case outside the courtroom. In November 1951, only weeks after McCall had shot the two Groveland boys, Buie had a shocking story to tell, and he chose a high-ranking NAACP officer in Ocala to tell it to. Jesse Hunter, Buie told the officer, was so livid with Marshall after the lawyer attempted to disqualify him from prosecuting the second Groveland Boys trial that Hunter entered into a conspiracy with Willis McCall to kill Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. It was Hunter’s pride, Buie said of his boss, that “caused him to plot this killing with McCall.” Marshall was immediately notified of the alleged conspiracy and saw right through Buie’s ploy. He suspected that by tipping off the NAACP, Buie was doing the bidding of his friend Willis McCall, who was “trying to drag Hunter into this killing.” Marshall was convinced that Hunter was not involved in such a plot because by that time, Hunter had himself, through Mabel Norris Reese, been keeping the NAACP informed on the FBI’s investigation into McCall’s shooting of the Groveland Boys.

Hunter decided that Sheriff McCall was “out of control,” and on behalf of the Platts, the former prosecutor sued the Lake County School Board. On his own money he traveled to South Carolina to obtain documents necessary to support the Platts’ claims, and in court, demanding that the board produce evidence to prove conclusively that the Platt children had Negro blood, he left the school board’s unsupported and insupportable case in shreds. “Much as I hate it,” said the judge, Truman Futch, he had no choice but to rule in favor of the Platts, who in October 1955 won the right to return to the white public school. “The Lord be praised,” said Allan Platt, near tears. “I knew it couldn’t be any other way.” The verdict did not please Sheriff McCall any more than did Jesse Hunter’s apparently blossoming friendship with the “Communist” reporter for the Mount Dora Topic. “I have no comment to make whatsoever,” McCall told reporters. “Absolutely no comment.” He did have a comment for Allan Platt, though, a few days later when a band of “night-riding terrorists” firebombed the Platts’ home. McCall’s investigation turned up footprints at the scene that, the sheriff informed Platt, could have been made by some high school boys who “didn’t want to go to school with burrheads.” McCall then placed the blame for all harassment, threats, and violence aimed at the Platts, not to mention the embarrassment brought upon the Lake County School Board, on Platt himself, as he had instigated the wh...

In the letter McCall argued further, with a parting shot at Thurgood Marshall and his New York lawyers, that commutation of Irvin’s sentence to life “would only be a victory for NAACP who has set out to destroy the authority of our courts, as it is an undisputable fact that they are the ones behind this movement. Should they accomplish this goal, it would mean one thing. That all a Negro criminal would need to do would be to pick out some innocent helpless white woman as a target to satisfy his ravishing sexual desires, keep his mouth shut, proclaim his innocence and let NAACP furnish the money and lawyers to beat the rap. Governor, at this time I have great confidence in you as a deep thinking man, I am praying that you will see fit to let the verdict of the Court stand and keep our great State safe for our fair womanhood. This obligation we owe to our children.” The sheriff’s argument might have persuaded Collins’s predecessors, Fuller Warren and Charley Johns, but the New South governor had no ear for still more racially motivated cries for blood and vengeance. Collins was persuaded more soundly by Bill Harris’s less biased report, which by the way showed Willis McCall’s fingerprints to be all over the Groveland Boys case. From the start, McCall had wanted the four Groveland boys dead, and he had proved himself ready to execute them himself if the state of Florida hadn’t the stomach for it.

In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of limitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay.

Stetson Kennedy’s efforts. In the sixty years since the explosion beneath that modest wooden house in an orange grove, Kennedy never stopped trying to solve the murder of Harry T. Moore. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to access FBI cases files, he hunted down witnesses, he continued to pressure Florida attorneys general and the state’s governors for action, and he lived to see the Moore case reopened three times: in 1978, 1991, and 2005. Stetson Kennedy died in Florida in 2011 at the age of ninety-four.

It all changed—and in his way, with the Groveland Boys, Marshall had helped to change it. “There is very little truth to the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality,” Marshall posited in a 1966 White House conference on civil rights. “Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.” In Groveland, Mabel Norris Reese had come round. So had Jesse Hunter. Governor LeRoy Collins had done the right thing. Maybe, too, that young juror with an honest face, the one who’d been listening so intently to Marshall’s summation at the retrial in Ocala, had fixed his mind on a different kind of future for the South. Marshall’s civil cases, the long battles for voting rights and school desegregation, unquestionably effected lasting social changes, but the criminal cases more immediately brought justice. They “did the most immediate good, because they saved people’s lives,” Marshall said.