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

by Gilbert King

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.”