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

by Gilbert King

“There is very little truth in the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality. Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.”

“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.”

The “Florida bail bond racket” was, according to a former Orlando newspaper editor, the “most lucrative business in the state.” The bondsmen worked hand in glove with employers to secure labor in exchange for fines and bond costs.

In 1930, the NAACP hired the Harvard-educated lawyer Nathan Ross Margold to study areas in which legalized segregation might be most vulnerable to attack in the courts, and finding discrimination in the financing of public schools to be especially assailable, Margold advised the NAACP to “boldly challenge the constitutional validity” of black schools that were systematically underfunded in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause; for in every case, when states exercised their discretion to spend public funds designated for elementary and high schools, appointments to white schools significantly exceeded those to black schools.

From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana.

As U.S. Army regulations allowed soldiers to continue to wear their military uniforms after completing their service, many black veterans did exactly that, perhaps to remind their communities that they, too, had defended their country. They had also been dispatched to foreign nations, particularly in Europe, where minorities experienced more tolerance and openness than they ever had in America, especially in the South. So, like many black veterans returning home to states in the South and the one south of the South, Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were not prepared to return to the fields or citrus groves of Lake County under the conditions defined by Jim Crow.

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.

Marshall and Patterson were deeply divided in their philosophies on both legal tactics and civil rights. Marshall particularly resented the CRC’s strategy in high-profile capital cases, which, he believed, “was to go into the local community, spit on the door of the courthouse, cuss at the judge and raise holy cain—and, incidentally, get the men electrocuted.” 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.

Not until 1981 (in an LDF-assisted case) did the Supreme Court rule that such a possibility discouraged appeal and “deterred the assertion of constitutional rights.” In essence, then, the Supreme Court interpreted a less-than-death sentence as an “acquittal” by the jury of “whatever was necessary to impose the death sentence” in the first trial, and thus ruled, under the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, that an appellant could not subsequently be sentenced to death in a second trial. In 1949, though, a legal misstep in the appellate process could send Charles Greenlee from a work farm to death row.

The rights of Sweatt to attend the University of Texas cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of any group of citizens. It matters not to me whether every single Negro in this country wants segregated schools. It makes no difference whether every white person wants segregated schools. If Sweatt wants to assert his individual, constitutional right, it cannot be conditioned upon the wishes of every other citizen.

“it is necessary to establish the principle of the indivisibility of liberty so that the masses recognize that no matter where liberty is challenged, no matter where oppression lifts its head, it becomes the business of all the masses.”

Tell Bo I did not run out on him but went down fighting that he might have better and broader opportunities than I had without prejudice or bias operating against him, and in any fight some fall.

The NAACP lawyers were set to argue three specific issues before the Court: jury exclusion, change of venue, and lack of adequate time to prepare a defense.

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 would reverse.”

That same day in April, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur on the grounds that he was “unable to give his whole support to the policies of the U.S. Government.” Although Marshall did not pretend that Truman’s decision had anything to do with MacArthur’s dilatory response to the segregation of black servicemen in the U.S. Army, he was pleased to note that MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, “desegregated in about three weeks. Desegregated the whole thing.”

Before the year’s end the “Florida Terror,” as it was dubbed by the press, had resulted in a dozen disastrous bombings and numerous failed attempts to destroy racial and religious-based sites: 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.”

“As matters now stand,” Marshall told reporters, “two colored men have already lost their lives as a result of this charge of attack of a white woman; one being killed by a sheriff’s posse and one by Sheriff McCall. Another is serving a life sentence. The fourth, Walter Irvin, although shot twice in the chest and once in the neck, must still stand trial and face the threat of the electric chair. This is typical Southern Justice.”

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? Respectfully yours, Harry T. Moore

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.

County sheriff departments and known Klan members were hardly forthcoming, and in central Florida the line between law enforcement and the KKK had often been indistinct. By the end of the 1940s it was completely blurred. “We’d go in and talk to someone in law enforcement,” Meech reported, “and they’d say, ‘what the hell are you investigating that for?’ He was only a nigger.”

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in the most important civil rights case of the twentieth century. The Court had found, just as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had observed on their tour of the South twenty years earlier, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” State laws that established separate public schools for blacks and whites were thus ruled unconstitutional, in violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

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.

In fact, McCall served seven consecutive terms as sheriff of Lake County. In his twenty-eight-year tenure, on various charges of misconduct, McCall was the subject of dozens of investigations. Not a single charge stuck. The sheriff’s personal reign of terror ended in 1972, when he was indicted and suspended from office by Governor Reubin Askew: the sixty-two-year-old McCall had kicked to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell. Although McCall was acquitted of the charges, the time he’d spent defending himself in court had prevented him from campaigning effectively enough to win that year’s election. Still, he was only barely defeated in his bid for an eighth consecutive term.

“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.