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

by Gilbert King

they documented public facilities and schools for blacks in rural areas of the South that, to both men, seemed to have been lost in time.

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

He noted that the whites he spoke with were less interested in seeking revenge for the rape of Norma Padgett than in seeing the demise of “all independent colored farmers.”

While none of it was true, the Morning Sentinel editorial effectively captured the sentiment among most Lake County whites, especially in its implicit warning, or threat, that unless the accused men were, as McCarthy wrote, “offered up as a ‘legal’ blood-sacrifice . . . evil will befall the rest of the Negro community.”

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.

The defense dared not to question in any way either the purity of the Flower of Southern Womanhood, however indelicately she might be represented by Norma Lee Padgett, or her probity in the “contention that she [had] been ravished” by four savage blacks. Should the defense dare to tread upon a white Southern woman’s honor, not only would the jury fail to acquit a black man of a rape charge, but they would also most surely deliver him a death sentence. So the only practicable strategy for the defense in the Groveland Boys case was to raise reasonable doubt by showing that the state of Florida had arrested the wrong men.