by Gilbert King
Months would pass before Marshall regained full strength, but he nevertheless returned to Columbia, despite his doctor’s warnings. In November he won in Tennessee, but more important, he survived not only a mysterious virus but also a lynching party. Walter White, in his autobiography A Man Called White, wrote, “It is doubtful whether any other trial in the history of America was ever conducted under more explosive conditions.” But White wrote those words in 1948, one year before Thurgood Marshall became involved in his most deadly and dramatic case ever. It would far surpass the Columbia Race Riot trials in its explosive conditions, and its consequences would have an impact on the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and its staff for decades to come.
CHAPTER 3: GET TO PUSHIN’
Willie Padgett rests his foot against his 1940 Ford sedan as he shares a laugh with Deputy James Yates. (Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
NORMA LEE WORE a pink farm dress on the worst night of her life.
Blond and seventeen years old, she pushed the wedding ring back onto her finger; tossed a compact, powder, and perfume into her purse; and sauntered outside her daddy’s house to where Willie was waiting beside his run-down 1940 Ford. He opened the door for her and Willie’s eyes went right to Norma’s bare legs as she slid her thin body across the tattered seat. With only one stop to make, Willie pulled away from the Tyson farmhouse as the Florida sun was setting, and minutes later he idled the old Ford in front of Frisz’s Bar and Grill, where he ran inside and picked up a bottle of whiskey for the big dance.
On July 15, 1949, the front pages of newspapers across the country bannered frightening news for Americans. President Truman had called an emergency meeting with “top Cabinet, military, atomic and Congressional leaders” on a matter so secret that none of the participants would comment “for the good of the country.” As it turned out, Russia, aided by spies who worked on the Manhattan Project, was just weeks from successfully testing its first atom bomb, a near replica of the U.S. Fat Man design, years earlier than analysts had expected. The United States was already in the throes of the Red Scare, and Americans’ fears of atomic warfare and the spread of communism intensified.
The same day another headline in the papers announced that the celebrated stage star and singer Paul Robeson had been a member of the Communist Party for years, and was “ambitious to become ‘the Black Stalin’ ”—or so a former communist testified at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington, D.C. The witness stated further that the Communist Party planned to set up a black republic through an armed revolt in the South, extending from Maryland to Texas, and that Robeson had been assigned “certain secret work that was intercontinental.”
On that mid-July Friday, twenty-three-year-old Willie Haven Padgett, his work on the farm done for the week, was blissfully unaware of the portents of nuclear warfare or the creeping threat of communism. He was looking forward to a Friday night of drinking and dancing and getting whatever else he might in the backseat of his car before the sun came up. Born and raised among the lower-class whites of Tattnall County, Georgia, Willie had moved with his family to Bay Lake, Florida—a clannish stretch of truck farmers who mostly lived off the land in scattered wooden shacks a few miles south of Groveland. He hadn’t made it past grammar school, so he had already put in years of hard work in the family’s fertile Lake County soil when he met a frail but comely girl up the road named Norma Lee Tyson.
Still, Willie was nervous, despite the fact that this was hardly their first date. He’d met the Tyson girl the year before, when she was just sixteen years old, and he and Norma had married a few months later. But things had been rocky from the start, and the two had separated even before their first anniversary. Norma’s father, Coy Tyson, had had a lot to do with that. He didn’t much care for the freckled, bucktoothed kid who asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and Coy Tyson certainly didn’t like the fact that his daughter was often left at home while Willie caroused all night all over Lake County. Rumors around town had it that the short-tempered Willie got rough with young Norma—that he slapped her around at times—and Bay Lake locals knew Coy Tyson wasn’t going to stand for behavior like that. Willie realized he had to watch his step with Norma these days, because the Tysons were not to be messed with, and tonight might be his last opportunity to make things right with Norma Lee.
One thing working in Willie’s favor was that Norma, despite her age, wasn’t exactly an innocent farm girl—not even in the eyes of her father. Her reputation around town was “not good,” according to one white woman who knew her, and “a bad egg” is how another local described her. For Norma had been seen “cavorting with Negroes”—one sure way for a white girl to tarnish her reputation—and this may have been why Coy Tyson was willing to give Willie another chance with his daughter. The Padgetts and the Tysons alike had thought the young couple would benefit by a temporary separation; both had some growing up to do.
By the summer of 1949, Norma was living at her father’s house and Willie had moved back onto his mother’s property about a mile down the road from the Tysons. The monotony of long hours on the farm and the haunting daily reminder that he had failed so early in his marriage had Willie looking forward to the weekend as a chance to patch things up with his teenage bride. There was a dance at the American Legion hall in Clermont, about sixteen miles away, and if Willie could get his jalopy of a car to run—and if Coy Tyson would approve—he could show Norma a good time out on the town.
For Norma, even if she and Willie were having troubles, the idea of going out dancing with him on a Friday night was still preferable to another night at home with her father. Why should Willie always be out having a good time? Why should she be always the one stuck at home?
After picking up a bottle of whiskey at Frisz’s, the Padgetts arrived at the American Legion hall in Clermont around 9:30 p.m. They found a table with Willie’s sister and her husband, and mixing with young farmers and war veterans still in their twenties, the young couple drank whiskey, danced, and gabbed until 1 a.m. After a last dance, they left the hall and headed for Willie’s old Ford.
Willie tried to start the car, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. According to Norma’s later account, they had to “get it pushed off” in order to leave the unpaved parking lot. As they rolled down the road into darkness, both of them roaring drunk, Norma announced she was hungry, as she hadn’t had anything to eat that night; so they decided to drive to Burtoft’s Café, a “dine-and-dance spot” in Okahumpka, to grab a sandwich. With farmland and pastures flickering by the car window, they passed what was left in the bottle of whiskey back and forth. They had traveled some miles north toward Okahumpka when it dawned on Willie that Burtoft’s Café probably wouldn’t be open at this hour. Norma decided they should turn around; she was tired, she just wanted to go home.
Willie slowed the car. The road was deserted, and Willie’s hopes were empty. Nothing magical was happening between him and Norma—all they shared was frustration and youthful impatience and confusion. Maybe it would never work out between them. What would they be, then? Neighbors? Willie didn’t see himself ever leaving Bay Lake, and Norma wasn’t going anywhere, either. Seventeen years old, thin, and pretty, but a prisoner in her daddy’s house, sitting around all day and night with her daddy whispering in her ear that Willie Padgett’s no good. Another man was sure to come along, come to rescue her. Willie had seen the young veterans practically leering at Norma when he was dancing with her. No doubt they were whispering, too, wondering where things stood and how long it would be before Norma was free of him. Well, she was still Willie Padgett’s wife. At least in name she was.
Good and drunk now, Willie took another swig of whiskey before handing the bottle to Norma. Then, slowing the car, he made a right turn down a dirt driveway, but he didn’t get far. He struggled with the wheel to pull up beside some mossy oaks, and stopped at a fence gate. The Ford’s engine rattled the dashboard. The headlights illuminated
the white, sandy road before them. Despite the shining moon, it was undeniably dark and uncomfortably quiet, with no signs of cars coming from either direction. Norma Lee, in her pink cotton dress, sat on the front bench seat, her delicate body pressed against the door, while she waited for Willie, the boy she called “Haven” in happier moments, to rest his hand on the gearshift and turn the car back around so that she could finally go home.
SAMUEL SHEPHERD WAS having car troubles of his own that night. He and his friend Walter Irvin, both twenty-two-year-old army veterans from the same outfit, had started out the evening in his father’s 1937 Ford, but the car was not acting right in Groveland. So Samuel drove them back to the Shepherd house in Bay Lake around 9:30 p.m.; there he hoped to swap the old Ford for his brother James’s Mercury. James, who was married to Walter’s sister, ultimately consented to the switch, on the promise they’d have the car back before James had to leave for work in the morning. The two friends gassed up the tank and headed east for a night out.
The town of Eatonville was only six miles north of Orlando and thirty-five miles east of the town that Samuel and Walter called home. Yet it was worlds away from Groveland. After the Civil War, many black soldiers, not content to be swept into the undesirable parts of a town, chose to settle in one of dozens of race colonies that had begun to spring up across the nation. There blacks could live a life that was virtually free of racial friction. In 1887, Eatonville became the first incorporated African-American community in America. According to its most famous resident, the writer Zora Neale Hurston, who gained fame during the Harlem Renaissance, Eatonville was something of an oasis for blacks—“a pure Negro town . . . where the only white folks were those who passed through.” She described it as “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.” (In 1949, after traveling the world and after decades in New York, where she’d moved in the same Harlem circles as Thurgood Marshall, Hurston had returned home after being falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy. The charges were ultimately dropped, but the damage to Hurston’s reputation was irreparable, and unable to make a living with her pen, the talented, outspoken, and now broke Eatonville resident was working as a housemaid in Florida.)
For Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, a night out in Eatonville was a welcome respite from the discriminating ways of Jim Crow and the continual racial harassment they’d endured while growing up together in Lake County. On their arrival in Eatonville, the two friends swaggered into Club Eaton—a renowned nightspot on the Chitlin’ Circuit where well-known black musicians such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and a young local boy named Ray Charles performed during the segregation era. Samuel and Walter ate a light supper, drank a few beers, chatted with girls, and played the jukebox. Then they decided to see what was happening at Club 436 in nearby Altamonte Springs. There the two army buddies ordered a quart of beer. After an hour or so, because Irvin had to get up early to work with his father in the orange groves under Florida’s unforgiving summer sun, and as he wanted to get at least a few hours of sleep, they finished their beer and drove approximately forty miles west, over a hot, flat land dotted with wild orange trees and live oaks swathed in Spanish moss.
It was long past midnight, and Samuel and Walter were just a few miles north of Groveland when they came upon a 1940 Ford by the side of the road. Samuel slowed the Mercury, and as he passed the car he saw a young white couple inside. About fifty yards farther on, Samuel stopped and turned the Mercury around. Willie had emerged from the Ford and was shouting something as Samuel and Walter rolled up to his car. Shepherd stuck his head out the window. “Need any help?” he asked.
“Yes,” Willie answered. Shepherd put the Mercury in park, Irvin got out, and Willie explained that the car’s battery was dead and that he needed a push to jump-start the car. Norma, still inside the Ford, interrupted the men’s discussion several times, telling Willie to get in the car so that they could get the engine started and get home. “OK, in a minute,” Willie told her.
Finally, Shepherd and Irvin went around to the back of the Ford, and Willie hopped in next to Norma. The two army veterans leaned in and began pushing, to no avail. One of the rear wheels was still lodged in sand. Samuel and Walter stopped to rest. “Get to pushin’,” Willie ordered them, popping his head out the window. Samuel didn’t like his tone.
Frustrated, impatient, Norma and Willie got out of the car to find out why the two black men had ceased their effort. Samuel tried to explain that it was no use: The battery was dead; they had given it a try but the car wasn’t budging. They were both sweating and breathing hard, and Shepherd was annoyed. He had stopped to help and didn’t appreciate being bossed around by Padgett. To ease the tension, Norma smiled at the two friends and extended the whiskey bottle to Samuel. He gratefully took a swig, then passed the bottle to Walter, who handed it back to Norma. Willie glared as his eyes followed the bottle, and when Norma extended it to him, he erupted. “Do you think I’m gonna drink behind a nigger?” Willie spat.
That was it for Samuel Shepherd. He’d had enough; after going out of his way to help this drunken cracker, Shepherd wasn’t about to abide his insults. He grabbed Willie by the shirt. Willie tried fighting back, but, drunk and scrawny, he was no match for Samuel. In just a few seconds Willie was flat on his back, either knocked out or passed out, in the ditch.
The two friends stood for a moment, their eyes set on a motionless Willie Padgett lying sprawled in the grass beside a pasture fence. They hadn’t hurt him too badly, and he’d had it coming, but this was Lake County, and they could see the picture. Cross a white man wrong in these parts and you’re like to find your own black self lying dead in a ditch. Norma Lee Padgett, still clutching the near-empty bottle of whiskey, steadied herself on the sand and clay. Bathed in the bright moonlight and the glow from the Mercury’s headlights, she knew. She knew nothing good would come of this. They all knew.
CHAPTER 4: NIGGER IN A PIT
Charles Hamilton Houston. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)
HER NICKNAME WAS “Big East,” and, like her friend Thurgood Marshall, she was a force to be reckoned with. Nearly six feet tall, exotic-looking, athletic, and graceful, Evelyn Cunningham was a black reporter and columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier, and was known around New York for her “high heels, red hair, mink coat and attitude.”
“When Evelyn Cunningham entered a room, you knew it,” said Charles Rangel, the congressman from New York, longtime Harlem resident, and former desk clerk at the Hotel Theresa. Cunningham’s other nickname, “the Lynching Editor,” stemmed from her days as a stringer for the Courier, when she traveled through the South to cover the same racial atrocities and trials that claimed the attention of Marshall and the NAACP. “I wanted to do hard news,” Cunningham said, “and he [the Courier editor] started worrying about me and I said, ‘Well, I get killed somewhere it’s not your fault. Can’t nobody sue you ’cause you weren’t even there. Chicken!’ ” Like Marshall, Cunningham loved the travel and the excitement of working for a cause she believed in—civil rights. “I think I did my best writing during that period of danger,” she said. “Went to jail a couple of times, I was threatened, I was almost raped, all the bad things . . . really bad.”
Cunningham claimed she conned her editors into assigning her to the dangerous stories she wanted to report. “I said, ‘You know, they don’t lynch women. I got an advantage being a woman. Everything they’re doing, they’re doing to men.’ And they bought that!”
Hard as Marshall and Cunningham worked on the road, in New York they found occasion to play. One night they decided to visit an illegal after-hours club that didn’t open until three in the morning. It was filled with smoke, sultry bebop music, and the “not particularly savory” people that Marshall usually steered clear of. But after a few drinks, the lawyer loved being in the middle of
it. With a cigarette dangling from his lips and a drink in his hand, Marshall was enjoying himself, Cunningham recalled. They were having a great, noisy time when, suddenly, police descended on the club from all directions. It was a raid. The music stopped; people screamed and scattered. Thinking quickly, Cunningham accosted a cop she recognized, telling him, “You can’t arrest this man. He is very, very important, he’s with the NAACP, you’ve got to let him go.” The officer permitted Cunningham to lead Marshall through a side door, out to the street. Big East was trying her best to get him away from the scene as fast as possible, but Marshall apparently wasn’t ready for the night to end. Cars rolled by, with horns honking, as police jostled men into waiting wagons. Espying his fellow club patrons in handcuffs and custody, the boisterous, slightly inebriated lawyer spun around in his tracks and bellowed, “I would like to defend these guys—these cops got no right doing this!” Big East grabbed him by his coat sleeve and dragged him away. “Time to go home,” she said, convinced that Marshall would have surely gotten himself arrested. “He was a bit high,” she recalled.
That he was out so late at night in New York while living at 409 Edgecombe was no surprise to friends, who observed that Marshall’s relationship with his wife had “become distant and lifeless.” Buster had by now become accustomed to Marshall’s constant travel and days, or weeks, away from home. They had been married only a few years in 1933 when Marshall was in his final year at Howard University Law School and his professor Charles Hamilton Houston approached his prize student with a proposition. Houston had been asked by the NAACP to defend George Crawford, a Virginia man accused of murdering two white women, and Houston invited Marshall to assist with the case. It was an opportunity Marshall could not pass up. He assisted Houston more than diligently, working long hours in the Howard law library. He also caught the eye of Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, who observed a “lanky, brash young senior law student” who was always present. “Amazed at [Marshall’s] assertiveness in challenging positions taken by Charlie and the other lawyers,” White recognized young Thurgood’s “great value to the case in doing everything he was asked, from research on obscure legal opinions to foraging for coffee and sandwiches.” The opportunity not only to study under Houston but also to work alongside the legal giant was a life-changing event for Marshall. Although they were unable to win an acquittal for Crawford, they did together prevent a death sentence. That in itself was worth celebrating, for both men knew that when blacks were charged with killing whites in the South, a life sentence was a victory. “You’ve won,” Marshall later said, “because normally they were hanging them.”