Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  The white people in the courthouse halls might have believed that Lyons was innocent, but the whites on the jury were not prepared to say so. After five and a half hours of deliberation, they returned with a guilty verdict. Marshall was not surprised. “We are in a perfect position to appeal,” he stated, noting that the prosecution had asked for the death penalty, whereas the jury’s sentence of Lyons to life imprisonment for a crime that resulted in “three people killed, shot with a shot gun and cut up with an axe and then burned—shows clearly that they believed him innocent.”

  The Lyons case reaped a harvest of publicity, which was augmented by the statement of E. O. Colclasure, the father of the murdered white woman. He told the press that he did not believe W. D. Lyons was guilty; he opined further that the Oklahoma police and prosecutors had conspired to frame the sharecropper. Moved by Thurgood Marshall’s argument in court, the still grieving father joined the NAACP.

  Confident he could reverse the verdict on appeal, Marshall boarded a train for the long trip back to New York. Despite the loss, he was becoming more optimistic about what had happened in Oklahoma. Every visit to a Jim Crow courtroom confirmed to him that the American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks—but he was seeing tiny cracks in the veneer. Guilty verdicts with recommendations of mercy instead of death sentences. Police officers indicted on brutality charges. Hope where there was none before. Criminal cases could affect people in unexpected ways. They raised awareness, increased NAACP membership, and if handled properly, they could bring in money. Lots of it. “I think we should aim at $10,000,” Marshall wrote to White. “We could use another good defense fund and this case has more appeal tha[n] any up to this time. The beating plus the use of bones of dead people will raise money.” Between the Spell case in Greenwich and Lyons in Oklahoma, Marshall was optimistic about the future. “The NAACP did all right this month. . . . We have been needing a good criminal case and we have it. Lets [sic] raise some real money.”

  CHAPTER 5: TROUBLE FIXIN’ TO START

  The Southern Knights of the KKK, led by Bill Hendrix in 1949. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

  NORMA PADGETT DIDN’T make it home that night.

  The first glare of another warm July sun had just come up over the high and dry pastures of Okahumpka, Florida, when Clifton C. Twiss and his wife, Ethel, up early as usual, heard a car coming up the road. The motor shut off for a moment, then started back up again, and when they looked out the window they saw a thin girl walking away from a small, dark car toward the fork. Clifton picked up his binoculars to get a closer look and then passed them to his wife. The car, with a white man driving, sped away. Unusual thing to see this time of morning, they thought—young, blond girl dressed nicely, pacing back and forth along the newly paved road, a purse slung over her shoulder. They kept an eye on her, curious as to why this waifish teenage girl would be up at six o’clock on a Saturday morning out here in Okahumpka—a town that wasn’t much more than an intersection in Lake County. It was odd, they thought, but she didn’t appear to be in any trouble. The couple, seeing her dropped off by the side of the road, decided she must be hitchhiking or waiting for someone, so they went about their morning rituals, stirring their coffee and reading the morning paper, and occasionally glanced up the road at the girl in the pink dress with the purse.

  At about 6:45 a.m. nineteen-year-old Lawrence Burtoft, who was finishing his shift as watchman at his father’s Okahumpka restaurant, looked out the window and saw the girl standing by the crossroads of Leesburg and Center Hill. He didn’t know her by name, but he’d seen her in the restaurant before and knew that she was from Bay Lake, a small community of mostly dirt-poor farmers about twenty miles south, and he wondered what she was doing up here by the cattle pens in Okahumpka so early in the morning. She looked as if she was waiting for somebody. Burtoft got dressed and went outside to pick up the fresh bread that was dropped off each morning before daylight.

  “Good morning,” the girl said as Burtoft approached. After they’d exchanged greetings, she asked if anybody might be coming along who’d be able to take her back to Groveland. Burtoft told her no and offered her some water or a cup of coffee. She declined, but they went inside the restaurant anyway. Sitting across from Norma Lee at a table, Burtoft slowly sipped his coffee and tried to figure out, without prying, what had brought this girl out here to the middle of nowhere.

  After a few minutes of small talk, Norma indicated that there had been some trouble. She told Burtoft that she’d been out last night with her husband, Willie Padgett, and his car had broken down on the way toward Groveland. Some black men, she said, had come along in a car and pulled over, to see if she and Willie needed any help.

  Burtoft had just finished his coffee when the girl told him the black men had hit Willie over the head and carried her away in their car.

  Burtoft’s eyes studied the girl. “Did they hurt you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, adding only that her feet hurt from walking such a long way.

  Burtoft noticed a tear in the girl’s dress; it had gotten caught on a barbed wire fence, she explained. Burtoft remarked nothing in the girl’s behavior to suggest that she’d been kidnapped by some black men a few hours earlier. Except for a few tears and an occasional sniffle, she “looked to be in a pretty calm condition for her husband to be lying down dead beside the road.”

  The two sat inside the restaurant for fifteen minutes or so, with Norma waiting patiently until Burtoft had finished his breakfast before she asked him to help find her husband. Burtoft detected no urgency in her voice, and as he rode his bike to his parents’ house to get their car, it struck him how strange it all was: Norma Lee so calmly relating how her husband might be lying dead at the side of the road to Groveland.

  When he returned to the restaurant in the family car, he and Norma Lee drove south, back toward Groveland. Burtoft’s reluctance to pry was vying with his curiosity. His heart raced as he began to register the reality of what the girl had told him.

  “Do you think you would recognize them?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. She didn’t think she could, as it was too dark, although she did note that one was extremely dark and one was “high yellow.”

  A few miles down the road, Norma asked Burtoft to pull over. He followed the girl into the high grass alongside the road, any moment expecting to stumble over the body of her husband. But they found nothing. Norma admitted that she did not know exactly where to look, but they did drive farther on. When it became apparent to Norma Lee that they had now driven too far, Burtoft turned the car around and headed back to Okahumpka. Having convinced Norma Lee that they should report the incident to the police in Leesburg, five miles to the north, Burtoft had driven about a mile or so when they came upon another car at the roadside. Two men emerged from the parked car and flagged them down. Burtoft stopped; he recognized one man, Curtis Howard, a classmate from Leesburg High School, and he had seen the other one, short and lean, more than once on the dance floor, but not with Norma. Willie Padgett came over to his wife; they didn’t speak a single word to each other.

  Strangely calm, Burtoft thought. Only minutes before, Norma Lee had been half expecting to find her husband dead. And Willie Padgett couldn’t have been certain his wife was alive, either. Burtoft had anticipated a more emotional reunion, but Norma simply got into the other car while Willie thanked Burtoft for his time and trouble.

  “You’re quite welcome,” Burtoft said, still dazed as he watched the two men drive off with the girl.

  SHERIFF WILLIS MCCALL was on his way back from an Elks Club convention in Cleveland, Ohio, with a deputy, a prisoner, and some friends when he stopped his sturdy Oldsmobile 88 in Citra, a small Florida town, home to the pineapple orange, about an hour and a half north of Groveland. Standing outside the Olds in his tall, white Stetson hat, the lumbering forty-year-old sheriff savored a long swig from a Coca-Cola bottle; he’d been driving for hours. The trip had been a ge
taway from the never-ending job of maintaining “lawanorder” in Lake County, but he had managed to conduct a little business in Ohio, picking up a prisoner in Columbus to face break-in and assault charges in Lake County court. McCall had been away from Florida for only a few days, but he couldn’t resist the urge to check in on his domain. He reached down and powered on the police radio.

  “We’re probably too far away to get anything from Tavares on this thing,” he said as he started up the car and bucked his six-foot, three-inch frame behind the wheel. As he drove south into citrus country, the radio cackled beneath the lull of the heavy engine until McCall thought he could make out the voice of his deputy, James Yates, in distress. Something about a shooting in Lake County. McCall stiffened behind the wheel, then reached for the radio and managed to get Reuben Hatcher, the county jailer, on the other end.

  “What’s the trouble?” McCall asked after identifying himself.

  Hatcher was breathing hard and trying to compose himself. “Boy, I’ve never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice,” he told McCall, adding that “there’s a lot of trouble fixin’ to start . . . some of the people down there are making all kinds of threats.”

  McCall tried to make sense of Hatcher’s panic but he could barely make out the jailer’s voice on the radio. He wanted to know exactly what had happened in Groveland. Only his radio had gone silent. It was a long couple of minutes till it cackled again. Then nothing, a static hiss. Finally, with heavy clarity the words came.

  “A white housewife . . . raped by four negroes . . .”

  With his passengers sitting in stunned silence, Willis McCall’s ears pricked up. Black suspects were in custody, he was told, but a mob was forming in Groveland and there was a “pretty high feeling” around the county. McCall stared straight down the highway, one hand gripped tight on the wheel as he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. He knew Lake County better than anyone and he could sense the distress on the other end of the radio. Night was coming; he needed to get back fast. The sheriff had one more thought, which he was able to relay to the jailer.

  “Call Yates and tell him to get the Negroes out right away,” he said. “Hide them in the woods.”

  MCCALL HIGHTAILED IT to his split-level farmhouse in Eustis, threw the Oldsmobile into park, and began unloading luggage from his trunk to the garage. Night was falling, and he knew now that a large mob of heavily armed men was forming in Groveland, and another in Mascotte twenty-five miles to the south. A gang of blacks, he’d been told, had raped a young, white Lake County girl, and as the news quickly spread, cars were rapidly gathering. Vengeance charged the county air. McCall knew how it would end, unless Yates got the Negroes hidden in the woods. Say nothing more on the radio, McCall had told his deputies: men at the Leesburg station might be listening, and McCall wanted no chance of a tip-off that might lead to a roadblock or ambush. He needed to secure the suspects because in darkness, he knew these south Lake County men would head north to Tavares. He was sure of it. They’d storm the jail, and there’d be no stopping the lynching.

  The sheriff was hoisting his luggage from the trunk when two cars pulled up to his house. In the first car he could see Deputy Yates and another man, Captain Bill Allison, a warden of the prison camps in Tavares. Deputy Leroy Campbell pulled the second car in behind them. Joining the sheriff in front of the house, Yates told him the Negroes were lying down in the back of his car; he’d ordered them to keep their heads down, so no one had seen them as they drove through town. Yates added that they had confessed to raping Norma Padgett.

  Willis McCall was quiet. He walked toward the rear of Yates’s car. His wife, Doris, had stepped outside, and he could hear his sons, Malcolm and Donnie, laughing and playing inside—the two boys oblivious to their father’s mood and the deputies’ tension. McCall peered inside his deputy’s car. He could see two prisoners crumpled together on the floorboard, handcuffs joining their wrists. He opened the rear door and immediately recognized the faces of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, the two army veterans from Groveland who had been picked up by Lake County deputies early that morning. As the door swung open, the dazed prisoners could hear the echo of children’s laughter at the same time they caught a glimpse of the “Big Hat Man” who stared down at them. They were all of them in a world of trouble.

  WITH SHEPHERD AND Irvin still slumped down on the floor in the back of the car, Yates and another deputy sped north toward Florida State Prison, in Raiford, some two hours away. McCall fired up his Olds and headed in the opposite direction, toward Groveland, where he aimed to quiet any mob he might encounter. He never made it. Just outside the city limits, he spotted a motorcade of twenty-five cars moving toward Tavares, their headlights blazing a path to the jail. McCall, certain they meant business, spun his car around. After following them for a few miles, he gunned the engine and, pulling ahead of the convoy, he took the lead into Tavares. He had his revolver at hand on the seat next to him.

  McCall parked the car and hurried to the back of the courthouse. He left his gun behind; with more than 125 men “armed to the gills” coming toward him, a revolver would be no deterrent. McCall recognized many in the mob as Bay Lake farmers, men he knew, and he knew a show of force was likely to provoke them into violence. If he was going to prevent a lynching, McCall was going to have to do it with his wits and personality.

  “Willis, we want them niggers.”

  Flowers Cockcroft, thirty-five, the “husky, brash” son of a Lake County watermelon farmer, stepped forward and spoke for the mob. The sheriff removed his hat and, attempting to meet their rage with a smile, talked fast and acknowledged as many of the men as he could by name. “I can’t let you people do this,” he said, looking toward Cockcroft. “You fellas elected me to uphold the law, and I’ve got to do it.”

  McCall was answered by men in the back of the mob hurling obscenities, but he dared not show any fear. He lowered his voice. “I may be in sympathy, and I know you’re stirred up about this thing,” he said. “You’ve got a right to be. But you don’t have a right to take the law into your own hands. These Negroes are going to be held and tried in court.”

  “Look, McCall,” one man shouted, “we’re going to fix them niggers right now or none of our women is gonna be safe.”

  Even as the sheriff continued to reason with them, he could sense they were determined in their purpose and he feared they might be on the verge of storming the jail. His reputation around Lake County might be enough to hold them off, but only if he changed his tactics. “The prisoners you want are no longer here,” McCall told them. “They’ve been taken elsewhere.”

  From the back, jeers and shouts of “Liar!” pierced the night. The mob thought McCall was bluffing; they demanded to be let into the jail. A few minutes of heated discussion later, McCall agreed to allow a small delegation inside to search the jail cells for two black prisoners. He pointed to two men at the front of the lynch mob; Willie Padgett and his father-in-law, Coy Tyson, stepped forward. Padgett would at least recognize the men who had beaten him and abducted Norma the night before, and Coy Tyson couldn’t wait to lay eyes on the men who’d raped his daughter. Flowers Cockcroft, the self-appointed spokesman of the mob, also joined them. McCall had negotiated an agreement, and Deputy Campbell led the three men into the courthouse while the sheriff and a few nervous deputies waited outside with the rest of the mob.

  IN HIS CELL on the top floor of the jailhouse, sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee was still trying to figure out what was happening to him. He had just arrived in town the night before from Gainesville, where he and his friend Ernest Thomas had been washing dishes and flipping burgers together at the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In. The twenty-five-year-old Ernest had been looking to come home to Groveland and he’d convinced his younger friend that plenty of orange-picking work awaited both of them in the groves of Lake County.

  At six feet tall, Charles looked older than his age, but he still had the wiry frame and the fears of a teenager. Leaving home hadn�
��t been easy for him. His close-knit family had endured a summer of unimaginable agony. In May, Charles’s four-year-old sister had been killed when she was struck by an Atlantic Coastline train passing on the tracks close by their home in Pine Top, near the Georgia border, in Baker County, Florida. His grief-stricken thirty-two-year-old mother, Emma, was already inconsolable when, in the cruelest of fates, just weeks later her two-year-old daughter was killed on the same tracks. The family had been irreparably damaged. Charles’s own grief had compelled him to leave.

  On the morning of July 15, in Zuber, Florida, Charles and Ernest had hitched a ride south on the back of a University of Florida truck. They’d caught a few more rides, and eventually some white men in a Dodge truck had dropped them off in Mascotte. They had walked the remaining couple of miles along the train tracks to Groveland. Both of them were filthy, and since their plan was for Charles to stay at the Thomas house, they decided he should wait in the train depot while Ernest picked up some clean clothes at the Thomases’ home for Charles to wear. He had been waiting about an hour and a half when Ernest returned in a 1941 Pontiac with two packages of cookies, a bag of peanuts, and a bottle of soda water, but no clean clothes. For those, Charles would have to wait a few more hours, until Ernest’s mother got home from her job running a beer joint in Groveland.

  The idea of loitering in the rail depot of an unfamiliar town at night, when he was all sweaty and caked in road dust, made Charles more than a little anxious. So, when he spotted a .45 Colt revolver with a four-inch barrel beside his friend on the front seat of the Pontiac, he asked, half jokingly, if Ernest would let him meanwhile hang on to the gun. To Charles’s surprise Ernest agreed. He handed over the gun, then drove off in the Pontiac. Charles would never see his friend again.