Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  By the time the Groveland case memos first crossed Hoover’s desk, the director was disposed to write, “Give this matter your full attention,” across the bottom, ordering a full investigation. Soon thereafter, FBI field office directors were reporting to Hoover that “Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP complimented the Bureau on its hard work in this case.” The two men appeared indeed to have reconciled their differences. The NAACP’s Jack Greenberg took a more cynical view. “The Association and Hoover were using each other,” he said.

  CHAPTER 9: DON’T SHOOT, WHITE MAN

  Just days after the alleged rape, Florida newspapers were calling for capital punishment of the Groveland Boys. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

  BLOODHOUNDS HAD PICKED up the scent of Ernest Thomas. Willis McCall had led more than one thousand armed men into a cypress swamp in northern Florida where they had the fourth Groveland Boy trapped. Around dusk, one group of men on horseback spotted Ernest running across a field two hundred yards in the distance. When they yelled at him to stop, he only ran faster, and six to eight men, spurring their horses to full speed, started firing their guns, McCall noted, “like you see in a western movie.”

  ERNEST THOMAS NEVER made it back to the train depot in Groveland on the night of July 15. He’d left behind the mosquito-bitten sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee with a gun tucked into his pants, and then he’d as good as disappeared. He was nowhere to be found the following day. Something must have spooked him by the time the sun came up. He may have heard about Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin being picked up by Lake County deputies early that morning for the rape of a white woman, or heard about the mob gathering outside Groveland jail, where Charles Greenlee had landed in a cell. There was talk around town that Ernest had returned to Groveland with an eye to getting more involved in the bolita business—perhaps running it from his mother’s juke joint, the Blue Flame—and in that, he had maybe upset certain parties, Henry Singleton in particular. The owner of the only other alcohol-serving Negro juke joint in town, the Blue Moon, for years Singleton not only had run a lucrative bolita operation but also had managed to stay on the good side of Sheriff Willis McCall. Had Ernest Thomas and Henry Singleton perhaps faced off in a confrontation the night before? Might that have been why Ernest had thought it wise to leave Groveland the following morning on the first bus out of town?

  A picture began to emerge after Richard Carter, a reporter for the Daily Compass, a short-lived leftist newspaper in New York, arrived in Lake County to investigate. Carter had been reporting on the dockside rackets of New York’s waterfront when he turned his sights to Groveland. With a keen understanding of organized crime and its political and economic effects, Carter quickly focused on the bolita business in Lake County in an attempt to understand why Ernest Thomas might have fled Groveland on the morning of July 16.

  In the course of his investigation, Carter discovered that Ernest Thomas had been “peddling bolita” in Gainesville for a man named Leroy McKinney, when the two men decided “that there was money to be made by paying odds higher than the traditional 70–1 on a winning bolita number.” By returning to Groveland, Carter learned, Ernest had hoped to expand his bolita business, but he would need a partner in Groveland, so he turned to George Valree, “a bearded, fantastic Negro, who had amassed a fortune in voodooism.” Valree owned two houses in Groveland. In one of them “he looked into his crystal ball” for both local blacks and wealthy whites who came from miles away to pay for his clairvoyant services. The other house “was known to be the headquarters for bolita in South Lake county.” Business was so good that Valree “had recently bought himself a Cadillac.”

  Ernest Thomas, according to Carter, had worked out a “cozy arrangement” with Valree, who began sending business to him. But the new partnership didn’t sit well with the “well-entrenched local bolita hustler” in Groveland, Henry Singleton. In addition to running his own juke joint, Singleton had his hand in bootlegging and the numbers game, and “the law enforcement officers whom Singleton paid for protection” were not pleased with the new competition, Carter wrote. Ernest Thomas would not be allowed to come back into Lake County and take money out of their pockets. Not without a fight. “Things were coming to a head in the bolita war,” Carter wrote, when Singleton and Thomas ran into each other on the night of July 15 and quarreled on the streets of Groveland. “Thomas was feeling his oats and Singleton was resentful,” but Singleton had a powerful Lake County ally who had a definitive interest in the bolita dealer’s continuing prosperity. All Singleton would have to do was pick up the phone and call Willis McCall and let the sheriff know he was having some bolita trouble.

  Three nights after the alleged rape of Norma Padgett, a Bay Lake mob had torched both of George Valree’s homes to the ground. Ernest Thomas had already fled Groveland in fear for his life. And Henry Singleton no longer had to worry about the crystal-gazing seer or the cocky Ernest Thomas cutting into his bolita throws.

  BY THE END of the week, the mobs having finally vacated the streets of Lake County, Willis McCall had released the National Guard: and with the three confessed rapists now indicted and secured at Raiford, the sheriff turned his mind to Ernest Thomas. A phone call to the Gainesville Police Department apprised the sheriff that Ernest had been seen in town recently with his wife, Ruby Lee. Promptly, with his deputy James Yates, McCall was heading up to Gainesville.

  Ruby Lee Thomas claimed she had not seen her husband since the day he had left for Groveland. “It was obvious she was lying,” McCall noted, and after spending the next day pursuing leads that went nowhere, he decided to further question Ruby Lee. As it happened, she was not home, and for the first and “only time in the whole investigation,” as McCall would later say, “I violated the law.” A letter in the Thomas mailbox caught his eye. It “was not sealed very well and came open with very little effort.” It was from Ernest Thomas. The letter told Ruby Lee where her husband would “be until things cooled off” and how she could reach him, under the assumed name of Willy Green, at an RFD mailing address with a box number in Shady Grove, which lay about two hours northwest of Gainesville, near the Georgia border. Thomas would be staying there, he said, “with some kin folks” deep in the swamps.

  The letter being a sure lead, McCall contacted Simmie Moore, the sheriff of Madison County, as well as the sheriffs in neighboring Lafayette and Taylor counties, and together they formulated a plan. Once McCall and Yates, who both had no jurisdiction beyond Lake County, had been deputized by local sheriffs, they set out on their manhunt along with several patrolmen from nearby Perry and Mayo. They’d narrowed Thomas’s whereabouts to a tenant house on a woodland farm near an old turpentine still, where they decided to lie low until their quarry had “settled down for the night”—they’d move in on Thomas when he was sleeping.

  They broke into the tenant house at three in the morning on July 25. They found Thomas’s clothes and a few personal effects, but not Thomas himself. He had switched to another house nearby, but he’d heard the lawmen’s commotion. Roused from his sleep, he had slipped out a window and made a dash for the woods. McCall admitted, “We had not cased the place as well as we would have liked.”

  The lawmen put in a call to the State Road Camp at Perry for bloodhounds. An hour later trucks arrived with men, dogs, and horses; by then Ernest Thomas had had a two-hour head start. The hounds picked up Thomas’s scent at the house where he’d slept, then led his pursuers through a “cotton patch and through a hog pen, and . . . through a big swamp.” The posse knew they were on Ernest’s trail in the swamp when one of the dogs found where Ernest had “cut his breeches legs off”; the hound got so excited, he pulled the leash out of the hand of the Perry prison camp inmate. For six miles they pursued the trail, until the dog gave out and they had to send back to their camp for more hounds. This reprieve allowed Ernest Thomas a little more time to put some distance between himself and the posse, but by early afternoon the do
gs had again picked up his scent. The sheriffs continued the chase. As the hours passed, however, they recognized that the black fugitive’s apparent familiarity with the backwoods and swamps of Madison County had made of him elusive prey.

  Word of Thomas’s escape had spread by then, and the posse grew. Since before nightfall cars had been descending on the area, and men were being deputized in groups to join the manhunt. McCall made sure that the men of Bay Lake and Groveland had been alerted, in the event that any of them might still be seeking justice for the rape of Norma Padgett. With more than a thousand armed men having answered the call, they were able to encircle the farmlands and cypress swamps where they believed Thomas had hidden. Around dusk, a group of men on horseback spotted Thomas briefly and gave chase, firing their guns and ordering him to halt. Again Thomas escaped his pursuers. He disappeared into a thick cypress pond, where the dogs less effectively followed his scent and darkness hindered the search. Still, the posse had him confined, and by daylight on Tuesday, July 26, when they resumed the chase, every road Thomas might have hoped to cross had been blocked off. His sole recourse was the swamp.

  In his legless dungarees, a dirty white flannel shirt, and a pair of muddy tan slippers, Ernest Thomas had been worn down by lack of sleep and his unending flight beneath a ruthless sun. He’d run twenty-five miles, at least, when he found himself in an area of densely wooded pines at the edge of the swamp; he was not far from Moseley Hall—a black section of Madison County in which he hoped to be able to disappear. The hope evaporated when he saw the cars and the armed men patrolling the road. He retreated deeper into the woods, and sitting down, his back against a tree, he drifted into sleep. Nearby, so did one of the bloodhounds in his pursuit. Sheriff McCall had no way to determine if Ernest had befriended the dog asleep at his side or if the dog was guarding the quarry until the posse arrived. The sheriff couldn’t ask Ernest because the posse’s first sight of him asleep prompted a volley of shots that rang out across the swamp. Around 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 26, Ernest Thomas’s lifeless body lay crumpled in a pool of blood, clay, and pine needles. A broken, half-empty pack of Camels was sticking up from the one pocket of his shirt.

  The next day, McCall and Yates drove Norma and Willie Padgett to Madison County in order to view the body of Ernest Thomas at the T. J. Beggs Funeral Home. Also present was the state attorney Jesse Hunter. Norma approached the casket. “That is him,” she said, staring down at the corpse. No matter that Ernest’s face and head were riddled with bullets, she further affirmed, “I would know that face anywhere. He is the one that had the gun and he is the one that drove the car.” Willie Padgett never said a word.

  Two days after the shooting, at a coroner’s inquest, a string of witnesses paraded before county judge Curtis Earp. Almost all of them testified they had been close enough to observe that Thomas was armed and had attempted to fire a .32-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver when he was discovered; yet virtually none of them could say or even approximate, not with “so much excitement” at the scene, how many shots were fired or who was actually present to fire them when Thomas was killed. One of them claimed he was close enough to hear Thomas’s last words, “Don’t shoot, white man, don’t shoot,” but not to see who did the shooting. Nor could he say how many shots had followed, although he did attest that with all the bullets flying, one of the dogs was shot.

  On the one hand, Willis McCall told reporters that Thomas was “belligerent as the devil. He had a loaded pistol in his hand and he had his finger around the trigger”; on the other, under oath, McCall stated he had been nowhere near the spot where Thomas was killed, telling investigators, “I was across on the opposite side of the swamp when the shooting occurred.” He didn’t know who fired the fatal shots, he later told reporters, “but it was a bunch of good fellows.”

  Called as a witness before the inquest, Sheriff Simmie Moore stated that when he arrived at the scene, Thomas was already dead with a bullet hole in the back of the head, two bullet holes in his right temple, and bullet wounds in the forehead, “above the eyes.” Moore had laid down newspapers “because it was a little bloody” and covered Thomas with a cloth. The actual number of bullet wounds sustained by Ernest Thomas was never clearly established, although the Baltimore Afro-American estimated that “nearly 400 slugs” were found in the body. The coroner’s report found that “there were other holes in the body” and that Ernest had been “shot with buckshot, as well as with rifle or revolver bullets.”

  At the end of the testimony, Sheriff Moore was recalled as a witness in the Ernest Thomas inquest. Apparently Moore had been discomposed by the chronic amnesia that had plagued witnesses throughout the hearing, and he wanted something on the record to show which sheriffs were in the vicinity “when this negro was shot.” When asked, Moore replied, “Sheriff McCall of Lake County, and Sheriff Towles of Taylor County.”

  “How many deputy sheriffs were down in that area?” the state attorney then asked.

  “One,” Moore said.

  “Who was that?”

  “Sheriff McCall’s deputy.”

  Ormond Powers, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, had been covering the Groveland story and he told Milton C. Thomas, a former editor from the newspaper, that he had become frustrated with what he perceived were “glaring flaws” in Willis McCall’s versions of events. To start, Powers had never seen any of the confessions McCall claimed to have obtained from the Groveland Boys. He just printed what the sheriff and his deputies told him, but he doubted the defendants had so freely admitted their guilt. Powers believed that reporters were “being told just the things they [law enforcement] wanted written” and that his own “probing questions were never welcomed.” The Sentinel reporter also suspected that Ernest Thomas’s involvement with bolita was the reason the young man had fled Lake County, not the fact that Norma Padgett claimed to have been raped. Powers had questions for Sheriff McCall about the specifics of Thomas’s resistance at the time the Groveland native was gunned down, and those questions “have never been answered.”

  The reporter had come to suspect that McCall was “desperate to seal Thomas’s lips” and that the reason for such an extensive manhunt “was for the purpose of shutting up Thomas permanently.” Officers in northern Florida, Powers believed, “could have taken Thomas,” but Powers suspected “a plot to GET Thomas—and they did. The ‘they’ in this case being organized gamblers.”

  The authorities, Powers said, viewed Thomas as a “definite threat to the established and entrenched gambling set-up in that section of Lake County,” and the posse was organized to make “absolutely sure Thomas had no chance to TALK.” The reporter also observed, “It seemed there was relief that Thomas was dead.” Finally, Ormond Powers told the editor that McCall “was present—and probably shooting—when Thomas was killed,” and that “this might have been cold-blooded murder.”

  THE CORONER’S JURY found that Ernest Thomas had been “lawfully killed” and ruled his death a justifiable homicide. Two hundred miles to the south of Moseley Hall, many of Thomas’s neighbors found the evidence supporting the jury’s ruling to be suspect. One of Groveland’s white elected officials “broadly hinted” to a reporter that it was unlikely that Ernest Thomas had attempted to shoot his way out of the swamp, as “Thomas was a bright, well-dressed, college-educated man. He wasn’t a rough of any sort.” Beyond dispute, though, was the fact that the “Groveland Four,” as the newspapers referred to the Lake County rapists, were now the Groveland three.

  After the inquest, on the drive back to Bay Lake, Willis McCall asked Norma Padgett to hold out her hand. He’d retained a token from the crime scene: something to ease the pain of the seventeen-year-old farm girl. Norma extended her pale, white palm. The sheriff plunked into it a .38-caliber slug that had recently been pumped into the black body of Ernest Thomas.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE much for Franklin Williams to convince Thurgood Marshall that events in Groveland resembled a Little Scottsboro and that NAACP coun
sel ought to intervene. On first hearing, the case for the most part fulfilled the three requirements Marshall had established to guide his staff. For one, the injustice stemmed from race. Second, while the innocence of Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee might be open to question, Marshall had argued enough cases to be suspicious of confessions obtained by law enforcement in Southern jails—especially if the crimes carried a death penalty. Lastly, the case obviously raised due process and equal protection issues.

  Williams presented a persuasive argument, but the New York office was shorthanded. With White, Wilkins, and Marshall’s assistant special counsel, Robert Carter, unavailable, options were limited. In 1949, Constance Baker Motley was still “learning to try cases,” under Marshall, and the prospect of dispatching her to Florida to try a criminal case did not appeal to Marshall. Nor could he enlist a more experienced attorney like William Hastie, the former dean of Howard University School of Law and cousin to Charles Hamilton Houston, as Hastie was still serving his term as governor of the Virgin Islands. (President Truman would soon appoint Hastie to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, thus making him the nation’s first black appellate judge.)