Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  In the end, Marshall assigned the case to Franklin Williams himself. Williams had argued Watts v. Indiana with Marshall before the Supreme Court a few months earlier—another instance when the NAACP was shorthanded—and the young lawyer effectively convinced the justices that a murder confession had been obtained involuntarily. So it was that Williams found himself on a plane to central Florida.

  The thirty-one-year-old assistant special counsel had been hired by the NAACP in 1945, when he’d impressed Walter White by passing the New York state bar examination before receiving his degree from Fordham University Law School. Williams, a native of Flushing, Queens, New York, and like Marshall, an alumnus of Lincoln University, had served in a segregated unit of the U.S. Army during World War II, his military experience being particularly useful to Marshall at a time when the NAACP was handling numerous cases in which black servicemen appeared to have been unjustly court-martialed. Like all counsel under Marshall, though, Williams had soon found himself working on briefs and appeals for cases involving school desegregation, restrictive covenants, and transportation. A 1946 case that had especially commanded Williams’s attention concerned a young former sergeant in the U.S. Army, Isaac Woodard, who had been maimed by police just hours after receiving his honorable discharge.

  On February 13, Woodard, in uniform, had boarded a Greyhound bus at Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, and was heading to South Carolina to pick up his wife so they could travel on to New York together to visit his parents. Not long into the trip he and the bus driver got into a dispute over Woodard’s need to use a drugstore bathroom during a stop. The argument was brief, but when the driver stopped again in Batesburg, South Carolina, Woodard was removed from the bus and taken to a nearby alley, where the policemen beat him with their nightsticks. They then arrested Woodard for disorderly conduct and threw him into a cell, where he was again drubbed with a nightstick, by the chief of police, Linwood Shull. When Woodard awoke the next morning, both eye sockets had been ruptured and his corneas irreparably damaged, but police denied him any medical attention for two days. Woodard had already been blinded for life when, two days after the beating, he was dropped off by police at a hospital in Aiken, South Carolina. The substandard medical care he received there resulted in amnesia, and it was several weeks before his relatives, who had reported the sergeant missing, were able to find him.

  While Williams was eager to take Woodard’s case, which certainly met Marshall’s guidelines, he knew that any investigation would be difficult given that his client was both blind and unable to remember many of the details of his ordeal. Eventually Williams managed to locate a student from the University of South Carolina who had been on the bus with Woodard; the student identified Shull as the arresting officer. With that the NAACP immediately began publicizing Woodard’s story. When Walter White met with President Harry Truman during “that terrible summer of 1946” after several high-profile lynchings of black soldiers in the South had caught the nation’s attention, Truman “exploded” on being informed that the state of South Carolina had simply dismissed the Woodard incident. Truman ordered the Justice Department to investigate; the indictments of Shull and his officers followed shortly thereafter.

  The blinding of Isaac Woodard enraged the public. Orson Welles campaigned on his radio broadcasts for punishment of the police officers; Woody Guthrie recorded “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” To raise awareness further, the NAACP sent Woodard on a national tour with Franklin Williams to speak about the soldier’s beating and blinding at the hands of police. The pair made an unforgettable impression. Woodard, who had begun to regain his memory, was initially terrified to address an audience he could not see, but from the outset of the tour his account of the pride he felt at serving his country in the Pacific, which earned him a Battle Star and a Good Conduct Medal, deeply stirred his audience, as did the poignant rendering of his anticipation as he boarded the bus, believing he was only hours away from seeing his wife, and then his desolation over the loss of his memory and sight. The soldier was “a good platform person,” according to Williams, who would follow Woodard’s story with a passionate appeal for funds.

  Williams was good on the platform, too. Thin and handsome, with a chiseled face and dark, deep-set eyes, he dressed in sharp, tailored suits, often with a bow tie and fedora. What he lacked in experience the urbane young lawyer more than made up for in confidence, and his substantial intelligence matched his forceful presence. Williams perfectly projected the NAACP’s desired public image. As the newest attorney on a staff that included Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, and Constance Baker Motley, Williams was proving himself a worthy addition in his tireless advocacy on behalf of Isaac Woodard. When Woodard and Williams appeared at Harlem’s Lewisohn Stadium, at a rally cochaired by heavyweight fighter Joe Louis, twenty thousand people attended, and the event pulled in more than twenty-two thousand dollars for Woodard’s aid and an “antimob violence fund.”

  The case against Woodard’s attackers was less successful, and Williams witnessed Southern justice as he sat beside Isaac Woodard in court. The judge in the trial, a proponent of civil rights, was so outraged by the U.S. attorney’s inept and uninspired efforts to make a case against the defendants that he declared it “disgraceful.” Adding insult to injury, Shull’s defense lawyers outright shouted racial epithets at Woodard in the courtroom. The jury needed not even a half hour to find Shull and the police not guilty on all charges; the gallery burst into applause.

  Williams could barely believe what he had witnessed. Marshall had always returned from his trips down south with colorful stories of crazy sheriffs, violent mobs, and vicious death threats, and Williams had laughed at Marshall’s mockery along with the rest of the legal staff in the comfort of the NAACP’s midtown offices. But Williams could find nothing funny in his acquaintance with that Southern landscape. The stories he could tell of his experiences with Woodard below the Mason-Dixon Line would, Williams said, “make your hair stand on end.”

  Still, Williams was beginning to appreciate Marshall’s strategy in regard to criminal cases in the South, where local law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and juries all guaranteed that the scales of justice would tip in favor of white supremacy. You fought, as Marshall repeatedly reminded his staff, so that you lived to fight another day, whether by filing an appeal to a higher court or simply by recognizing that when an all-white jury handed a black defendant a life sentence instead of the death penalty, you had in a sense won, because the jurors believed your client to be innocent. For Marshall, the fight was never over with a jury’s verdict. For him the Supreme Court was as level a playing field as you’d find in the land: that was the courtroom he wanted to fight in. Williams, too.

  Yet here Williams was, on a plane, heading back down to that strange, lawless other land where people didn’t take kindly to niggers wearing suits and talking back to judges just like they were white men.

  CHAPTER 10: QUITE A HOSE WIELDER

  Willie Padgett, Mabel Norris Reese, and Jesse Hunter. Life magazine photographer Wallace Kirkland protected Norma Padgett’s identity by hiding her behind Hunter. (Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  DON’T WORRY, MAMA. I haven’t done anything.”

  Walter Irvin spoke calmly, then walked past his sobbing mother toward Deputy James Yates and the patrolmen who were waiting outside the house to take him and Samuel Shepherd away. He had only gotten a few steps from the front door when Willie Padgett darted from a black sedan and charged.

  “You little son of a bitch. You were there. You had better get my wife or I am going to kill you.”…

  Irvin, confused, told Padgett he didn’t know anything about his wife.

  “Yes you do,” Padgett fumed, and as he rushed toward Irvin, Deputy Yates and Deputy Leroy Campbell pulled the sputtering Bay Lake farmer away and sat him back in the car.

  The patrolmen ushered Shepherd and Irvin into the backseat of another car, and a caravan of squad cars sped
its way through Groveland. Meanwhile, James Shepherd’s Mercury, which Samuel had been driving the night before, was confiscated by the police; Deputy Campbell had it taken to a filling station, where a search was begun on it for evidence. By then the caravan, which had been heading toward Mascotte, had turned onto a deserted clay road. Four or five miles got the patrol cars to a secluded spot. They stopped alongside the road.

  It was Yates who opened the door on Irvin’s side. “Get out of the car, boy,” he ordered, and Irvin did.

  “Why did you rape that white woman?” Yates demanded, but Irvin didn’t have a chance to answer. Yates smashed him across the forehead with a nightstick.

  Shepherd had watched his friend collapse on the road before he, too, was ordered out of the car. The patrolmen were standing in a semicircle before him. “Better talk,” Yates advised, and Shepherd replied that he didn’t know anything.

  At that the patrolmen converged on both Shepherd and Irvin, who had pulled himself up from the ground. With some patrolmen holding the two of them and others beating them with blackjacks and fists, Shepherd and Irvin ended up eventually on the roadbed. Curled up, they were kicked repeatedly, then dragged again to their feet.

  “Nigger, you the one that picked up this white girl last night?” someone asked.

  “What white girl?” Irvin replied before being struck again.

  “Well you might as well tell us you’re the one did it,” another one said, “ ’cause we gonna beat the hell out of you until you tell us you did do it.”

  Shepherd’s vision was blurring, and Irvin was drifting in and out of consciousness. As best they could, they denied having anything to do with the missing white girl.

  One of the patrolmen brought Willie Padgett over to the beaten men and asked if he was sure these two were “the right ones.” Padgett paused, grimacing at all the blood.

  “The hell with it,” the cop said, lifting his blackjack and bringing it down hard on skull and bone.

  WHEN FRANKLIN WILLIAMS arrived in Orlando, before he could even think about investigating the Groveland case he had to attend to the basics of housing and transportation. Blacks traveling by car commonly relied upon The Negro Motorist Green Book as a guide. The eighty-page booklet, published by Victor H. Green & Company in New York, under the sponsorship of Esso and the Ford Motor Company, listed by city and state the names and addresses of hotels, restaurants, taxi services, and gas stations that would accommodate blacks: thus it aimed to “solve your problems” if you happened to be traveling in unfamiliar territory, especially in Jim Crow states. The 1949 Green Book confirmed Williams’s suspicions. Not a single hotel in Lake County was open to blacks. Further, because he had been advised not to spend too much time near the courthouse in Tavares—Willis McCall country—especially after dark, Williams’s misgivings far exceeded the assurance of the Green Book’s tagline, “Now We Can Travel Without Embarrassment.”

  Through the NAACP’s network of Florida branches, Williams lined up a room at an Orlando “tourist home,” akin to a black-run bed-and-breakfast. It was here that Williams met and befriended Joe Louis, who was visiting Orlando for a boxing exhibition. On learning of the Groveland case, Louis aided Williams in his work with some ready cash and subsequently donated five hundred dollars to the NAACP for the defense of the Groveland Boys. A picture of Louis and Williams appeared in the New York Post below the caption “Slugs for Equality,” for news of Ernest Thomas’s killing had made headlines in Northern newspapers, like that in the July 27 New York Times, which ran “Posse Kills Negro, Florida Fugitive; He Was Hunted in Groveland Rape Case.”

  In New York, too, Thurgood Marshall, after consulting with Williams in Florida, attached his notable name, for the first time publicly, to the Groveland case. He fired off a telegraphed request for a federal investigation to U.S. attorney general Tom Clark, stating, “This wanton killing by a deputized mob is worse than a lynching.” He followed with a protest to Governor Fuller Warren of Florida, charging, “There is serious doubt that the man killed was in any manner connected with the alleged rape.” The national press accounts of Marshall’s actions included his phrase “alleged rape,” which was another first, for until then, except for black newspapers, coverage of the events in Groveland had eschewed the word alleged in connection to the plight of Norma Padgett on the night of July 15.

  In Florida, in order to proceed with the investigation, and working with a limited NAACP budget, Williams had to retain a lawyer who was a member of the state’s bar: not any easy task, given that the state registered a total of less than two dozen black lawyers, with most of them practicing in Miami or the larger cities and none of them in Lake County or any county nearby. Williams nonetheless managed to find two young law school graduates—William Fordham from Tampa and Horace Hill, a Howard University Law School graduate, from Daytona Beach—who had been admitted to the Florida bar the year before. Of course, they had been reading the papers, too, and were not so sure they wanted to be involved in a Lake County rape case. Williams, though, could detect the excitement in twenty-four-year-old Hill at the prospect of working alongside an attorney from the national office of the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall’s legal defense team. Still, fully aware of the Lake County rioting, the renegade posse, and especially the vindictive Big Hat Man sheriff, Hill was reluctant. “My aunt wanted to know if I had lost my mind,” Hill recalled. “I even called my parents, and they wanted to know whether or not I was crazy, and they said how dangerous it was.”

  On Friday, July 29, the smooth-talking, persuasive Franklin Williams was driving north to the Florida State Prison in Raiford not only with his new recruit Horace Hill but also in Hill’s 1948 Chevrolet and with Hill’s wife, Dorothy, whom Williams had convinced to serve as their stenographer. And with William Fordham, too. By late afternoon they’d arrived at the prison farm known as “the Rock” and had settled in a room where they met the three defendants one by one. Although Fordham, who had previously been dispatched to Raiford by Harry T. Moore, had tried to prepare the New York attorney for the visit, Williams was profoundly shocked by his first sight of Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, and Charles Greenlee. It had been nearly two weeks since they had been transported to Raiford, but their faces and bodies still bore the effects of the beatings they’d suffered in Lake County. “Their heads were a mess” and caked with “encrusted dry blood,” Williams observed. “Their hair was a mess. It was shocking to me that in a state prison, they had not even been able to wash their hair.” Bruises, scars, and swellings were the badges of their brotherhood.

  Samuel Shepherd was the first to be interviewed. After taking the lawyers through events on the evening of July 15, when he and Walter Irvin had driven to Eatonville for a few beers, he described what happened the following morning. Samuel had just dropped off his sister-in-law at the beauty parlor in Groveland when he stopped by Walter Irvin’s house around 7 a.m. to see if his friend had gotten up on time for work. At the same moment, two Florida Highway Patrol cars and a third, black car pulled up in front of the house, and several white men emerged, among them the deputies Campbell and Yates. “Where is the guy that was with you last night?” Yates asked Shepherd, and what began with that question led to the beatings he and Irvin endured on the deserted clay road outside of Groveland.

  “They must have beat us about a half hour,” Shepherd told the lawyers, who were at once riveted and appalled by his testimony. After the beating, he and Irvin were shoved back into the patrol car. Irvin’s shirt was drenched in blood, and when he reached his hand up to his head he felt “a big chunk knocked out of it.” A patrolman told them to scoot up to the edge of the seat so their blood wouldn’t drip onto the upholstery. As did Irvin, Shepherd opened his mouth to show Williams’s team his broken teeth and lifted his shirt to reveal still numerous bruises.

  Then Shepherd continued, telling the lawyers how Yates and Campbell in their black sedan led the caravan to the place where Padgett’s car had broken down on that Friday night after th
e dance. Ordered out of the car, Shepherd and Irvin stood beside Deputy Yates, who was trying to match their footprints to those in the sand and clay. After examining Shepherd’s shoes, which Shepherd avowed he’d worn the night before, Yates once more studied the ground, and declared, “These are not your tracks.” Similarly questioned, Irvin, who was still bleeding profusely from his head, admitted that he had in fact been wearing a different pair of shoes. Frustrated, Yates returned the men to the patrol car, which delivered them to the Tavares jail.

  They had been locked in a large cell with other inmates, who could plainly see that Irvin, sitting in a corner on the floor with his hand pressed against his head, was unable to stop his wound from bleeding. One of the prisoners remarked that it looked like the police had tried to kill them, but Irvin, understandably, was in no mood to talk. Hours had passed when Yates and Campbell showed up at the bullpen. The interrogation of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin was not over yet.

  “Nigger, you are gonna tell us the truth or we are gonna beat the hell out of you,” Campbell warned. “We will make you tell it.”

  They were in the bowels of the jail. Irvin surveyed the basement room; a number of pipes ran the length of the room, which housed “a lot of motors.” The deputies hoisted Irvin up; they cuffed his hands to an overhead pipe. As Irvin stood only five foot two, his feet did not reach the floor. Satisfied that Irvin was hanging securely, Yates and Campbell took turns beating him with a leaded rubber hose.