by Gilbert King
“They hit me across my back, shoulders, head, arms and hindpart,” Irvin told Williams and the two young black lawyers, but neither Yates nor Campbell had any questions for him. Campbell just “kept on trying to get me to admit that I had raped some woman, which I would not admit because I did not know what they were talking about.”
Tossing aside the rubber hose, Campbell pulled out his gun and taunted Irvin, saying “he would get a thrill out of blowing my brains out.” But instead he stepped aside for another man, who held Irvin up by the chin and with his fist made a punching bag of Irvin’s face. Then the man reared back and with his “high top boots,” Irvin said, he “kicked me in the privates.”
They dumped Irvin in a cell. It was Shepherd’s turn next, and the deputies now led him down to the basement, where he, too, endured another brutal beating. “My mouth was bleeding where a front tooth went through my lip,” Shepherd recounted. “I have three teeth broken in the back of my mouth. Nobody at the prison camp has looked at it, though I asked to see the doctor when I first came here.”
Williams wanted to know about another critical issue, the much-publicized confessions of the three defendants in the case. Shepherd said he had never signed anything, but the repeated beatings had wrenched an oral confession from him—particularly the blows delivered by the man in the high-topped riding boots, whom he recognized as Wesley Evans, a regular customer at the dairy in Groveland where Shepherd had once worked. Evans had asked for a few cracks at the prisoner, and with a hose he was so vengefully smashing Shepherd’s face and chest that Yates, deeming him “quite a hose wielder,” wondered if Evans might be related to Norma Padgett. Evans said no, he wasn’t related, but he did pause to allow that both Norma and Willie Padgett were “good friends,” before continuing to slash away at Shepherd. Two nights later, Wesley Evans would be standing among the ringleaders of the mob that burned the Shepherds’ house to the ground in Bay Lake.
“They tried to make me say that I had been with the group of fellows that raped a white woman,” Shepherd said. “It was terrible the way I was whipped, there was just knots all over me. They said they were not going to stop whipping me until I said that I was the one. I kept telling them I was in Orlando where I was. Finally, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I said yes.” Shepherd said yes, he raped Norma Padgett, and the men dropped their hoses. Yates told Shepherd he could have “saved all the beating” if he had just said yes the first time they asked.
Williams cataloged the still visible evidence of Shepherd’s injuries: scars on his head, broken teeth, tooth puncture of upper lip, lash scars across back and chest, scars on the wrists, which supported Shepherd’s claim that he had been cuffed to a metal pipe above his head. Irvin evidenced similar injuries: body scars, wide bruises, lash marks, scars across the wrists. Also, Williams noted, Irvin’s “right jaw appeared to be fractured.”
After the beating Shepherd, too, was returned to the fourth floor of the jail, where, like Irvin, he was locked in a separate cell. Irvin, however, did not remain long. Again he was removed to the basement for a second round of beating by Campbell and Yates; for Irvin had not yet confessed. At the end of it “I was bleeding pretty bad,” Irvin told Williams, but to the end he had refused to admit to raping Norma Padgett. The deputies took him back to his cell; on the way up “one of them kicked me in the balls,” Irvin said.
Around 6 p.m., Yates and Campbell informed the two exhausted, beaten black men that “a mob was on its way”; they were “lucky,” said the deputies, in that they were going to be taken away from the jail so they wouldn’t be killed. Handcuffed together, Shepherd and Irvin were led to a car and ordered to lie down in the backseat so as not to be seen. They could hear the chaos on the police radio, which relayed that colored people were being beaten and killed in the vicinity, while the black sedan made its way to a watermelon field in the woods. There the two prisoners were handcuffed with their arms wrapped around a small pine sapling. They’d expected to be doused in gasoline and set afire, but instead they simply waited. A young girl on horseback passed by; the deputies stayed by the sedan. After a half hour or so, Shepherd and Irvin were again stuffed into the back of the car, then driven to Eustis. The sedan had pulled into a driveway when they heard a voice shout, “Where are those niggers at?”
The door on Shepherd’s side of the car was flung open, and immediately a tall man in a white Stetson was bashing the prisoner with a large, heavy flashlight and stomping him with his boots. Already displeased—the sheriff had just gotten home from Ohio only to find that all hell had broken loose in his county—McCall became only more provoked when Shepherd entreated him to stop: the sheriff started “really kicking him then.” With venom to spare, McCall went round to the other side of the sedan and with the flashlight gave Irvin a taste of it across his arms and legs. The deputies then resumed their journey with Shepherd and Irvin. In about two hours they arrived at Florida State Prison in Raiford.
The third prisoner in the Groveland rape case, Charles Greenlee, did not escape a trip to the basement of the Tavares jail. He, too, had wounds to show. Because of his young age, Horace Hill’s wife, Dorothy, was asked to step out of the room while the lawyers examined the boy. Williams recorded that Greenlee’s left eye was “red and bruised”; his right cheekbone bore a double scar and he had “scars all around his neck”; also scarred was the groin area, and his testicles were still swollen; his feet had numerous cuts. The examination complete, Hill’s wife returned to take down the rest of Greenlee’s statement. When he had finished he said to Williams, “All of this is true. I know nothing about this rape. I don’t even know Samuel and Irvin.”
The lawyers closed their notepads. What Williams had suspected had proved to be true: Sheriff Willis McCall and his deputies had tortured the three Groveland boys in order to secure the confessions that supported the sheriff’s boast to the press, no matter that one of them, Walter Irvin, had refused to confess even to stop the beating. Individually, the three men’s stories were remarkably similar in their descriptions of their torturers and of the basement below the jail in Tavares. But, while Greenlee’s denial that he had ever seen Norma and Willie Padgett on the evening of July 15 was convincing enough, the account that the two army buddies related of their whereabouts that night was indeed problematic, as it included an encounter with the alleged victim and her husband.
After assuring the three defendants that he would arrange for a physician’s visit so as to have a more complete, professional medical report on their injuries, Williams inquired if they had been offered or had sought legal counsel since their incarceration at Raiford two weeks earlier. Apparently, neither at the jail in Tavares nor in the state prison had any officer or official advised them of their right to be represented by a lawyer. The state attorney, Jesse Hunter, had brought Norma and Willie Padgett to Raiford so that the young couple could identify the three suspects, and before the indictment, when he had interviewed each of them, Hunter had asked only if they had lawyers. That both Irvin and Greenlee had replied, naively, that they didn’t need lawyers because they hadn’t done anything wrong—that it was merely a case of mistaken identity soon to be cleared up—left Williams incredulous. No less naive had been Shepherd’s response that he was a member of a church and “was going to tell the thing just like it happened.” The defendants’ naïveté aside, the oversight on the part of county and state officials bolstered Williams’s confidence that his report from the state prison would prompt the NAACP to commit more substantially to the Groveland case, especially since the hunting and gunning down of Ernest Thomas by a posse of more than a thousand armed men, many of them deputized, had already engaged Thurgood Marshall more actively in the fray.
It was when the three prisoners stood up, as the lawyers were preparing for their departure, that Williams noticed, first, Irvin’s bare feet and then the bloodstains on the back of his pants, the same pants he’d been wearing the day he was beaten in the Tavares jail. “I have no shoes up here,” I
rvin told Williams. “I only have my shirt and pants.”
Williams and his team had begun the long drive back to Orlando and the attorney from the New York office of the NAACP was still shaken. Unsettled though he naturally was by the defendants’ revelations, the injustices they had already suffered, and the physical pain they had endured, it was a comment the sixteen-year-old Greenlee had made in his stuttery, backwoods accent that Williams couldn’t shake. The boy had implicitly articulated what every black male since the dawn of slavery in the South instinctively knew about race and sex. It could also explain Ernest Thomas’s bolting out of Lake County on the morning of July 16, 1949. On Greenlee’s first night in Groveland, when the deputies picked him up at the train depot and put him in jail, they had left him alone in a cell with a cot and without a lock. “Jesus,” Greenlee had said, remembering for Williams the night he’d lost his future. “If I, if I thought a white woman had been raped within a hundred miles of [Groveland] and Negroes were suspected, I would have opened the door and left.”
WILLIAMS’S STAY IN Orlando was proving to be fruitful. His investigation of the case against the Groveland Boys took him to Terence McCarthy, whose coverage of the story for the New Leader, a leftist intellectual weekly newspaper “devoted to the Socialist and Labor movements,” had convinced him—as he would convince Williams—that the case had more to do with race and the citrus industry, with intimidation tactics and status, than it did with the alleged rape of Norma Padgett. Henry Shepherd, who had long suffered the ire of his white neighbors, and finally their torch-lit violence, agreed. “I been told by a lot of people it was nothing but jealousy and jealousy is what it was,” Shepherd told Williams. Shepherd also had a second theory, one that the World War II veteran Williams understood well: “Sammy is a good boy,” Shepherd said. “All the white people will say he was before he went to the army. Since he come back people didn’t like Sammy and the Irvin boy driving James’s car around. They didn’t like no veterans’ attitude.”
Both Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin had recently returned from military ser vice. As U.S. Army regulations allowed soldiers to continue to wear their military uniforms after completing their service, many black veterans did exactly that, perhaps to remind their communities that they, too, had defended their country. They had also been dispatched to foreign nations, particularly in Europe, where minorities experienced more tolerance and openness than they ever had in America, especially in the South. So, like many black veterans returning home to states in the South and the one south of the South, Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were not prepared to return to the fields or citrus groves of Lake County under the conditions defined by Jim Crow. White Southerners, meanwhile, may have been outraged by the reported egalitarian attitudes of Europeans toward Negroes, but they were flat-out enraged by stories from France of white women sleeping with American black men; they were thus determined to put returning black veterans back in their place. After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance. Fathers of black soldiers warned their sons not to come home in their uniforms because police had made a practice of searching and beating black military men. “If he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, they’d kill him,” one Mississippi man related.
A veteran himself, and having worked extensively with the blinded veteran Isaac Woodard, Franklin Williams understood fully the antagonism blacks experienced in the United States on leaving military service. That veterans Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin had still been wearing their army uniforms around Groveland was bound to incense the whites of Lake County, Williams knew, and he was also not surprised to learn that Sheriff McCall had expected them to be picking fruit in the groves the way black men were supposed to, with poor pay for long hours of hard labor. Instead, Shepherd and Irvin were driving around town in a late-model Mercury as if the streets were theirs; to the whites, this was gallingly plain “arrogance.” Resentment was general and, according to Williams, that resentment among rural whites “had been communicated to them from the sheriff . . . from Willis McCall.” Henry Shepherd was more succinct. He said that to the whites around Groveland, his son was an “uppity Nigger.”
The more Williams poked around the Groveland area, the more he considered the likelihood that the alleged rape had simply provided the Lake County Sheriff’s Department with an excuse to do some heavy housekeeping with regard to black troublemakers and potential instigators. “McCall knew exactly who he wanted to get,” Williams said. “He wanted to get Shepherd and Irvin. He wanted to get them.”
IMMEDIATELY UPON HIS return to New York, Franklin Williams briefed Thurgood Marshall fully on the case of the Groveland Boys: how lucky they were to be alive after the beatings they’d endured; how, two weeks later, “blood was still in their hair and head and the soles of their feet were still cut”; how Shepherd and Greenlee had confessed—but only orally—in order to end their torture, whereas Irvin had not confessed either orally or in writing. None of it surprised Marshall, who had seen enough such cases to know that in the South coerced confessions were more the rule than the exception. Even President Truman’s 1946 Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights acknowledged as much, with J. Edgar Hoover testifying that “lawless police action” against blacks was so commonplace in the South that at one particular jail “it was seldom that a Negro man or woman was incarcerated who was not given a severe beating, which started off with a pistol whipping and ended with a rubber hose.”
With one suspect dead under legally questionable circumstances and three others severely and lawlessly beaten, Marshall did not hesitate to ratchet up the commitment of the NAACP to the case. He told Williams to enlist the best local lawyer available to try the case, and he told the press, forcefully, “The resources of the association will be thrown behind the defense of these boys, and at the same time, we will insist upon protection of other Negroes in the area.” Marshall had served notice to the state of Florida. If local officials with racial bias had been planning to run helpless blacks through their justice system to predetermined convictions, they were going to have to do so against attorneys with formidable backgrounds in both state and federal appeals. Furthermore, NAACP involvement in a criminal case guaranteed it attention in the national press, which would place the prosecuting state attorney Jesse Hunter in the spotlight of newspapers that, unlike Florida’s local ones, had no investment in maintaining racial tranquillity and the Jim Crow status quo. By then, at a press conference in New York, Franklin Williams would have already told national reporters that his investigation in Lake County had convinced him not only that the Groveland Boys were “entirely innocent” but also that the “trumped up rape charge” against them had less to do with the riots and destruction in Negro communities than did the resolve of the white mob’s ringleaders to intimidate blacks into accepting their designated place in the citrus groves.
While Marshall and Williams attempted to put together a preliminary legal strategy, the New York office of the NAACP advised Harry T. Moore in Florida that the LDF would vigorously defend the three Groveland boys and requested that Moore rouse local public support for the case. Moore immediately sprang into action. He had already sent telegrams to Governor Warren on July 20 and 22 calling for punishment of the parties responsible for the rioting in Groveland, and now, in a letter to the governor on July 30, he demanded a special investigation and a special session of the grand jury “to indict the guilty mobsters.” Moore also had Sheriff McCall in his sights. While Moore had commended the sheriff for preventing a lynching on July 16, he had been critical of McCall as well, especially of the county lawman’s “lenient attitude toward the mob” in permitting certain of its ringleaders to search the jail for the suspects. Moore had inquired, too, if the sheriff, who’d claimed to have known or recognized all the armed men in the mob, planned to bring charges against those who did not have permi
ts to carry weapons. Now that Moore had learned the defendants had been physically tortured, he composed a circular that he released to the press. It charged that the blacks indicted in the Groveland case had been “brutally beaten by local officers in an effort to force confessions from them” and it called upon Governor Warren to suspend the officers responsible.
Sheriff McCall did not react kindly to Moore’s accusations. He had carefully crafted an image of himself for the press as an unimpeachable county official, a man “duty bound” to run the sheriff’s office by the rule of law, even if that included his standing up to an angry white mob in order to protect black rapists in his jail. Indeed, obsessed with his public image, McCall clipped every newspaper article that, favorably or not, mentioned his name, and he was quick to correct reporters on issues of fact as well as to dispute any negative statement or opinion written about him—on occasion in person, as he did when he stomped unannounced through Mabel Norris Reese’s door at the Mount Dora Topic and accused her of writing lies about him. When the Ocala Star-Banner reported Harry T. Moore’s charge that local officers had systematically beaten the suspects in the Groveland rape case in order to obtain the confessions McCall had been vaunting not three weeks before, the sheriff was apoplectic. “It’s a damn lie,” was his answer to the charge. “There’s absolutely no truth to it.”
After the consultations with Marshall in New York, Williams returned to Florida and traveled again to Florida State Prison in Raiford, this time with a physician and a dentist, both black, in order to complete the medical report of the prisoners’ injuries. Dr. Nelson Spaulding did the driving, on a hot August day, in his yellow convertible, sporty but with no air-conditioning. When Williams suggested they might at least ride with the top down, the doctor explained that if the police in rural Florida spotted them, three “negroes in a yellow convertible Cadillac,” they could only expect trouble. With the top up, Spaulding said, the police “will not notice us.”