Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  The evidence, medical and otherwise, gathered by Williams was convincing. Due process in the case of the Groveland Boys had been violated; infractions of the law by law enforcement officers could be substantiated. Williams’s interviews thus far had produced sound testimony. But Marshall’s man in Orlando had yet to find an experienced lawyer willing to represent three black men accused of raping a white woman in Lake County. Shortly after Williams’s first trip to Raiford with Horace Hill and William Fordham, the latter had withdrawn from the case. Although Hill was more than willing to go forward, Williams still needed a seasoned attorney to navigate skillfully a case that would most likely rush the three defendants through a trial to conviction with a death sentence. The case was scheduled to go to trial at the end of August.

  In early August, Williams’s search for a local lawyer turned up a qualified CIO attorney, but he wanted ten thousand dollars to take the case—a figure well beyond the limited means of the NAACP. Next, a “very distinguished criminal lawyer in Daytona Beach” appeared to be willing to consider representation of the three defendants, until he learned the venue for the trial. Scared off, the white lawyer said to Williams, “You know, Franklin, those clay eating crackers down there in Lake County would just as soon stand off and shoot me with a high power rifle as they would you.” Another attorney agreed to take the case but refused to raise any technical issues. He stated that “he would not raise any issue of change of venue or jury selection or anything like that,” recalled Williams, who viewed all such issues as being essential to challenge, especially in the very likely event that they would be appealing a guilty verdict in a higher court.

  Spessard L. Holland Jr., the twenty-nine-year-old son of the former Florida governor and current U.S. senator, had caught the attention of the NAACP after he’d represented several black migrant workers who had been held in confinement and forced to work in the orange groves. He’d even filed charges with the Justice Department on behalf of the workers. In light of Holland’s apparent sympathies with civil rights cases, Williams thought the young white lawyer might be interested in representing the Groveland Boys. He was, and agreed to meet with Williams and Hill the next morning. When they arrived, as arranged, at Holland’s office in Vero Beach to discuss the case, the attorney had reconsidered.

  “I can’t do this, Frank,” he said, sitting down at his desk.

  “Why not?” Williams asked.

  Holland sat in silence, the two black men contemplating him from across his desk. Suddenly he dissolved into tears. Once he’d begun to compose himself, he struggled to explain. “You may not understand this, but my wife is a typical flower of southern womanhood and this is a rape case and I can’t take it.”

  There was nothing more to be said. Williams and Hill left Holland’s office for the long drive back to Orlando. If finding a black attorney with criminal trial experience in Florida had proved to be a futile task, that of finding a reputable white lawyer who was willing to risk his career in order to represent three black men accused of raping a white teenager was proving to be herculean.

  Days were slipping by. As Judge Truman Futch had already promised the citizens of Lake County a speedy trial, it was bootless to think he might delay the trial to allow a black New York lawyer more time to prepare a defense for three confessed rapists. In the South the bargain between justice and the public was implicit: an expeditious trial with swift punishment by death or else a riot and lynching. With less and less time for the daunting sum of it, Williams had to continue his investigation, locate and interview potential alibi witnesses, and sign on a top-notch criminal lawyer for the defense. Add to that the fact that the New York–based lawyer Williams had little stomach for his necessary, if infrequent, ventures into Lake County either alone or with Horace Hill. If the two attorneys had to speak with someone in the Groveland or Bay Lake area, they would sneak in and out of the county, for they had been duly warned about those trigger-happy, clay-eating crackers. “I was not completely at ease,” Williams later recalled. “We just did not tell anybody we were in town.”

  On one occasion, while preparing to make the dreaded journey from the rooming house in Orlando to Tavares in order to interview a woman who’d had a dispute with Sheriff McCall, Williams had an inspiration: he would ask Joe Louis, who was also in residence, to accompany him. For surely the presence of the world heavyweight boxing champion “would give me some unusual kind of protection,” Williams figured, and noted: “Joe would not go.”

  ON AUGUST 5, at a Federal Housing Authority conference in Washington, D.C., Thurgood Marshall argued that, despite his victory in Shelley v. Kraemer, the war to end legalized housing discrimination against blacks went on, and he sharply criticized the FHA “for failing to follow through on the implications” of the Supreme Court’s decision. He was not of a mind to be his most patient self when he addressed the conference, as was noted afterward by one NAACP associate, who remarked to Marshall, “You were in rare form last Friday and handed out liberal education all over the place.” (During the address, a slightly annoyed government lawyer passed a note to the same NAACP associate that read, “Who’s that guy?” Barely had the associate uttered the second syllable of Marshall’s first name than the lawyer responded with an “Oh!” and then “closed up like a tongue-tied clam.”)

  While in Washington, Marshall also pressed the Justice Department and the FBI to initiate a civil rights and domestic violence investigation into the beatings of the three surviving Groveland boys. Marshall by then had been unable to gain support in Washington for a full investigation into the killing of Ernest Thomas; the FBI had conducted a preliminary investigation but concluded “it would appear undesirable to become involved in the killing of Victim Ernest Thomas as there is no indication, with the exception of the statement by Thurgood Marshall, that there was serious doubt that Thomas was involved in the rape. On the other hand, the state has apparently produced evidence to indicate that he was involved in the rape.” More successfully, Marshall convinced the Justice Department that the beatings had seriously violated the Groveland Boys’ rights.

  Within two days the FBI had dispatched Special Agents John L. Quigley and Tobias E. Matthews to the Raiford prison, where they interviewed and photographed Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee. Their initial reports back to headquarters prompted J. Edgar Hoover to order a “full and exhaustive investigation into the entire matter of the arrest and mistreatment by the authorities of all the victims.” The agents meanwhile continued downstate. They interviewed residents of Lake County by the dozens; they took down statements from witnesses, law enforcement officials, victims of the mob violence, and even Norma and Willie Padgett. In the course of their investigation, Quigley and Matthews began to notice some disturbing elements. For one, “all of the persons interviewed who were allegedly implicated” in the beating and torture of the three Groveland boys “refused to furnish any information whatsoever unless they made it in statement form,” thus indicating that Sheriff Willis McCall, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell, and Wesley Evans—the four suspects positively identified by Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee—had all received legal advice not to provide complete cooperation with the FBI’s investigation.

  Not surprisingly, the statements of McCall, Yates, Campbell, and Evans, though totally consistent with one another, differed dramatically from those of the three rape suspects. For example, both deputies and Evans stated that all the interrogations took place in a radio room on the same floor as the jail, rather than in the basement with the three prisoners handcuffed to overhead pipes or, as was the case with Greenlee, in the elevator. Also, whereas Shepherd and Greenlee admitted that they’d confessed to the rape of Norma Padgett only when they could no longer tolerate the painful beatings, and while Irvin stated he did not and would not ever confess to a crime he did not commit, Campbell, Yates, and Evans shared a different account. They claimed that during the interrogations, when the suspects were shown “a pair of pants, a handkerchief and some other e
vidence,” each of them readily confessed to robbery and rape (punishable by death in the state of Florida) and each of them named Ernest Thomas as the fourth accomplice. Further, Irvin and Shepherd, on the one hand, stated that they were seated in the back of Deputy Yates’s car when the door was flung open and Sheriff Willis McCall began striking them with a large flashlight; the sheriff, on the other hand, said that when the two black prisoners arrived at his house in the backseat of Yates’s car he had simply opened the door and “asked them why they wanted to do such a thing.” According to the sheriff, the two army buddies then told him that “the other two made them do it.” Finally, none of the Florida highway patrolmen or Lake County law enforcement agents questioned by the FBI had noticed any bruises, marks, or blood on any of the rape suspects when they were transported to Raiford prison; yet special agents Quigley and Matthews themselves not only had observed and photographed evidence of the prisoners’ “trauma” but also had taken statements from several prison officials who had documented “numerous bruised marks,” cut wounds, broken teeth, and bloodstained clothes at the time the three black men were taken into custody.

  Quigley and Matthews took their investigation in Lake County beyond law enforcement personnel and established witnesses to civic officials, politicians, prominent businessmen, and grove owners in this largely rural area of central Florida with a population of thirty-six thousand. What they discovered was a county controlled not by politics, money, the citrus industry, or the law, but by an embittered contingent of the Ku Klux Klan intent upon codifying a racial caste system, through violent means if necessary, that would effectively deny blacks access to political influence, economic opportunity, and social justice.

  On August 13, the agents met with Groveland’s mayor, Elma Puryear, who had witnessed the gathering of the mob outside the jail on the morning of July 16 and had safely transported Charles Greenlee to Tavares. In his statement to the FBI, Puryear related his efforts to help Groveland’s “leading citizens” protect their lives and property from the KKK, which by the evening of July 16 was filling the streets of Groveland. Off the record, Puryear disclosed that most of the trouble around Groveland had been “caused by the people of the Bay Lake region.” He also told the agents that certain parties were aware of the FBI’s presence in town, and that “word had gotten to them [the town’s prominent white citizens] that if they didn’t keep their damn mouths shut about what happened around Groveland, their homes and business property would be burned.” Neither did Puryear identify in his statement who of those prominent citizens had enabled the blacks to be evacuated to safety, but he did indicate, again off the record, that Norton Wilkins, owner of B&W Canning Company, and L. Day Edge, the wealthy owner of a large mercantile store and formerly Florida’s speaker of the House and Groveland’s mayor, had been instrumental in the evacuation.

  The Edge family, having once amassed a fortune in the turpentine and timber business before the sawmill men “cleared the county of pine trees,” had since cultivated in the same fertile soil Lake County’s increasingly profitable citrus groves. Citrus baron L. Day Edge had earned a reputation among blacks for his generosity and fairness, and on the morning that Walter Irvin was picked up by Willis McCall’s deputies, both he and his father, Cleve Irvin, had been readying themselves for another day’s work at Mr. Edge’s groves. Agents Quigley and Matthews were thus eager to speak with Edge, who had in fact been quite willing to cooperate with the FBI until he, too, fell under the cloud of threats cast by the county’s Klan. Having been informed that if he didn’t keep quiet, “he wouldn’t have a building left in Lake County”—and having spotted one of the Groveland night riders, Curtis Merritt, “watching the City Hall” to see who might be cooperating with the FBI—Edge had decided it would “very imprudent” for him to meet with the federal agents. Edge, however, did tell Puryear—and the mayor told Quigley and Matthews (off the record)—that Curtis and Bill Merritt along with Wesley Evans, the illiterate, hose-wielding grove caretaker identified by Samuel Shepherd as one of the men in the basement, had been among the ringleaders of the mob violence nearly a month earlier and were behind the current rash of threats being leveled at Groveland’s respectable citizens.

  In an interview with agents Quigley and Matthews on August 14, Groveland’s chief of police, George Mays, told them he was a “one man police department” and he “absolutely refused to furnish a signed statement form.” Informally, however, Mays confirmed it was common knowledge that deputies Yates and Campbell had participated in the beating of the three rape suspects, as had Wesley Evans, who’d been witnessed laughing “heartily” at the banter among some locals about Evans being “quite a hose wielder.” Mays also apprised the agents that if anyone were to discover what he had relayed to them, “his life would be in serious danger and he would probably lose his job and have to leave the area.”

  During the agents’ interview with Lieutenant Colonel Harry Baya of the Florida National Guard in Tampa, Matthews and Quigley could sense the frustration that the commanding officer had experienced in trying to bring order to unruly Groveland in July, with much of that frustration being centered upon the unwilling Willis McCall. The sheriff’s refusal to identify the mob’s ringleaders, let alone take any “affirmative action” in regard to them—because, as he’d informed Baya, he was “too busy” to concern himself with arresting the ringleaders—had baffled Baya, who could not tell for sure whether McCall “knew who they were or not or was just withholding them from him.”

  In rural counties and parishes across the South, as the FBI was well aware, the sheriff’s office was the seat of power. Elected to office by a countywide vote, the sheriff was viewed by his electorate not only as the county’s chief law enforcement officer but also as a community leader who shared his electorate’s interests. The FBI knew, too, that in Florida in the 1940s and ’50s, “County Sheriffs openly joined the Klan, and law enforcement officers boldly attended Klan meetings armed and in uniform,” as indeed did some of McCall’s good friends like Sheriff Dave Starr of neighboring Orange County. Lake County, though, was Willis V. McCall’s personal territory, and he bullied his county like no other sheriff in the state of Florida. Tom Hurlburt Jr., the former chief of the Orlando Police Department, whose father, a citrus buyer, had served as one of McCall’s deputies, said, “I believe the only thing more powerful than Willis McCall was the Ku Klux Klan in those days.”

  Nor was Willis McCall’s power unallied with that of the KKK. So it was that Lake County’s “leading citizens”—men like Mayor Elma Puryear, Chief of Police George Mays, L. Day Edge, and Norton Wilkins—had no recourse in Sheriff McCall when they received open threats from the Klan. The citrus barons and respected citizens of the county may have been instrumental in McCall’s election to office in 1944, but five years and one landslide reelection later, McCall had made Lake County his own. In 1949, McCall’s always ambiguous allegiances lay less in his oath of office than in the demands of a restive electorate capable of extreme violence. “Bay Lake region people,” Mays told the FBI agents, “were in some manner related to one or the other of the Padgetts. These people are very clannish and stay to themselves, but when any one attempted to molest or abuse their women folk they got up in arms about it and felt that the law should be settled in their own way.” McCall knew his constituents, and he knew what they expected of him if he planned on having them keep him in the sheriff’s office. McCall held the office until 1972.

  BY MID-AUGUST IN 1949, mainstream newspapers across the state of Florida had joined the black press in the coverage of Harry T. Moore’s charges that savage beating at the hands of local law enforcement had coerced the Groveland Boys to confess to the rape of Norma Padgett. Between the press and the FBI—their agents, no doubt in cahoots with the NAACP, snooping all over his county—Willis McCall was livid. Still, he knew he’d have to come up with some explanation for the bruises, blood, and lacerations that had been plainly observed and reported by witnesses. “They might hav
e got in a fight somewhere in prison or somewhere and had a mark or two on them, but they didn’t get that in Lake County,” the sheriff emphatically told the reporters.

  By mid-August, too, Franklin Williams and Horace Hill had in their investigation been collecting increasingly more evidence and testimony that contradicted the “official” narrative being doled out to the press by McCall and State Attorney Jesse Hunter. With just two weeks remaining before the scheduled start of the trial, however, Williams had still not found a defense lawyer for the Groveland Boys. From the New York office, Thurgood Marshall could offer Williams only moral support until the NAACP had a trial lawyer in place, but Marshall meanwhile continued to keep the Justice Department informed of any leads that developed. One of them was startling.

  Marshall telephoned Alexander Campbell, the assistant attorney general, immediately upon learning that the “physician who examined the alleged victim of the rape reportedly found that this woman’s charges were not true.” Campbell in turn informed J. Edgar Hoover, who dispatched a third FBI agent to Florida, to Leesburg, in order to verify the examining physician’s “Report of Accident” in the alleged rape of Norma Padgett. No matter that the report bolstered the NAACP’s defense case and introduced new issues for Williams’s further investigation, and no matter that Williams had yet to find the defendants legal representation: the overwhelming sense in Marshall’s office was that neither the judge, Truman Futch, nor State Attorney Hunter would allow a delay of the trial. Indeed, for both the judge and Hunter, with the FBI everywhere in the county asking questions and setting everyone from law enforcement to black pickers and packers on a perilous edge, the trial could not happen soon enough.