Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Franklin Williams’s knottiest problem began to be resolved on August 22, when he met with Alex Akerman Jr., an experienced Orlando trial attorney with something of a maverick’s reputation in central Florida. The son of a Republican federal judge in Florida—Akerman Sr. had been nominated by Calvin Coolidge in 1929 and served on the bench until his death in 1948—Alex Jr. was the only Republican member of the Florida legislature. More important for Williams, Akerman was currently representing a black faculty member at Bethune-Cookman College, Virgil Hawkins, in his attempt to gain admission into the University of Florida College of Law, as well as five other black graduate school applicants to the university who had been added to the case. Akerman’s concern that the first desegregation lawsuit in the state would be compromised in Florida’s supreme court if he were also representing the Groveland Boys made him reluctant to take the NAACP’s case. So did the fact that Akerman was just beginning to establish a career in state politics. “I knew that this would be an end to that,” he later said.

  After a long, fruitless search for an attorney to try a case now only one short week away, Williams was not prepared to accept no as an answer. If desperate in his appeal to Akerman, Williams also argued soundly that the thirty-nine-year-old lawyer had already risked his chances of a political career when he’d initiated the inflammatory, high-profile law school integration suit. Furthermore, the Groveland Boys had no other legal counsel open to them, and the consequence they thus faced was not a denial of admission to a university but a sentence to death in the electric chair—for, Williams insisted, a crime that they did not commit. Their innocence or guilt aside, the three defendants, all of them facing a death penalty, certainly had a right to counsel, and that, for Akerman, made his representation of them the right thing to do. He also appreciated Williams’s refusal, for all his frustration and the pressure of time constraints, to settle for some indifferent criminal lawyer who might have signed on solely for the fee. Not that the fee was handsome or, at $1,500, even adequate. Akerman negotiated, and with a handshake he and Williams agreed on a payment of $2,500 for the case. It was more than Williams had expected to pay but less than any other attorney had asked, and the New York office would no doubt be counting on Harry T. Moore to continue to raise both awareness of the case and cash to offset some of the legal costs. In closing, Akerman acknowledged that time was short, although he knew that even if he had a year to prepare for the defense of the Groveland Boys, in all likelihood they’d still be sent to the chair. He promised nonetheless to commit his expertise and energies to the case as well as the assistance of a second attorney, Joseph E. Price Jr., Akerman’s nephew, who had graduated from law school the previous June. So Williams might find some comfort in the fact that he was getting two lawyers for the price of one.

  As Alex Akerman contemplated the black New York lawyer from the NAACP, he might well have wondered if Franklin Williams realized fully what awaited him in a Lake County courtroom. For weeks Williams, out of concern for his own safety, had been avoiding visits to Groveland and Tavares, where he had yet to step inside the county courthouse. Nor had he yet had occasion to meet Sheriff Willis McCall, although he had seen the handiwork of McCall’s deputies on the bodies of the defendants they had interrogated. Likewise, State Attorney Jesse Hunter and Judge Truman Futch were still mostly names to Williams. For the benefit of the New Yorker’s education in the courtroom culture of Lake County, Akerman arranged to have Williams and Hill introduced to their opposing counsel, Jesse Hunter, in Tavares the week before the pretrial hearings were to begin.

  Jesse Hunter was born in 1879 in Naylor, Georgia, about two hundred miles north of Tavares, but as a young boy he’d moved to Lake County with his family. At the age of sixteen, after just two years of formal schooling, he proved himself qualified to teach at the public school in Mascotte, and at twenty-two he was named principal of a school in Marion County. Always an avid reader, in his spare time Hunter began devouring books on the law, for he’d set his sights on a new career; but first he had to pass the state’s bar examination. Unable to fulfill satisfactorily the demands of both his full-time job and his intensive study of law, he resigned his principalship and joined the Railway Mail Service as a clerk on the run from Key West to Jacksonville and back. The schedule—“one full day of work and two days of rest”—afforded him the time he needed for the rigorous study necessary to pass the Florida bar without attending law school. Five years of countless mail runs and mountains of borrowed law books later, Hunter felt prepared. While he may not have engaged in Socratic debates on the finer points of law or have established a host of law school friendships and future contacts, he had learned a thing or two about self-discipline. And self-confidence.

  In 1913, appearing before a justice of the Supreme Court of Florida for the administration of the bar examination, thirty-one-year-old Jesse Hunter had listened as one candidate after another rose and stated the name of the prestigious university where he’d studied law. Then Hunter heard his name called, and with no time allotted for elaboration, the erstwhile mail clerk announced with pride and brevity, “The University of Scuffletown.”

  Muffled laughter filled the room. The justice, wielding no gavel, shook a box that he’d “filled with odds and ends” to restore order, and asked, “Young man, WHAT college did you say?”

  Hunter’s reply—“The University of Scuffletown, Your Honor”—brought a pause, then a smile, from the justice. “Mr. Hunter,” he said, “that is the best university in this entire country.”

  Jesse Hunter passed the bar, and that same day so did Truman Futch, another graduate of the “U. of S.”—they met; they became friends. The summer of 1913 took Hunter to Tavares, where, on a loan of a few hundred dollars from a friend, he rented “a tin building” around the corner from the courthouse and furnished it with some used chairs, an old desk, and a secondhand typewriter. In that office he practiced law for ten years, until 1923, when he became county attorney. Two years later, Governor John W. Martin appointed him state attorney, a post he had held for nearly a quarter of a century by the time rape and race detonated the riots in Groveland. In thirty-six years of practicing law in Lake County, Jesse Hunter had gotten past being surprised by mobs and murder. Yet he was maybe a bit startled that day late in August 1949 when Alex Akerman walked into his office with two black men.

  Certainly Franklin Williams was struck by the presence of the seventy-year-old man who occupied the state attorney’s office. “He was almost a caricature of the Southern country boy,” Williams observed. “He literally had red suspenders and no jacket, sleeves rolled up.” When Hunter advanced to shake Akerman’s hand, Williams noticed the sidelong glance the prosecutor cast at him and Horace Hill as Akerman indicated he’d be representing the Groveland Boys. Then, to Williams’s astonishment, Hunter asked Akerman, “Where is the third defendant? Aren’t these boys the defendants?”

  “The dirty bastard,” Williams thought, “trying to belittle us like that!” Now outraged—did this country lawyer honestly think Akerman would waltz into the state attorney’s office with three black men who were facing the death penalty for raping a white woman, as if they were out on bail?—Williams responded with cold civility, “We are not the defendants. I am an attorney from New York and this is Horace Hill.”

  After a grunt, Hunter smiled and, with a nod of acknowledgment, said, “Well, come on in and have a Coke with me.”

  For Williams, that brief exchange between him and Hunter on their first meeting defined their relationship thereafter. “It was very clear to me that he was a sharp character,” Williams recalled, adding that he was “never at ease with Jesse Hunter.” Hunter’s reference to a third defendant may have been merely a momentary lapse of memory, for Hunter had visited all three defendants at Raiford and had more recently questioned them at the arraignment. On the other hand, Hunter’s comment may have been a wily attempt to put the two black attorneys off their mental balance, and thus to gain a psychological advantage o
ver them. One thing was certain: Hunter knew that Franklin Williams would be the first black lawyer ever to be sitting on a legal team in any Lake County courtroom. If Hunter’s aim had been to keep Williams off his balance in relation to the state attorney’s attitudes and intent, he succeeded. “At one moment he [Hunter] would have the most acerbic and bitter racist comment,” Williams noted, “and then the very next moment he would be the most pleasant good fellow, country lawyer you had ever met.”

  On August 25, at the county courthouse in Tavares, the pretrial hearings opened with Judge Truman Futch presiding. They argued motions around a table “in shirt sleeves, drinking cokes and smoking with feet of judge up on the table in front of us,” Williams wrote to the New York office. “All very friendly—while deputies swarm all around the joint!” The defense had no expectations of success, but to establish grounds for appeal, Akerman filed, first, a motion to quash the indictments, citing that at the time the defendants were indicted, “lawless mobs were roaming throughout the County of Lake determined to seek and find your defendants and to then inflict grievous bodily injury upon them. . . .” The motion stated, too, that widely distributed newspapers had published editorials and cartoons “calling for and demanding that the extreme penalty of death be leveled” against the Groveland Boys. “Filed too late,” Futch ruled.

  Akerman then put forth an application for removal of cause for a change of venue, arguing that lynch mob violence, prejudice, and the hostile environment in Lake County would prevent the defendants from receiving a fair trial. With Sheriff McCall and deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell in attendance, the defense called attention to the apparent “brutal” beatings and abuse “by persons purporting to be law enforcement officials of Lake County.” Futch ruled the support of the motion to be “completely irrelevant and immaterial”; furthermore, Futch announced, he would not permit any testimony regarding its substance during the trial.

  Next, the defense filed a motion for continuance, citing good faith reasons why the trial should be postponed—namely, the inadequate time to properly prepare a defense, especially given the fact that with the defendants more than a hundred miles away at the state prison in Raiford, their meetings with counsel had been “extremely inconvenient and impractical.” Futch considered the motion. Deciding it to be a fair request, he delayed the start of the trial by three days. Jury selection would begin on Thursday, the first of September.

  During the remaining days of pretrial hearings Williams and Akerman hoped both to build a case for the defense and to determine specifics of the case being mounted by the prosecution. They thus filed a bill of particulars, which required Hunter to specify what facts the state of Florida intended to prove with regard to the crimes charged in the indictments. The defense attorneys had made a start, albeit late. It would get later.

  With the pretrial motions under way, the defendants—Irvin, Shepherd, and Greenlee—had been removed again to the jail in Tavares, to the same cells they’d occupied on the fourth floor a month earlier. The bloodstained sheets on the beds had not been changed, as Williams had noticed with disgust when he’d visited the three defendants. Still, Williams trusted that the Groveland Boys would at least escape abuse during their second stay at the Tavares jail, since the beatings they’d previously endured had been not only well documented but also fully reported in the local and national press, which had laid blame on Willis McCall and his deputies. So it would be in the sheriff’s best interest to ensure that the prisoners appear in court with no visible evidence of abuse, or so Williams reasoned—incorrectly, as it turned out. “Every time” the defendants exited the courtroom, on the stairway back up to their cells McCall would kick the three of them repeatedly, although he’d strike Shepherd with special animosity. “Sammie,” Irvin said, “he hit Sammie with his fist.”

  McCall had sat silently with his deputies throughout the August 25 pretrial hearings at the county courthouse. He’d brooded. For more than a month the case had been his. He’d been pursued by reporters; he’d enjoyed celebrity. After all, he had stood up to a lynch mob; he had policed the riots without the loss of a single life. Within hours of the rape he’d had three of the suspects behind bars, and he’d taken care of the fourth one, too. Only now it was Jesse Hunter’s case. The sheriff had been sidelined, and worse, he’d had to bear the sight of a black New York NAACP lawyer in a fancy suit sitting before the bar, conferring with the judge and prosecutor about the admission of coerced confessions into evidence: more of the same claptrap he’d read in those “disgusting and disheartening” newspaper articles from up north (he’d clipped them nonetheless). Something had been agreed; Hunter wasn’t going to introduce the confessions—as if this weren’t Lake County. Then they’d adjourned.

  The sheriff and his deputies escorted the Groveland Boys from the courtroom. In the stairwell, the sheriff let out a little of his frustration with a booted foot and his fists. Between blows, McCall demanded, “What are those nigger lawyers putting you up to now?”

  The defendants had no answer to the angry question and tried only to protect themselves from the sheriff’s rage, which seemed finally to be directed no longer at them but at the defense counsel. “Nigger lawyers better watch their steps,” McCall told them, or they’ll “end up in jail” along with their clients.

  After the adjournment Williams and Hill, along with Akerman, returned to Orlando to take advantage of every minute available to develop strategies and construct a defense. At the same time a tropical storm was heading for South Florida from the Bahamas, and the following day, August 26, what would now be classified a Category 4 hurricane hit land at West Palm Beach and roared north from Lake Okeechobee. By the time it reached Lake County that evening, hurricane-force winds had wreaked havoc in central Florida, with damages running to millions of dollars. Particularly hard hit was the citrus industry; agricultural losses approached $20 million, as the heavy winds uprooted about one-third of the citrus trees—what would have amounted to 14 million crates of fruit. For two days Williams and Akerman were stranded in a rooming house in Orlando without access to the court or the prosecutor’s bill of particulars or a working telephone. Residences had been unroofed; the streets were obstructed by fallen pines, downed utility poles, and industrial debris. And the defense case was a shambles.

  The prosecution can’t have regretted the losses in time and preparation that the storm had cost the lawyers for the defense. Still, the state was hedging its every bet. As Hunter was planning to call Samuel Shepherd’s brother James as a time line witness for the prosecution, and in order, therefore, to prevent him from fleeing the county or conspiring with other potential witnesses, the state attorney requested that Judge Futch dispatch Sheriff McCall to place and hold James Shepherd in the county jail until he had testified at his brother’s trial. Never a man for half measures, especially when dealing with blacks, McCall had Samuel’s parents, Henry and Charlie Mae Shepherd, jailed as well, and with a phone call north to the sheriff of Alachua County he also had Charles Greenlee’s parents detained. It was the sheriff’s way of guaranteeing that the families of the Groveland Boys did not get together in an attempt to fabricate alibis for the defendants by scripting a scenario contrary to his own official record on the events of July 15–16.

  McCall paid a visit to Ernest Thomas’s parents, too. Then he drove them from Groveland to Tavares, where Ethel and Luther Thomas were also jailed until the date of the trial. Jesse Hunter needed Ethel Thomas for the prosecution’s case, which hinged in part on establishing Ernest Thomas’s whereabouts the night of July 15, and McCall thought it likely that a friendly, private conversation, albeit in jail, would convince the grieving mother to cooperate. Her son Ernest was dead, and with the Klan shooting at the Blue Flame, Ethel Thomas didn’t have many options if she wanted to stay in Groveland. If the High Sheriff could see to it that she’d be able to run her juke joint, what harm would she be doing by agreeing to testify for the state?

  Henry Singleton need worry no
more about the crystal-gazing racketeer or cocky Ernest Thomas cutting into his bolita throws. He might have worried a little, though, about McCall, who, as Singleton knew better than most, was not of a mind to do favors for a black man without expecting something in return. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone in Groveland that the name of Henry Singleton—bootlegger, bolita dealer, nightclub owner, stool pigeon—showed up on the list of witnesses for the prosecution.

  CHAPTER 11: BAD EGG

  The New York Post was the only newspaper to publish a photograph of Norma Padgett at the time of the trial. (New York Post)

  IF I WERE asked if the woman was raped, I would have to answer ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  It was not what Willis McCall wanted to hear. He had come to the Theresa Holland Hospital in Leesburg for the physician’s report on the examination of Norma Padgett after the alleged rape. He left in a huff—after a brief, unsatisfying conversation with the examining physician, Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld—and headed back to Tavares with a notarized copy of the document and with some bad news for State Attorney Jesse Hunter. The medical evidence did not support Norma Padgett’s claim that four men had raped her.

  In mid-August, when the existence of the examining physician’s Report of Accident was leaked to the NAACP in New York, Thurgood Marshall soon had the FBI scrambling to locate the doctor and the document. It took some digging by Special Agent Watson Roper of the Miami bureau, but on August 30, at the small, private Theresa Holland Hospital in Leesburg, he was querying the young (at thirty) though “highly regarded” Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld on the matter of Norma Padgett. While “the confidential Doctor-Patient relationship” disallowed his providing a signed statement to the FBI without written permission from Norma Padgett, Binneveld did allow Roper to read and take notes on his physician’s report.