Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Poston’s own personal experience of the hazardous link between racial and sexual tensions for black males in the South had drawn him to the story of Norma Padgett and the Groveland Boys from its outset. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1906, two years before Thurgood Marshall, the especially dark-skinned Poston found himself assigned as if by nature to a lower social and economic status among both whites and blacks. At the age of thirteen, he was earning fifty cents a week for tending the fireplaces at the house of a dentist in town. On a particular morning he’d entered one of the rooms to clean out the ashes and lay wood to build a new fire when he encountered there a “grown young lady.” She beckoned the boy to her, and with her hand pressed to the front of his pants, she commented on his anatomy, then asked the tongue-tied Poston, “Are you diddling with the nigger gals?” Aghast, the boy watched as she disrobed before him, and he trembled, as much with fear as desire, as she coaxed him into sexual intercourse—as she would again the next morning, and the next, for it became “an every morning occurrence.” And the boy became increasingly traumatized; even thirteen-year-olds knew what happened to blacks caught with white women. When guilt and fear finally compelled him to tell the woman he was going to quit his job, she replied with a threat. “If you quit, I’m going to tell the doctor you raped me,” she said, and for three more years Poston remained a slave to her bidding.

  Weeks before the Groveland Boys were brought to trial, Poston had been writing features for the New York Post under the series headline “Horror in the Sunny South.” As soon as he had picked up the story on Norma Padgett’s claims of rape from the newswires, he had begun investigating the case. He had interviewed the family of Samuel Shepherd; he’d spoken with victims of the mob violence. It was Poston who first compared the events in Groveland to those in a similar rape case nearly twenty years before. It was Poston who called it “Florida’s Little Scottsboro.”

  Ramona Lowe, a part-time Florida correspondent for the Chicago Defender, also arrived at Tavares to cover the trial. Lowe had been the first reporter to break the story of the gross mistreatment that the Groveland Boys had borne while in Sheriff McCall’s custody. If her incendiary pieces on the case had in general won the appreciation of the NAACP, a particular story that ran on the front page of the Defender had Marshall and Williams both scratching their heads. In addition to carefully documenting the “seething jealousy” that fueled the resentment of Bay Lake’s poor white farmers toward more prosperous black farmers like Henry Shepherd, Lowe claimed that, according to an unnamed source, Samuel Shepherd and Norma Padgett had been longtime friends. So distraught was Norma over Shepherd’s arrest, the source said, she had asserted that should anything bad happen, “I will leave this place [Groveland]. I have known Sam all my life.” If Lowe and her source were to be believed, the assertion would certainly alter the complexion of the sheriff’s and state attorney’s official narrative and would buoy Williams’s defense, but in another article, with equal conviction, Lowe had reported that Charles Greenlee had been riding in the car with Irvin and Shepherd on the night of July 15: an affirmation that Williams had determined was simply not true. Lowe’s reporting puzzled Williams, but he was happy to have one more journalist on his side covering the trial.

  For Marshall and Williams—indeed, for any NAACP defense counsel assigned to a criminal case in the hostile South—the presence of a reporter, even from a black newspaper like the Pittsburgh Courier or Chicago Defender, helped to ensure their protection. “The theory was,” Williams said, “if the world knew you were there, you were safe.” (Though it was no guarantee. An FBI informant in a central Florida Klavern later revealed that the Pittsburgh Courier was “generally read from the Klan meeting floor.”) In the event that the press did not find a trial significant enough to warrant coverage, Thurgood Marshall himself would issue press releases from the NAACP’s New York office in which he would announce his own or an associate’s arrival and departure times in a given Southern town. With Poston in Lake County, Williams had a major New York newspaper covering his every move and thus, he felt, a “greater modicum of security.” For a measure of security, too, Poston reserved a suite in a Negro hotel in Orlando for the duration of his assignment, but each night he would steal out the back door of the hotel to sleep instead at one of three secret private homes. Not a man to take any chances in the South, Poston made sure the defense lawyers had the telephone number of the city editor at the New York Post “just in case anything happens.”

  With trial testimony about to begin, Franklin Williams might have envied the confidence of Mabel Norris Reese that the “true story,” however “unpretty” its details, had been uncovered in the case or have wished he could validate Ramona Lowe’s discoveries about Norma Padgett’s past. Rumors and clues and speculation tantalized the lawyer for the defense with possibilities, but they did not constitute sound evidence for the court, so he had to face what for him was the truth: that for all his interviews and investigation, he still did not know what had happened on that Friday night in July. Certainly suspicion densely clouded Norma Padgett’s claim that she’d been raped by the four Groveland boys, and not just among the blacks. Terence McCarthy, the British economist who’d been researching the story for the New Leader, told Williams that Groveland’s police chief, George Mays, had informed him off the record that Norma Padgett was a “bad egg” and that her denial of acquaintance with the Groveland Boys was suspect—Norma, according to Mays, “had grown up as a child next door” to Ernest Thomas.

  Franklin Williams himself had spoken with the Reverend Collis C. Blair, a white Methodist minister in Orlando, who had been in Bay Lake after the rioting. On that occasion, Blair told Williams (as Williams subsequently told the FBI during an August briefing in the New York office of the NAACP), various members of the mob who had “stirred up” the violence and “kept it going” had been pointed out to him, but with no names named. When pressed by Williams as to who they were, the understandably nervous Blair had answered, “The Klan,” adding that the men told him “these niggers needed to be taken down a notch.” Whatever sympathies Blair may have had with the victims of that violence and whatever horror he may have had of the Klan, the minister knew that the KKK could burn a church with as little compunction as they would a Negro home; he needed to limit his risks.

  Sensing that the white minister was holding back perhaps critical information from him, Williams pressed further: Hadn’t Blair, a young Methodist from Florida, pursued his religious studies in the enlightened North, at Yale Divinity School? Didn’t he acknowledge the church’s strategic role in combating interracial violence? With one boy already dead and three others facing the likelihood of execution, would he offer only silence? The lawyer was practically pleading, and the minister, after more than a moment’s hesitation, did finally admit that he had had a met with a few people after Norma Padgett had been found walking barefoot up near Okahumpka. With whom? Williams asked. And Blair replied, “Mrs. Padgett, her husband, and mother in law.”

  Williams, in his conscience, recognized that he could not put Reverend Blair on the witness stand. The substance of Blair’s knowledge, vital to Williams’s insight into the elusive truth of the case, would have to be imparted in confidence. Williams asked what the Reverend Blair had concluded after talking with Norma and the Padgetts? Blair was neither coy nor evasive. He observed that Norma did not show “any traces of having gone through a bad experience,” and seemed “quite thrilled to be the object of so much publicity.” As a native Floridian familiar with the Bay Lake community, Blair also found it curious that “none of the family showed any such resentment [toward the Groveland boys] as one would expect.” He ultimately admitted to Williams that he had “grave doubts as to whether a rape actually occurred.”

  Williams passed on the minister’s name and telephone number to the FBI, whose agents, the New York lawyer was sure, had gathered information equally valuable to the defense, although the FBI investigation had been “considerably aff
ected” once word of the brutality exerted upon the three suspects by Lake County law enforcement had spread. Williams was of course aware that the willingness of some Lake County residents to talk to the FBI had evaporated in the face of rumors and threats and misinformation to the effect that “the investigation will result in defense material for NAACP attorneys.” Williams had in fact attempted to compel agents Quigley and Matthews to testify by serving them an anonymous “Richard Roe and John Doe” subpoena, which was ultimately quashed in the U.S. attorney’s office by reason of “the confidential nature of the FBI’s investigation.” Williams had been frustrated by the state attorney’s office as well, in its strategically sound decisions not to call Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld as a witness or to place into evidence his physician’s report—and likewise, the (coerced) confessions of the Groveland Boys. Jesse Hunter would rely on the probability that the testimony of a young white woman would trump anything the three Negroes might say in their defense. Judge Futch, meanwhile, compounded Williams’s frustration in his rulings not to make the medical report available to the defense and not to allow any testimony about beatings of prisoners at the hands of law enforcement. What the judge called irrelevant Williams considered to be deliberate moves to assure Hunter the convictions he sought.

  On Friday morning, September 2, before the commencement of trial testimony, Judge Futch presided over the completion of jury selection and the defense did the best they could with the few challenges still available to them. Over the past few days, as, one by one, the prospective jurors—Lake County farmers and pickers and truckers, with their meaty hands and their worn work clothes—had appeared before the court, Williams, the sharply attired New York lawyer, had recalled again, and more than once, the words of the Daytona Beach attorney who’d refused the case because “those clay eating crackers down there” would as soon shoot you as look at you. In quizzing the potential jurors, Akerman had been trying to gauge what might be their reactions should they see a black man addressing whites in ways they had never witnessed before, thus implicitly challenging the racial power structure as they knew it. “How would you feel about one of these negro lawyers jumping up and objecting?” he’d asked one. To another he’d posed, “And you would feel that it would be proper for them, as defense counsel, to cross-examine witnesses, even though the witness happened to be white?” (One potential juror had become confused when Akerman pointed to Williams and Hill at the defense table: “They are not on trial, are they?” the juror had asked.) Akerman’s other primary concern had been to discover if potential jurors were “kin” to any Tysons or Padgetts, and the few who were had been excused. Jesse Hunter, on the other hand, focused largely on any objections the prospective jurors might have to capital punishment; most were “in favor of it.”

  Most of the prospective jurors, not surprisingly, were also white. Of the three black men whose names had been pulled from the jury pool, only one made it to court: a “gray haired old handyman” whose father-in-law had recently died. The court clerk implored Williams to excuse the “boy” so that he could attend the funeral, adding that the handyman was “one of the best niggers in Lake County.” Then all the jurors were white, and by the end of that Friday morning in early September both Hunter and Akerman had announced to Judge Futch that they were satisfied with the jury in the box. While it might have been worse, it was, to Williams’s mind, nonetheless terrible. Still, the defense had managed to establish on record that blacks were historically and systematically excluded from jury service in Lake County, so he would be able to tell Marshall on Friday night that the NAACP was well positioned for appeal. It was a small victory and in this trial, Williams feared, most likely his last.

  Testimony in State of Florida v. Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, Ernest E. Thomas began after a recess on Friday, September 2, 1949. Hundreds of spectators packed into the Lake County Court House, among them a few dozen blacks who filed up to the balcony to a section reserved for coloreds. A few days earlier Mabel Norris Reese had written a news piece under the header “Women Beg for Reserved Seats at Trial,” but it was mostly white Lake County men who filled the wooden benches. Ramona Lowe observed: “Through sentiment whipped-up by Florida daily newspapers, the trial has become a side-show for thrill-seeking, sadistic country-bred whites.”

  Williams and Hill shuddered at the entrance into the courtroom of steely-eyed “Bay Lake Crackers with snuff in their mustache,” local men who had been deputized as security police, whose presence was more menacing than reassuring. It was not unlikely that security included some of the very same men who had descended on the courthouse less than two months before with Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett, although Williams could not be sure. When he spotted Willis McCall—strutting around the courtroom like a man in his home at Thanksgiving, shaking hands and welcoming in friends and family—Williams felt a pang of apprehension. McCall “always intimidated me,” the lawyer said.

  Around 2 p.m., the clang of an iron gate quieted the crowd. A door behind the judge’s bench swung open. Slowly, the sheriff’s deputies Yates and Campbell paraded the three solemn young black men to their seats at the defense table, and the people of Lake County got their first look at the men accused of raping Norma Padgett. Weeks earlier, at the arraignment, Mabel Norris Reese had noted for her readers that Irvin was wearing no shoes, his “bare feet making a soft, pattering noise as he climbed the steps,” but he appeared at the trial in shoes and, like his codefendants, dressed in a suit. That September afternoon the temperature had reached the low nineties and a large electric pedestal fan whirred behind the witness box, the sound promising to drown out any quiet testimony. On the judge’s desk lay a pile of cedar sticks; seated, Truman Futch pulled a knife from a drawer and demonstrated, as he would throughout the trial, how he’d gotten nicknamed “the Whittlin’ Judge.” Oppressive heat, old Southern lawyers in red suspenders, whittling judges, a fearsome sheriff, and a crowd of racist, tobacco-stained crackers on the benches behind him—“it was,” Williams observed, “almost to me like a story that I was living through and these were caricatures that I was being exposed to.”

  A glance up to the balcony did not allay any of Williams’s misgivings. In the somber faces of the blacks he read resignation mixed with fear—fear of McCall, “of what he might do and of what he could get away with”—and in no face could he see an expectation of justice. “They were just there watching.”

  Then Williams spotted the girl: Norma Padgett, seated in the front row beside her husband, her blond locks newly curled, lips tightly pursed. There would be no mercy, either, for the Groveland Boys.

  The state attorney called his first witness, whose sole purpose was to attest that he had seen Ernest Thomas on the afternoon of July 26 and that Ernest Thomas had been and was in fact dead. Williams had suspected that the prosecution had a “dying declaration all rigged,” but Hunter was content with the testimony. The defense had no questions, and with one of the Groveland Boys out of the way, the state turned to their next witness, the twenty-three-year-old husband of the rape victim, Willie Padgett. Hunter led Padgett through what seemed to Williams a tightly scripted scenario: how Willie had been beaten and robbed on the side of a road near Okahumpka; how he had come to his senses just long enough to see four black men drive away with his wife; how he’d driven miles, to Dean’s filling station in Leesburg, where he told the attendant, Curtis Howard, about the attack and abduction. Finding room for doubt in Willie Padgett’s story, Williams whispered to Akerman before the Florida lawyer began cross-examination. By the end of his testimony, Padgett had conceded that of the four defendants he was able to identify only two, Shepherd and Irvin, from that night. It was a small gain for the defense, one to be lost in a matter of minutes.

  Hunter next called Norma Padgett. Her chin held high, shoulders back, she strolled more than strode to the witness box. She was wearing a dark party dress with a large corsage flower at the hip, and into an ample white belt Norma had tucked a kind of homemad
e, sleeveless bolero, the bright, wide fabric slung up and over both her shoulders like wings on an angel costume. To Williams and Hill, she seemed to be “promenading” with no sense of shame or discomfort before the court, as if her purpose were to command, and relish, the attention of several hundred Lake County men rather than to testify that she, a white girl still in her teens, had been recently raped by four black men. If initially baffled by the girl’s appearance and demeanor, Williams in a moment recalled the publicity that another Lake County girl, Lois Driver, had recently been gleaning in the local and national press. Having won a few local beauty contests—Miss Merry Christmas as well as various agriculturally related titles, like Tangerine Queen—Lois had achieved at least countywide fame when Ladies’ Home Journal began scouring small towns across America for a series of covers called “Undiscovered American Beauties.” The magazine urged photographers around the country to be on the lookout at the beach, football game, church, or high school for a girl “whose face would launch a thousand ships or sell a million magazines.” The Journal promised it would pay top dollar to photographers and models who made the cut in the highly subjective business of selecting one beautiful girl each month from thousands of entries. In July 1949, as every girl in Lake County was aware, whether with admiration or envy or aspirations, the Undiscovered American Beauty on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal was Lois Driver. Franklin Williams was also aware of it, because J. E. Driver, Lois’s machinist father, had been summoned and questioned for jury duty on the Groveland rape case (he was not selected). And Norma Padgett was making the most of her moment.