Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Williams didn’t think the jury would be out very long. Earlier in the trial, they had requested to see the inside of the car where Padgett was alleged to have been raped. Williams had held out some hope that perhaps they were considering exactly how this “grim game of ‘Musical Chairs’ could take place” in the small backseat of the car. But Futch declined, stating that the request was “a little out of line.” There weren’t going to be any surprises, and Futch had kept a tight rein on the trial.

  Williams thought Akerman’s closing argument was quite good, given the lack of time to prepare this case and the restraints Judge Futch had imposed on them throughout the trial. But Williams’s praise of Akerman did not compare to the praise Judge Futch had heaped on Jesse Hunter.

  “Jesse,” Futch said, shaking the lawyer’s hand, “I have never heard a better argument in all my life.”

  At 7:25 p.m., the twelve white Lake County men were sent out to deliberate and Poston darted down the block to “the one long distance phone booth” in range of the courthouse. He put a call in to the New York Post news desk. He was told city editor Jimmy Graham was nervous, pacing the floor like “an expectant father” because he hadn’t heard from Poston in hours. Graham had even phoned Governor Warren, hoping to secure some protection for his reporter.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Poston said. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Tell Jimmy the verdict will be in any minute, and I’ll be heading for Orlando—40 miles away—later tonight.”

  Poston wasn’t the only person on a phone near the courthouse while the jury was deliberating. William Bogar, Sheriff Willis McCall’s fellow Klansman who had been one of the night riders during the rioting in Groveland in July, received a call from another member of the Apopka Klavern at around the same time. The Klansman told Bogar that Sheriff McCall “needed help” to “run the negro lawyers.” A bunch of them were getting together to meet in an open space near a house off Route 441 near Lake Ola, where they’d wait for the car.

  Word began to spread that the jurors had reached a verdict, and at 9:26 p.m. they took their seats in the jury box and waited for Judge Futch to bring the court to order. Before the verdict was read, Futch warned that there would be “no demonstration, handclapping or anything of that sort,” and that all spectators were to remain in the courtroom until the sheriff and his deputies removed the defendants. The judge asked the clerk of courts to read the verdict. Greenlee’s eyes followed the paper that was carried and passed from the jury foreman to the clerk.

  We the jury find the defendants guilty. So say we all, By majority recommendation of mercy for Charles Greenlee.

  Charles A. Blaze Foreman

  Mabel Norris Reese noted, “Hope was gone from the eyes of Shepherd and Irvin. They were looking past the jury as they gazed forward—past them to their journey to the electric chair.”

  There was no outburst, just silence. Franklin Williams reached back and gripped the hand of Charles Greenlee. “Then a smile—a smile of boyish triumph came over the face of the Negro boy,” Mabel wrote. “The play was done. Charles Greenlee had no reason to be acting then. He was accepting the plaudits due any one who kept an audience spellbound.”

  A recommendation of mercy meant that the sixteen-year-old would likely spend the rest of his life in jail. The defense had no interest in having the jury polled. They needed to move.

  ALEX, PSST, ALEX,” came a hiss from across the court. It was Judge Futch, informing the two white lawyers for the defense that they could slip out of the courthouse through his private chambers. Akerman quickly requested that sentencing be delayed for three days so that he could file a motion for a new trial. Futch granted the request, seemingly more concerned with getting the lawyers safely out of his courtroom. As Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee were taken away in shackles, Akerman and Price retreated behind the judge’s desk. Hunter stayed in the courtroom, urging spectators to “go home quietly and not to cause any trouble.”

  Williams could hear the iron gate clang behind him as the Groveland Boys were led back upstairs by Sheriff Willis McCall. Hunter approached Williams to shake his hand, and Williams wanted Hunter to know one thing, off the record, as he watched the defendants leave the courtroom. Those boys, Williams told him, had been severely beaten by the sheriff and his deputies.

  “I don’t doubt it at all,” Hunter replied.

  With nothing more to say, Williams and Hill were escorted by highway patrolmen downstairs and out the back door, where they emerged in the back lot behind the courthouse, right at the spot where McCall had been met by a mob of angry Bay Lake men who demanded to search the jail for Norma Padgett’s rapists back in July. It was hot and humid and dark and quiet, and as they made their way to Hill’s car, the patrolmen turned and walked in the other direction.

  “Aren’t you going to escort us to our car?” Williams asked.

  “No, my job is over,” one cop said. “The trial is finished.”

  It was the first time Williams had truly felt fear during the case. He’d been intimidated by Willis McCall, but “I was young enough and I guess silly enough not to be afraid of him.”

  The two lawyers crossed the lawn just as spectators were leaving the court, and they hopped into Hill’s 1948 sedan. Hill tried to light a cigarette, but the car’s lighter had started smoking. Williams reached over and knocked the lighter to the floor, burning his finger. Somebody had tried to short-circuit the car and “jammed that cigarette lighter in just a few minutes before we got to it.” The two had promised to give Ted Poston and Ramona Lowe a ride back to Orlando, and they waited nervously in the car as spectators came their way.

  “Boy, nigger boy,” said one man with his wife and daughter as he passed by. More and more of them were filing past the car and Williams was past being edgy.

  “Now where the hell is Poston and Lowe?” he muttered.

  Ted Poston was just coming down from the Jim Crow balcony when he touched Lowe’s arm and guided her into a corridor where they almost bumped into Norma Padgett, who clenched her jaw and glared at the Negro reporters. Poston reached the lobby, but he’d lost Lowe in the jostling and “hostile sea of white faces.” He took a side exit and with his jacket slung over one shoulder, he heard Horace Hill, idling his car with the lights out, calling his name softly.

  “Hurry up and get in,” Hill told him.

  “Jesus,” Poston remarked. “I am scared stiff.”

  “Where’s Ramona?” Williams asked.

  Poston opened the door. He had to go back for her, but Hill tried to stop him.

  “Don’t argue now, Horace,” Williams snapped. “Let him go.”

  “Look, Frank,” Hill said. “You’re not in New York now. These clay-eating crackers aren’t joking. I know. I wasn’t born down here for nothing.”

  Poston raced back across the lawn and into the courthouse, where he spotted the heavyset Lowe talking to James Shepherd. “Come on,” he said, leading her back to the car.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Hill scolded, telling the reporters that the state patrol’s escort was gone.

  Even Williams wasn’t pleased at having to wait. “They blame us for getting Greenlee out of the chair,” he said. “You both might have had a chance.”

  Hill continued to curse Poston and Lowe for their “damfoolishness” until they were able to make it out of Tavares. The traffic was thick until most of the cars peeled north toward Eustis, and they got onto Route 441, where the road opened up. Hill was moving the car along at 60 miles an hour where the road curled south toward Lake Ola. They were finally able to breathe and even managed some gallows humor about Hill having to live down here with these crackers, but the joking came to an abrupt end when they spotted two cars parked on both sides of the highway, facing Orlando. Hill shot past them, but “the two parked cars lighted up” and a third car followed behind.

  Hill put the pedal to the floor and was doing 80-plus miles an hour, passing slower-moving traffic, when Williams noticed two cars coming up on the
m, with lights flashing.

  “Jesus Christ,” Williams said. “There is somebody behind us.”

  Ahead, they spotted a man in the road waving a white handkerchief or a cloth, but Hill had no intention of stopping and the man jumped aside as they passed. Williams spotted three cars in pursuit and in the first car, the silhouette of three men in the front seat. The one in the middle, Williams noted, was wearing a cowboy hat—“the kind that Willis McCall wore.”

  At high speeds, all four cars plowed through a red light.

  “Oh, shit,” Williams shrieked. “This is it.”

  Williams had been through a similar and harrowing experience before, when the car he’d been driving in hit a patch of ice and skidded out of control back in his college days at Lincoln. The crash had been so horrific it made the news, but Williams survived. Still, that car had been totaled, and Williams had been going only at half the speed that Hill was doing.

  Ramona began sobbing. “Oh, God. It’s my fault. I got you into this . . . I should’ve—”

  “Shut up!” Poston yelled.

  In silence, the sedan rocketed toward Apopka, with Williams calmly providing updates. “He’s picking up, Horace.”

  Poston had picked up some “second hand make-shift glasses” but was grateful he could see “no further than two feet ahead.” Three times the city desk at the Post had turned down his request to cover the Little Scottsboro case, but he persisted, and now he was back in one of those moments that had haunted him every time he went south. They were “hurtling forward in a stygian blackness,” as Hill cut the lights, “trusting only the light of the Florida moon.” He’d reached 90 miles an hour, but he hadn’t lost his Klan pursuers, and he ever so slightly zigzagged on the road so they wouldn’t shoot the tires. The cars behind them were close enough that they could hear the drivers honking their horns. Coming into lighted downtown Apopka, Hill ran a few red lights and “missed by inches” a pickup truck near a movie house. Williams noted that one of the cars behind nearly crashed, but straightened up, and “one of the crackers was leaning out the front window.”

  “I guess this is it, then,” Williams said. “No cracker would endanger other crackers—not to mention his own life and limb—just to put a scare into a bunch of Negroes. I guess they really intend to take us.”

  They were still on Route 441, past Apopka and heading south to Orlando, picking up speed again, when Ramona Lowe screamed.

  “They’re not back there now!”

  The Klan cars had peeled off, perhaps unwilling to take the chase any farther. Williams reached for a cigarette, but Hill kept the speed up until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. They reached the familiar Wigwam Hotel, with thirty-one large white teepees off South Orange Blossom Trail, which Hill passed before turning left into Parramore, the black section of town, where they stopped in front of a little hotel.

  “I have never been so happy to see so many black folks in my life,” Williams thought.

  Poston was sitting quietly in the back, where they all looked at each other in silence. He was glad his good glasses were broken, he later wrote. “I couldn’t see my own shame, which must have been reflected in their eyes.”

  Hill parked the car and they entered the hotel, only to go right out through the back door and up to the woman’s house where Williams was staying. They grabbed a drink and sat for about an hour. Once they’d settled their nerves some, Williams and Hill got back into the car to drive to Akerman’s office. “We’ve got to get to work on that appeal,” Williams said.

  When they arrived, Akerman and Price were already going over the case files. Williams told them the story of being chased by three cars at 90 miles an hour through Lake and Orange counties.

  “Aw, you have got to be kidding,” Akerman said.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Williams told him, he wasn’t kidding.

  CHAPTER 12: ATOM SMASHER

  Flat Top, also known as the “death house,” at Florida State Prison in Raiford. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

  WILLIS MCCALL HAD decided the time had come for the Groveland Boys to “get right with the Lord.” He’d had his deputies drag Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd to his office below the Tavares jail. The two rapists would soon be transported back to Florida State Prison in Raiford, this time to death row, where they’d be waiting for their date with the electric chair. Now, though, while he had the chance, McCall wanted to have a little conversation with the two boys. He preferred there be no lawyers present.

  McCall pointed toward the wire recorder. He suggested to the boys that the time had come for them to clear their consciences; that it couldn’t hurt to make a statement, since they’d soon be heading to the chair anyway. Shepherd and Irvin both refused, both of them stating, as they had in court, that they were innocent. McCall looked them hard in the eyes; neither man flinched. The sheriff had them taken back to their cells. They’d be gone from Lake County quick enough, and the only way they’d be coming back was in a pine box.

  With Charles Greenlee, the sheriff played hardball. He pointed to the wire recorder on his desk; he told the boy he wanted a statement. The boy’s eyes darted from the recorder to the sheriff to the ceiling, a wall. Was he going to be beaten, he wanted to know, “if he didn’t say what the sheriff wanted to hear.” McCall fumed. No, he told him, not beaten—killed.

  The sixteen-year-old was sufficiently intimidated: “He was going to hand me over to the mob,” Charles Greenlee said later. McCall turned on the wire recorder and proceeded to lead the prisoner through a series of simple questions. Convinced that he could avoid trouble if he cooperated, the boy responded with the answers he figured the Big Hat Man wanted to hear. They were nothing like the boy’s rambling responses from the witness box, which prompted twelve white men on a jury to spare his life. Life on the chain gang—it galled the sheriff that the boy had gotten off easy.

  “You lied on the witness stand?” McCall asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you make up that story?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sometimes it’s better if you tell the truth about what happened,” McCall said. “Who went first?”

  “Ernest Thomas, I believe.”

  “Now, you didn’t take a lot of talking into, did you?”

  “No, sir,” Greenlee replied.

  “Why didn’t ya’ll kill the woman?”

  “Well, I begged them not to, they were talking about it.”

  Seeing an opportunity to embarrass the NAACP with a recorded statement by their defense team’s star witness, he asked, “Now, did these lawyers talk to you, did they put you up . . . What did they say to you?”

  Greenlee didn’t bite. “They just asked us our story. And then they said to don’t worry, that they were going to defend us, that they were going to fight for us.”

  McCall finished with a string of rapid-fire questions: “Now nobody has promised you anything?” “Nobody has offered you, or made any promises to you?” “Nobody’s threatened you?” “You’re not under any threat of any kind?” “Now you didn’t have to say any of this, did you?”

  “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir.” “No, sir,” came Greenlee’s prompt replies.

  Willis McCall was satisfied. His voice became quiet, almost reassuring. “I just wanted to know for my own curiosity what had really happened there,” he said slowly. “I just wanted to know for my own curiosity if you had lied.” Then he reached across his desk and switched off the recorder.

  Deputies Yates and Campbell led the lanky boy back to the elevator in the Lake County Court House—the elevator that just two months before had taken him down to the basement where he’d been cuffed to an overhead pipe and mercilessly beaten. He’d survived the question-and-answer session with Sheriff McCall without a scratch. The deputies locked him in his cell on the fourth floor. Yates departed with a sneer.

  Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin watched in silence. The boy sat down. He buried his fa
ce in the palms of his hands; his body trembled. He began to cry.

  SCOTLAND YARD, PLEASE Don’t Take Our Yates.”

  Mabel Norris Reese wrote her own headlines for the Mount Dora Topic, and she seemed never to tire of advertising the top-notch detective work of Deputy James Yates. To his forensic analysis of the tire tracks and shoe prints at the crime scene Mabel attributed, in her posttrial coverage, the sentences to death by electrocution that the Whittlin’ Judge had so justly delivered to Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. The photo of Deputy Yates standing beside his plaster casts on the front page of the Topic was enough to turn Thurgood Marshall’s stomach, for the Yates that he saw in the photo was the sadistic deputy who had severely and serially beaten the Groveland Boys.

  The only good news that Franklin Williams, on his return to the NAACP office in New York, had to offer to Marshall was that Charles Greenlee had received a life sentence of hard labor: “An unlettered but articulate 16-year-old boy literally talked himself out of Florida’s electric chair,” as one reporter had written. On all other matters, Judge Futch had ruled uncompromisingly, and unsurprisingly, against the defense. He had not only rejected the motion for a new trial but also made a point of noting for the record both that the attorneys for the defense had had “ample opportunity to prepare” and that Williams and Akerman had “inject[ed] the racial question into the record.” Meanwhile, the “vicious,” in Williams’s judgment, Mabel Norris Reese had filled the pages of the Mount Dora Topic with her grossly biased coverage of the trial and its aftermath, which was spiked with quotes by the self-satisfied sheriff Willis McCall, such as his reminder to the residents of Lake County that “the evidence was overwhelming, all three confessed.” The reportage galled Marshall no less than it had Williams.