Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Once the indignant Williams had detailed his exchange with Marshall about the Groveland case for Walter White, the recently restored executive assured his young colleague that “he didn’t have to worry about Thurgood Marshall, that he’d get a job as long as he was secretary.”

  White’s statement of assurance got relayed back to Marshall. As it happened, Williams had stepped out of the office, so Marshall asked the telephone operator to call him the moment Williams returned. Marshall did not have to wait long for the call. He met Williams at the door, and announced, “You’re fired.”

  Again Williams stormed into Walter White’s office. It was immediately apparent to White that in his absence power had shifted in the NAACP offices, and it was soon apparent to Williams that his ally and advocate could not make good on his promises. Franklin Williams would indeed have to worry about Thurgood Marshall, and as for that job he’d get as long as White was secretary . . . “Why, I didn’t mean that,” White told him.

  Franklin Williams did get another job. Within weeks he had been named West Coast director and regional counsel for the NAACP in San Francisco. While his transfer to the West Coast might justly have been viewed as a promotion as well, Williams left New York in disappointment, for, he believed, he would probably never again have the opportunity to argue civil rights cases for the LDF in the U.S. Supreme Court. He told Jack Greenberg that his ambition was to one day return to the NAACP as chief, but he less optimistically confided to other friends and associates that “he felt he was being exiled.” As it turned out, he would be back much sooner than he’d have expected.

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1950, Marshall decided to proceed more proactively in the Groveland Boys case. Norman Bunin’s exposé in the St. Petersburg Times had convinced Marshall that Norma Padgett’s story held more than she or the court had revealed, and in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse Lake County’s verdict, he preferred to have further investigations into the case completed or at least under way before a date was set for the second trial to begin. To a meeting in New York with representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Baltimore lawyer and national secretary of the Workers Defense League Rowland Watts, and New Leader reporter Terence McCarthy, Marshall also invited a friend from Miami, Buck Owens, of the Owens Detective Agency, and a young private investigator, one “Miss L. B. De Forest.” Together, they carved out a plan.

  Bunin told Marshall that “although most of the whites there [in Lake County] were happy about the conviction, many of them don’t believe Norma Padgett’s story.” Marshall thought, and the others agreed, that it “could prove fruitful” if Miss De Forest could cultivate relationships with some of the Padgetts, “not all of whom are on good terms with Norma.” It was agreed, too, that the detective “should try to get on good terms with the people of Groveland itself, especially the police chief [George Mays],” who had demonstrated a willingness to provide information to both McCarthy and the FBI. McCarthy and Watts would also brief Miss De Forest on further leads. She, it was decided, would enter Lake County undercover, as a potential buyer of real estate, and would regularly send reports back to the “realtor” Rowland Watts in New York, “to avoid any possibility of a slip-up.” Marshall agreed to payment by the NAACP of a five-hundred-dollar retainer and thirty-five dollars a day, plus expenses, for the investigator’s services. The deal was struck. All Miss De Forest needed to do now was pack her bags and hop on a bus for Lake County, and follow a piece of advice from Marshall, the lawyers, and McCarthy. “Keep away from Sheriff McCall,” they told her, although “plied with beer, his deputies might do some talking about their part in the case.”

  THURGOOD MARSHALL ASSIGNED Jack Greenberg the task of writing the writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to hear the Groveland Boys case, and Greenberg did exactly as he had been taught: he talked first to academics and law professors; then he talked to Bill Hastie. He learned.

  Recently, in the appeal of a Texas murder case, Cassell v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed the conviction of a black man on the grounds of unconstitutional jury exclusion practices, the commissioners having “chose[n] jurymen only from people with whom they were personally acquainted, and they knew no Negroes who were eligible and available for grand jury service.” As the state attorney in Lake County had selected a grand jury in virtually the same manner, Greenberg made the Cassell ruling the first point in his petition. Closed though the mind of the Florida Supreme Court might have been to the argument, the U.S. Supreme Court, Greenberg noted, “would not be likely to treat its own precedent so cavalierly.”

  Further, in studying the court records, Greenberg was pleased to discover that Williams and Akerman had filed the proper motions with the trial judge in a timely fashion. They had also properly raised constitutional objections over the unfair trial atmosphere in Lake County when filing their motion for a change of venue. While Williams and Akerman themselves may have felt that they were being steamrollered by Jesse Hunter and Truman Futch during the proceedings and trial, what Greenberg felt after reviewing the transcripts and affidavits was confidence that the Groveland Boys might very well prevail at the appellate level.

  Greenberg’s confidence was not misplaced. On November 27, 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Groveland Boys case. The young attorney immediately began working on the brief, in which he would include “a number of old English cases from the 1700s on change of venue, because Justice Frankfurter liked English precedents.”

  EARLY IN THE summer of 1950, at the NAACP’s forty-first annual convention, in Boston, Marshall announced to the delegates, “The complete destruction of all segregation is now in sight. . . . We are going to insist on non-segregation in American public education from top to bottom—from law school to kindergarten.” To achieve this far-reaching goal in all (then) forty-eight states without unnecessary political distractions, Marshall and the board of the NAACP found it necessary to pass and adopt an anticommunist resolution, which directed the organization’s leaders to “eradicate Communists from its branch units.” The irony of the resolution was not lost on the NAACP itself; an article in its magazine, the Crisis, later pointed out, “It was one of the great ironies of the era that the nation’s oldest civil rights organization discriminated against individuals on the basis of their political beliefs and affiliation.” Yet, ever since the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, the rift had widened between communists and NAACP executives who believed that the “radicals had been extremely severe and frequently unfair in their attempts to discredit the NAACP.”

  Marshall took special delight in trumping the political maneuvers of the NAACP’s communist wing. At the annual convention in Los Angeles in 1949, the communist faction of the NAACP had put forth a resolution to stop the Marshall Plan, in which General George C. Marshall, after touring postwar Europe, proposed massive U.S. funding to jump-start the European economy and thereby prevent the spread of communism. Misguided in their conviction that the communists had set out to defeat Thurgood Marshall’s plans, delegates at the convention were soon protesting the measure: “They’re in there, the Commies are fighting, they’re trying to get rid of our lawyer!” the offended delegates shouted. “They’re voting against the Marshall Plan!” Marshall’s plans got passed pretty easily that year.

  The next year in Boston, Marshall could again boast, “we socked them good,” after an unsuccessful attempt by the communist faction at the convention to weaken the NAACP’s leadership by spreading rumors that vastly inflated the salaries of the LDF lawyers and the executive staff—in part with Marshall’s collaboration. For Marshall had been on his way to church with some friends when he’d been spotted by a group of communists who’d wanted to know about “all this money that you and Walter and Roy make.” Marshall had replied that as Wilkins, he, and White earned all that money, they deserved it, but he had not appeared to be willing to tell the agitators just how much “it” was. Then he’d paused a moment, as if to consider the matter furt
her, and added, with a touch of glee in his mischief, “Of course, I’ll tell you. If you’re a member of the NAACP, you’re entitled to know . . . fifty-five thousand dollars plus expenses.” Pressed further as to Walter White’s take, Marshall had estimated “around eighty,” although he knew that White was drawing only about ten thousand dollars annually, around fifteen hundred more than Marshall himself. When one of Marshall’s friends had inquired why he’d tossed out such inflated amounts, Marshall had responded that if any of those guys at the convention quoted those figures, they’d be “hooted off the floor.” And “sure enough,” Marshall later recalled, “the damn fools did.”

  The executive staff and majority delegates of the NAACP had in fact socked the communists good on virtually every resolution they’d brought to the convention floor in 1950. They walked out in frustration “and never came back,” said Marshall, whose management of the communist issue in Boston earned him an oral commendation from J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI director had “evidently had the meeting monitored”). “The communists brought it on themselves,” Walter White told reporters. “We have always kept the door open. But they alienated and infuriated the members by their clumsy efforts to take over the NAACP.”

  About the same time that the convention in Boston was ending, on June 25, 1950, communist North Korea invaded the Republic of Korea. Thus began the first significant military conflict of the Cold War. In 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, President Truman had, by executive order, desegregated the armed forces, but the U.S. Army had not been prepared then or since—and certainly not at a time of war—to effectively integrate blacks into daily military life. Racial prejudice and the negative stereotyping of black soldiers—their supposed fear of the dark, for one example—had a particularly demoralizing effect on the largely African-American 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, in part, it would appear, because the regiment’s white leadership blamed its own failures on the black soldiers in the field. When dozens of men from the 24th Infantry Regiment found themselves being court-martialed and convicted for cowardice and desertion, they began requesting NAACP representation. It struck Marshall as strange that the notable 24th, which, despite “staggering casualties,” had demonstrated exceptional valor in retaking the city of Yechon on July 20, 1950, had gone from “heroes to cowards, all within a few days.”

  Marshall decided he would have to get the facts for himself, in Korea, but he almost immediately encountered problems in his attempt to secure military clearance for his travel. Although the FBI approved Marshall’s travel plans expeditiously enough, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. troops in Korea, cited evidence from the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Thurgood Marshall had belonged to two legal guilds whose members were known to include communists. On that basis, the State Department denied Marshall entry to the Far East. Marshall countered by appealing to President Truman, and the White House pressured MacArthur to withdraw his objections. Marshall arrived in Tokyo on January 14, 1951. He spent weeks there, interviewing blacks who’d been imprisoned at the Tokyo stockade, before proceeding to Korea. There, Marshall had to hunt down the military court’s records of the “so-called trials,” which he eventually found in a warehouse near Tejon. The transcripts were astonishing. In hearings that lasted mere minutes, men had been sentenced to life imprisonment. One man—Leon Gilbert, a black lieutenant—had even received a death penalty, for being absent in the presence of the enemy: to Marshall’s mind, a highly suspect charge, given the testimony of two medical officers that Gilbert had not gone AWOL but had been “in a base hospital.”

  To track down witnesses, Marshall traveled to the front lines. “There was so much sniper fire that we couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a buddy,” Marshall recalled, “and then both of us had to take rifles.” On one occasion, he was walking with a group of soldiers and his escort, Colonel D. D. Martin, when the sound of a rifle pop and the whish-crack of a bullet overhead sent the men scrambling for their lives into a nearby ditch. “Where are you, Marshall?” the colonel shouted in alarm; in an uncharacteristically small voice came the reply: “Are you kiddin’? I’m under you.”

  Marshall may have found humor under fire, but he found nothing amusing about the Jim Crow discrimination he witnessed among the armed forces in Korea and Japan. “What happened over there is that they had this big withdrawal, and the records show that that was just [the] damnedest retreat you’ve ever seen,” Marshall said. “They were running, ducking—I mean, it was awful. And they had to stop it. And the only way to stop it was to pick a unit, and court-martial them and make examples of them, and here was this Negro unit. So that’s the one they grabbed.”

  Marshall eventually did meet with General MacArthur, whom he characterized as being “as biased as any person I’ve run across.” Apparently staunch in his conviction that blacks as a race were “inferior,” the general had no black soldiers in the honor guard protecting him—had none in his entire headquarters, in fact—“not even in the band,” Marshall noted, “and I assume that there are some Negroes who can play instruments.” On MacArthur, who failed to follow, or simply ignored, Truman’s order to desegregate the troops, Marshall laid the blame for the “ramrod justice” in Korea, even as he reminded the general and his staff that “the United States Air Force took just one day to end segregation. They gave a single order, and the Air Force is now an integrated, American body of men using the best efficiency and skill each man can provide in his country’s service.”

  Ultimately, Marshall managed to have the sentences on many of the black GIs in Korea reduced, and he successfully lobbied President Truman to commute Lieutenant Leon Gilbert’s death sentence to time served. In that the courts-martial and convictions of the 24th’s black infantrymen so clearly demonstrated racial bias, Marshall was careful to point out that the Korean War was a battle against communism and not a war between the races. “The Red Koreans and Chinese bayoneted black as well as whites,” Marshall said, adding that anyone who signed petitions for communists claiming to represent black GIs in Korea were “dupes or dopes.”

  In some of the GI cases Marshall determined that no injustice had been committed on grounds of race, such as one in which he concluded that the convicted soldier was “just a bad egg and is using the race question as a cover up for his misdoings.” With military as with civil cases, Marshall urged his staff to exercise caution in choosing which cases to represent, to look at the person beyond the color. It was a principle Marshall had established early in his legal career at the NAACP, and one he would follow for nearly a quarter century. “My dad told me way back”—way back being when young Thurgood was growing up in Baltimore—“that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Some lessons you don’t forget.

  CHAPTER 14: THIS IS A RAPE CASE

  From left to right: Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Franklin Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Alex Akerman, James Nabrit Jr., and Robert Carter, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court following the March 9, 1951, argument of the Groveland Boys case. (Courtesy of The Crisis magazine)

  SHE ARRIVED IN Lake County on a Greyhound bus on July 24, 1950. First thing she did, she called the Baptist minister in Leesburg: she’d be needing accommodations for a few days and maybe he could direct her to some parishioners with a room to rent? She found a place, at a home on Main Street, close by the filling station where Curtis Howard was working the night that Willie Padgett showed up after he’d been assaulted, so he’d said, and his wife had been abducted by four black men.

  In her mid-twenties, wearing a plain farm dress and lugging the suitcase she’d packed with clothes, stationery, and a Bible, she introduced herself to the woman of the house on Main Street as L. B. De Forest; only that wasn’t her real name. She told the woman and everyone else she met in Lake County that she was looking to buy a house with a small orange grove; that wasn’t true, either. She’d come to the Bay Lake area fo
remost to cultivate a relationship with Norma Padgett, and through that acquaintanceship to uncover evidence that might aid the Groveland Boys case should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Lake County’s verdict. Miss De Forest was strongly opposed to capital punishment, and she was also convinced that the Groveland Boys had been victims of institutionalized injustice. Once the young woman’s intentions on her visit to Lake County had become clear, Judge Truman Futch would tell reporters that a “Communist agent . . . had been sent into Lake County” and engaged in activities that violated the laws of Florida.

  Two nights after her arrival, at a Baptist church service Miss De Forest was introduced to the congregation as “a stranger coming to live among us.” She was welcomed warmly: “They seem to have taken me into their hearts and homes,” she reported. Some of the younger ladies at the church invited her to join them for a soda at Carney’s Drug Store, just across the street from where she was staying. Over vanilla Cokes they discussed possible places Miss De Forest might consider for a permanent residence, and the young stranger feigned surprise when she was told that Lake County had experienced some racial trouble last year. The ladies from the church offered details about “the case” and about the Groveland Boys. One of the ladies noted that “Negroes are o.k.,” but if they “step out of their place . . . they’ll burn.” Another said, “The Northerners spoil them and treat them like equals.” The woman who’d rented Miss De Forest a room in her house was also eager to talk about the rape of Norma Padgett, who, so she’d heard, had been beaten so savagely she’d been confined to the hospital for two weeks after the attack because “her breasts were lacerated and injured by the teeth of her abductors.” Rumor had rewritten the reality of the case.