by Gilbert King
Over the next few days De Forest had “some success in dodging some of the realtors” keen to show her houses with orange groves in Lake County. She wore a “World Peace” pin of her own design that, she wrote, “interests everyone and is a good cover.” Each night in her rented room she composed letters on the progress of her investigation, which she mailed to Rowland Watts of the Workers Defense League in New York. In the coming days, she told him, she hoped to be introduced to some of Norma Padgett’s relatives, so she expected soon to be packing up her stationery, clothes, and Bible and moving to some place in Bay Lake.
ONCE THE L. B. De Forest private investigation had been set up by Thurgood Marshall, Rowland Watts had shared with NAACP lawyers the results of the WDL’s own, long-running investigation into the peonage conditions in Lake County. For the WDL, the Groveland Boys case provided an opportunity to focus media attention upon the forced labor practices common in Florida’s citrus groves and at the same time to highlight, and hopefully to rectify, a criminal injustice in a death penalty case. Watts’s high-level contacts in Florida, all of them sympathetic to the Groveland Boys’ cause and willing to aid, if clandestinely, in the investigation, had access to official documents like driver registration records and even police department records. Among Watts’s confidential informants was Milton C. Thomas, formerly an editor at the Orlando Morning Sentinel and now public relations director for U.S. senator Claude Pepper, sworn political enemy to Jesse Hunter and Willis McCall.
Thomas had had numerous conversations with reporters in central Florida who had been following the Groveland Boys case for their local newspapers but had felt pressured by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department not to dig too deeply into the story. Ormond Powers was one of those reporters. He had covered the Groveland Boys trial for the Orlando Morning Sentinel, and prior to that he had reported from the scene of the Groveland riots. He’d seemed always to find himself at the side of Sheriff Willis McCall, who had spoon-fed Powers news items like the claim that all three defendants had confessed. Powers had essentially collaborated with McCall, he’d printed the news the sheriff deemed was fit to print, but he’d later come to resent the fact that he had been used by law enforcement in Lake County. One of the stories he had not reported in any depth was that of Curtis Howard, which Powers believed to be one of the keys to the case.
L. B. DE Forest hired a taxi to take her to Burtoft’s Café, where Norma Padgett had sought the help of Lawrence Burtoft on the morning of the alleged rape. After speaking with Burtoft’s mother about the modern six-room home and three-acre orange grove she was interested in selling, De Forest turned the conversation to the topic of Norma Padgett. “If we were to tell the truth about the case, the true facts,” a neighbor of Mrs. Burtoft’s said, “it would bust the case wide open, and the boys would have evidence for a new trial.” The neighbor, De Forest wrote, “scoffed at the rape theory—said it was false.”
Mrs. Burtoft had other neighbors who knew “true facts,” too, neighbors who had even signed affidavits as to what they’d witnessed on the morning of July 16, 1949, just outside their Okahumpka home. Clifton and Ethel Twiss were already awake that Saturday morning when, sometime between 6 and 6:30 a.m., they heard a car slow down in front of their house. They heard the motor turn off, and a moment later, when Clifton Twiss “heard the motor start up again,” he looked out his window and saw her: a young lady, “quite small and slender,” in a light pink dress; she was carrying a white handbag. She did not look disheveled, and she did not seem to be panicked. She walked away from the car, “about 4, 5 or 6 feet away—walking toward Center Hill,” and when she got to the fork she simply paced back and forth for about thirty minutes, Twiss stated—he and his wife had taken turns observing her through binoculars. They’d thought she was a hitchhiker, but it seemed funny to them “that a lady would be hitching a ride at 6 o’clock in the morning.” The small, dark car had driven past the Twiss house “on the way to Groveland,” after the lady had been dropped off; a white man was driving. Both Mr. and Mrs. Twiss had agreed to sign statements about what they’d seen that morning, but they had refused to testify on behalf of the defense: “Wouldn’t do to be called ‘nigger lover,’ ” Clifton Twiss said.
One of Rowland Watts’s sources had informed him that the initial “police alarm,” which had been radioed before Norma was found, may have indicated that the deputies were searching for a Buick. Indeed, when Deputy James Yates showed up at the Groveland jail on the following morning, one of the first questions he asked Charles Greenlee was “Where’s that new Buick or old Buick you was in?” Also, the Twisses were later shown pictures of a small, dark Buick, which, they’d said, resembled the car outside their house on the morning of July 16. And Curtis Howard had testified in court that on July 16 he had been driving a ’46 Buick. “I know you realize the significance and value of untangling the Buick car and Curtis Howard’s activities that night,” M. C. Thomas wrote to Watts, who had begun to suspect there was a “probability that [Howard] knew the Padgetts before” that weekend in July.
Watts’s suspicions about Curtis Howard were well-grounded. In the days following the alleged rape, Howard had told several people around Lake County that “it was he who had discovered and rescued [Norma Padgett] as she wandered in the woods.” By the time of the trial, however, his story had become more consistent with Norma’s account. In court Howard had testified that after Willie Padgett arrived at Dean’s filling station in Leesburg and told Howard that Norma had been kidnapped, Howard phoned his uncle, Deputy Leroy Campbell, who appeared at Dean’s in a matter of minutes and took Padgett away in his car to investigate. That might have been the end of the story for this average filling-station attendant who placed a helpful call to police, but it wasn’t. Around 6:30 a.m., after he was relieved at Dean’s, Howard was on his way to Groveland for a cup of coffee when, he’d claimed, he spotted a young blond girl “sitting in the grass” by the side of the road. Howard slowed his car. He knew that his uncle, a deputy sheriff, had set out with Willie Padgett to find his seventeen-year-old wife, who had been kidnapped by four black men a few hours earlier—he’d even told people afterward that on leaving work he’d gone to look for the girl himself—yet, inexplicably, after seeing a young girl (in a torn dress, by Howard’s account) sitting in the grass by the side of the road just after sunrise, Curtis Howard did not connect her to Padgett’s missing teenage wife. He’d testified that he “didn’t pay too much attention” to the girl and kept driving on to Groveland.
At about 7 a.m. Howard arrived at a café in Groveland. There he ran into his uncle and another deputy, James Yates, along with Willie Padgett. They had still not found Norma Padgett, and Curtis Howard still made no mention of the girl he’d seen only minutes before. Instead, at Yates’s request, Howard agreed to drive Padgett home; Willie wanted to change his shirt. In the eight-mile ride to Bay Lake they made two stops at the houses of Norma’s relatives; Willie would testify that he “thought she might have gotten some way to get home.” On one of those stops, Willie’s sister-in-law showed Howard a picture of Norma. Only then, it would appear, did Curtis Howard figure that he knew where Norma was.
ORMOND POWERS HAD no problem expounding the flaws in the prosecution’s case against the Groveland Boys: the lack of medical evidence; Norma Padgett’s reputation and credibility, both dubious; “vagaries in both the husband’s and wife’s stories”; “a series of marital rifts” that were, Powers said, “substantiated.” Powers told the former Sentinel editor M. C. Thomas that, in his opinion, “the four boys were all mental superiors to the alleged rape victim and her off-again, on-again spouse.”
What Powers could not to his own satisfaction explain were the strange coincidences that brought Curtis Howard into the Groveland story, most notably the fact that Howard had actually “seen the girl not far from the alleged attack scene.” Powers speculated that Howard might have a “Dick Tracy complex”—he was frequently observed hanging around the sheriff’s office with h
is uncle, Deputy Leroy Campbell, when not at the filling station—and thus “he apparently started looking for the missing girl on his own hook.” What did not make sense to Powers, though, was that Howard would fail to attach any significance to a young blond girl he’d seen by the side of the road at the exact time that he’d set out in his Buick to look for a young blond girl who’d reportedly been abducted by four black men at a roadside.
Rowland Watts compiled a list of “comments on defense in second Groveland trials” should the NAACP be successful before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was clear that Watts gave credence to Mr. and Mrs. Twiss’s statements. Watts believed that Curtis Howard had not driven past Norma Padgett on the morning of July 16, 1949, but rather, the young filling-station attendant had driven to that spot and let Norma out of his car by the side of the road. In his comments, under the section heading “Discredit Curtis Howard,” Watts listed a series of questions: “Why did he go to Groveland in the morning? Did he stop his car at Okahumpka? How close was Norma to car? Why didn’t he stop, get out, and talk to her, knowing that a girl had been abducted in that area? Why didn’t he mention fact of having seen girl to Yates and Padgett in café? Try to pin his own activities that night and the probability that he knew the Padgetts before.”
ON MARSHALL’S RETURN to the New York office after his travels in Tokyo and Korea, which had overextended his calendar and his energy, he resumed working with his New York office staff on preparation of the Groveland Boys case for the Supreme Court. He had intended to argue the case himself, but his trip to the Far East, and his monthlong absence, made him reconsider his plan. He faced an awkward decision. While Robert Carter was more than capable as a counsel, he was not as especially familiar with the case as Jack Greenberg, who had prepared the brief. Greenberg, on the other hand, lacked Carter’s experience, since he had only recently started working at the NAACP offices, and although he had already gained Marshall’s confidence, he was not yet ready, in Marshall’s opinion, to argue his own Supreme Court case.
In early December, Franklin Williams wrote to Marshall, pleading for the chance to argue before the Supreme Court. “I am sure you can appreciate my having this desire,” Williams wrote, adding that it “would be the logical conclusion” of his association with the Groveland case. Marshall, however, was dismissive. “To pull you out of the west coast for a week or two would certainly deprive the Association of your services during that period,” he wrote, adding, “I think you will agree that it will be better to leave things as they are.”
His point made, Marshall soon realized that he did not have any other real choices. His differences with Williams did not prevent him from acknowledging the younger attorney’s notable legal talent, not to mention his unmatched grasp of the Groveland case, and in the winter of 1951 he brought the “exiled” Williams back east to argue Shepherd v. Florida before the Supreme Court. Marshall acknowledged that Williams was not merely the best available choice for the job but also probably the best lawyer to handle the arguments, period.
On March 9, Marshall, in a heavy winter overcoat and fedora, arrived on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he posed for a photo with his LDF team: Jack Greenberg, Franklin Williams, and Robert Carter. Alex Akerman, who had worked with Greenberg on the brief for the appeal, as he himself had presented the case for the Groveland Boys’ defense before Judge Truman Futch in Tavares, had traveled up from Florida to see the attorney he had partnered at the original trial, Frank Williams, argue before the nine justices on the Supreme Court. On the trip north, Akerman had run into Reeves Bowen, the assistant attorney general of Florida, against whom he had argued the Groveland case before the Florida Supreme Court. Akerman had wondered why Bowen had decided to come to Washington himself to argue Shepherd v. Florida. “Well,” Bowen had responded, “I wasn’t going to send anybody else up to be slaughtered.” For, once the Court had ruled on Cassell, Bowen had little doubt as to what the outcome would be in Shepherd.
“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal of the court bellowed. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”
Shepherd v. Florida was called. Robert Carter, who was sharing the case with Williams, approached the podium. The NAACP lawyers were set to argue three specific issues before the Court: jury exclusion, change of venue, and lack of adequate time to prepare a defense. For reasons known only to him, Marshall had assigned the jury issue to Carter. Williams later stated that it “irritated me a little bit that Thurgood gave him that assignment because that was the issue on which I was probably at the time, according to Thurgood, the nation’s leading authority.” Still, Williams wasn’t surprised by the move, as “Thurgood and I did not get along anyhow, not too well.”
No sooner had Carter begun to present the jury exclusion argument than, in Williams’s words, he “botched it up”: Frankfurter immediately interrupted him by citing “five or six other systematic exclusion of jury cases” and asking Carter if the Groveland case proved to be the same as them.
“Yes,” Carter answered, but when he attempted to proceed, he was again interrupted, this time by Justice Robert Jackson. He failed to see why Carter needed “to say anything more” rather than simply to quote from Florida’s admission that it used a racial proportional system for jury selection.
“Well,” Carter asked rhetorically, “what is the point of arguing for them?” With that, he left the podium and sat down.
It was a strange beginning, and awkward. Certainly Williams would have handled the issue differently, but he had been assigned to argue change of venue and lack of time to prepare a defense. And he soon proved himself to be equally capable of producing an awkward moment. Williams opened by “paint[ing] a picture” of the atmosphere in Lake County at the time of the Groveland Boys trial. Oral arguments came easily to the dynamic, eloquent New York lawyer, and since he had experienced firsthand the antagonistic, tension-filled environment he was describing, he effectively accomplished the task of showing that “it was impossible to get a fair and impartial trial” in Lake County. Most important, Williams knew the record “backwards and forward,” and the appellate record included all those newspaper stories that he and Akerman had collected: stories of white mobs burning Negro homes in Groveland; articles quoting Sheriff Willis McCall’s proclamations to the press, such as his notices that he had obtained confessions from all three defendants. Then, for no reason that was clear to him or Marshall or the justices or anyone else, Williams addressed Frankfurter: “And Mr. Justice Frankfurter, this is a rape case.”
Williams cringed at the words he himself had spoken, and not just because Supreme Court protocol required that lawyers, unless they are directly posed a question from the bench, address only the chief justice. “Jesus, I wanted to go through the floor,” Williams recalled, “but I was so conscious of the fact that Frankfurter had considered me excellent.” Justice Jackson, not resisting the awkwardness of the moment, leaned forward and asked Frankfurter, wryly, “Felix, since when are you an authority on rape?”
Nonetheless, in Greenberg’s estimation, Williams argued the case “superbly.” In Florida’s response to Williams, the assistant attorney general Reeves Bowen, as he had anticipated, got slaughtered. Bowen had barely uttered his denial of the racial tension that Williams had so dramatically presented on the change of venue issue when Justice Jackson halted him with the proposition that “the hardest thing for you to overcome” is the establishment by Judge Truman Futch of special rules “in anticipation of some kind of violence.”
Likewise, Bowen’s attempt to defend the jury selection process was stopped short, and he was forced to admit that “a system of racial proportional representation had deliberately been used” to select grand jurors in the Groveland Boys case. His argument crumbled when he justified the jury selection process in Lake County in terms of “the historic
al background of the South,” stating that the county commissioners “just don’t think about Negroes as jurors” in the same way that they would not “think of having Negroes on a list for a social function.” Justice Harold Burton wondered if there was “anything to prevent” jury commissioners from putting the names of both whites and blacks in a box and “drawing them out by chance.” Justice Tom C. Clark marveled that Lake County had never heard of placing the names on a “jury wheel” and allowing spins of the wheel to randomly select the names of prospective jurors. Both justices drew laughs from the spectators and reporters. Bowen absorbed the judicial blows, and Marshall grinned from ear to ear.
Marshall relished any moment in Supreme Court proceedings that forced Southerners to defend their Jim Crow traditions before the country’s top legal minds. It almost made up for the constant humiliation he’d had to endure so often in the courtrooms of the South. Except that when the lawyer for the state of Florida walked out of the Supreme Court building at the end of arguments, he would shake hands with his opponents and return safely to his home in the south of the South. No one was going to chase Assistant Attorney General of Florida Reeves Bowen out of the capital at ninety miles per hour, or drag him at gunpoint to a waiting mob along the banks of the Potomac.
Akerman, too, headed back to Florida, and Williams boarded a long flight back to the West Coast. Marshall joined the other LDF attorneys on the train to New York.
CHAPTER 15: YOU HAVE PISSED IN MY WHISKEY
Sheriff Willis McCall. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)
THURGOOD MARSHALL SENT a twelve-word telegram to Dellia Irvin: “Won new trial for Walter Irvin in Supreme Court of United States.”