by Gilbert King
Irvin—twice wounded but still conscious, though unable to move in any case because he was cuffed to Shepherd—had no other choice: he lay quiet and pretended to be dead. Samuel’s hand was pressed next to his, the two Groveland boys linked together . . . only Sammy was gone. McCall’s first shot had put a hole in Shepherd’s chest; the shot that followed right after, lodged now in the frontal lobe of his brain, had severed his spinal column. McCall’s next two bullets had torn through Irvin’s chest and side. McCall had then returned to Shepherd, lying on the ground, and shot a .38-caliber round straight through his heart.
Irvin lay quiet. He saw the headlights come from the direction of Umatilla. They lit the rear end of the sheriff’s Olds before they dimmed. Deputy Yates got out of the car. He and the sheriff exchanged a few words. The deputy had a flashlight; he shone it down on the two prisoners lying in the ditch. Irvin closed his eyes, but he could sense the spot of light crossing his face, back and forth, from eye to eye, light, then dark, then light only, for a long moment, hurting his eye. He could feel the blood seeping from his nose, his mouth, in the light; he tried to hold his breath, to keep himself lying quiet, in the light pointed down on him. He couldn’t stop the awful pounding of his heart when he heard the deputy’s voice call back to the sheriff, “This nigger is not dead. We better kill this son of a bitch.”
The hospital room itself might have gasped at that. Marshall’s eyes met Greenberg’s, then Perkins’s and Akerman’s; the horror was worse than any that Irvin’s lawyers had imagined.
Irvin resumed, picturing himself lying on the ground and looking up at the deputy standing over him with a pistol in his hand, and without a sound watching the deputy lean down over him and slowly aim the gun. “The Deputy Sheriff then pointed the pistol on me and pulled the trigger, snapped the trigger, and the gun did not shoot, and so he took it back around to the car lights, and looked in it and shined the light in it, and then something they said was about letting it stay cocked, and so he turned it on me again and pulled it, and that time it fired, and went through here [indicating it went through neck] and then I began to bleed and bleed, out of my nose.”
“Is that Deputy Yates you say?” Akerman asked, stunned.
“Yes, sir,” Irvin replied, his voice fading. He paused to catch his breath. “He shot me the third time, but I managed to pull through OK cause I did not say anything, and did not let them know that I was not dead, and after all the people came, there was lots of people came there, and some of them predicted that I was not dead. . . . I heard some remarks that ‘he ought to have been dead long ago.’ ”
Realizing that Irvin’s story would be headlined on the front page of virtually every newspaper in America the following day, the lawyers strove to get as much testimony from Irvin as possible before doctors stepped in and called a halt to the proceedings. “I know you are tired,” Akerman said, “but there is just one or two questions. Had you tried to jump him? The Sheriff?”
“No, sir,” Irvin answered.
Marshall leaned in. “Where was his gun?” he asked. “Did he carry it on the right hand side next to you?”
“Carried it on his left,” Irwin said.
“Did you ever try to escape that night?” Marshall asked.
“No, sir, never.”
“And you were in the front seat of the car?”
“Yes,” Irwin said. “He put us both on the front seat.”
Perkins took a turn: “Walter, did you have good hopes of coming out of this thing alright?”
“Yes, sir,” Irvin said, “I sure did, for I sure did have high hopes of coming out alright, and why would I try to escape, didn’t have no reason to.”
Akerman punctuated the hospital room press conference with a few final, terse questions to ensure that the reporters held the most salient facts of the shooting in their minds when they left to file their stories.
“How many times did the sheriff shoot you?”
“Two times,” Irvin told him.
“How many times did Deputy Sheriff Yates shoot you?”
“One time.”
“You were shot three times?”
“Yes, sir.”
At that point the nurse closed the interview. Alan Hamlin folded up his stenograph. Marshall requested that Elliott have Irvin removed immediately from Sheriff Willis McCall’s custody; Elliott replied that such action lay beyond his authority but that he would relay the request to the governor. Flanked by Greenberg and Perkins, Marshall proceeded downstairs to the hospital entrance, where, he knew, the reporters were expecting him to make a statement. As Irvin was still going to stand trial if he survived the shooting, Marshall felt it necessary to assume an attitude of unruffled rationality so that the recent conduct of the renegade sheriff would seem all the more extreme by contrast.
“We sincerely hope the good people of Lake County will insist that the action so obviously indicated by the sworn statement of Walter Lee Irvin will be taken immediately,” Marshall announced, and when asked if the NAACP lawyers would press for murder charges against Willis McCall, he replied, “The good people of Lake County should have time to take action, but if they don’t the NAACP will.”
Stetson Kennedy rushed off to get further comments from hospital staff. Mabel Norris Reese called State Attorney Jesse Hunter to relate to him the details of Irvin’s statement. Other reporters stuck to the NAACP team, conspicuous among them Marshall’s New York friend Evelyn “Big East” Cunningham, also known as the “Lynching Editor,” who was covering the events in Eustis on behalf of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Colored men who are accused of raping white women don’t have a chance in this part of the world,” she wrote. “Walter Irvin’s chances found a thin string to hang on Saturday when Lake County finally woke up and began to believe that maybe he was innocent after all.”
One reporter tracked down James Yates at his home in Mount Dora. The deputy appeared to be caught off guard when asked to comment on Irvin’s claim that it was Yates, not the sheriff, who had fired the intended kill shot into Irvin’s neck. “It’s a funny thing,” Yates stammered, adding, “no comment at this time.”
Hunter, who “was visibly shaken” by what he had witnessed on Tuesday night, had, “since the shooting, virtually run out on Sheriff McCall,” one reporter observed. “This is the worst thing that ever happened in Lake County,” Hunter said. “It will ruin the county.”
The FBI agents returned to their district bureau to type up their notes and file their reports. In confidential report MM 44-267 the following notation would appear: “IRVIN agreeable to lie detector test. Sheriff McCALL and Deputy YATES do not desire to take lie detector test, McCALL claims sees no reason to take test as he has told truth.”
BACK AT THE San Juan Hotel, the lawyers worked on strategy. Greenberg amended a motion for a change of venue, citing the attempted murder of Walter Irvin by the sheriff and his deputy as a reason that Irvin could not get a fair trial in Lake County. Marshall, meanwhile, telegraphed the Justice Department; he wanted McCall and Yates to be found in contempt of court for defying the U.S. Supreme Court “and the laws of this country.” Marshall also contacted Roy Wilkins and Walter White in New York, to have them instruct all NAACP branches that as of now the Groveland Boys case was their top priority. Marshall wanted Walter Irvin’s story to be recounted in every black church on the upcoming Sunday; he wanted protests staged at the local level everywhere across America. In response, Wilkins set up a plan whereby every NAACP branch would arrange a “Groveland Memorial Protest Meeting” and engage in an organized letter-writing campaign in newspapers and on the radio to draw attention to the nature of Southern justice. “We must leave no stone unturned to see to it that the entire Nation learns the facts about this cold-blooded murder of a boy in shackles,” Wilkins informed NAACP officials. “We must bring every possible pressure to bear to the end that these legal lynchers are brought to justice. If we fail in this, our whole struggle for human rights will be in jeopardy.” Very soon—from labor
unions, from churches and synagogues, from veterans committees and fraternal organizations, from individual outraged citizens across the country—Governor Fuller Warren’s office in Tallahassee would be inundated with letters and telegrams condemning Sheriff McCall’s brutality.
Marshall also sent a telegram to his old friend Harry T. Moore: the one man in Florida with the tenacity and fortitude to bring pressure to bear on the men in Lake County who were not only responsible for the injustices in the Groveland Boys case but also determined “to whitewash the whole affair.” Moore, in fact, had already wired Governor Warren to urge an investigation into the sheriff’s shooting of the two Groveland boys; and for years, with no success but with perseverance nonetheless, Moore had been pressing the governor’s office to launch an investigation into lynching in Florida. Marshall wanted Moore beside him in the Groveland Boys fight for justice, no matter the precariousness of Moore’s position in the NAACP. The national office, and more particularly Gloster Current—in Marshall’s view, a good company man with an eye only for budgets and membership rolls—had been building a case against Moore’s management and leadership in Florida’s branches, but Marshall, by virtue of his own experience in the South, knew more particularly the hostile conditions that dedicated men like Moore had to endure continually in the regions they represented. “There isn’t a threat known to men that they do not receive,” Marshall said. “They’re never out from under pressure. I don’t think I could take it for a week. The possibility of violent death for them and their families is something they’ve learned to live with like a man learns to sleep with a sore arm.” For Marshall, Moore was one of the heroes. In the telegram Marshall asked if Moore could meet with him on Friday, November 9, in Orlando. Moore said yes.
On November 8, newspapers across the country published Walter Irvin’s version of the shooting outside Umatilla, with Irvin’s claim that Deputy Yates had fired the intended coup de grâce capturing most of the headlines, none of them as sensational as the New York Post’s: “Blood Lust of Sheriff and Aide Bared, Florida Anger Grows in Negro Killing.” The Post ran the headline large and provocatively on its front page, with a story by Jay Nelson Tuck, who’d found himself, like Ted Poston before him, reporting an event of even more moment than the trial he’d been sent to cover—it described law enforcement officials who were “ducking, weaving and scattering for cover today.” The Associated Press picked up Marie Bolles’s images of the bloodied Groveland boys lying by the roadside, as well as a portrait of Deputy James Yates, which one paper published above the caption “It’s a funny thing.”
State Attorney Jesse Hunter was reported to have spoken on November 8 with Governor Fuller Warren, who reportedly agreed with Hunter’s recommendation that Sheriff McCall either be suspended or be ordered to resign temporarily from office. News of the meeting apparently effected a remarkable improvement in Sheriff McCall’s physical condition, as he checked himself out of the hospital and then drove two and a half hours north to Jacksonville, to a hotel, for a secret meeting with Fuller Warren. In November 1951 Warren was in the midst of a statewide barnstorming tour, replete with stump speeches and country music jamborees, in an attempt to recapture some of the magic that had swept him into office in 1948. Or at least, to rehabilitate his reputation. Illegal gambling scandals had put Warren in the investigative crosshairs of his longtime nemesis, Senator Estes Kefauver. The nationally televised Kefauver hearings on organized crime in 1950 not only had exposed the involvement of numerous Florida law enforcement officials in widespread corruption, by which they raked in payoffs from illegal numbers and bolita games, but also had aired allegations that Warren’s gubernatorial campaign had been heavily financed by prominent figures in organized crime. Kefauver had invited Warren to Miami to testify, but Warren had refused. Then, in 1951, resolutions calling for Warren’s impeachment had been introduced in the Florida House of Representatives, so the governor was now fighting for his political life. It took Willis McCall not much more than an hour to convince the former Klansman and governor that he might want to reconsider the wisdom of a suspension or temporary resignation for the sheriff. That done, Sheriff McCall headed back to Eustis, where he had set up another late-night, closed-door session, this time with Warren’s special investigator, J. J. Elliott, at a Lake County hotel. Again, no doubt by extortionist means, McCall got results, and Elliott got a singular role in the imminent coroner’s inquest.
Early on Friday, a young FBI informant was riding the road to Tavares with several Klansmen, among them Eddie Jackson, the Exalted Cyclops of the Orlando Klan. Jackson wanted to run a plan by Willis McCall, and if the sheriff okayed it, the Klan would be able to “break you in right,” Jackson told the young, supposed prospective Klansman. They’d arranged to meet the sheriff in the men’s room of the courthouse. There Jackson explained that he’d come to Lake County with “a couple of the boys” to do a bit of a favor and to initiate a new member into the Klan. Jackson then put it more bluntly: they’d come “to kill Alex Akerman.” To the Klansman’s disappointment, McCall rejected the idea summarily. “No, I’m in the clear on this case,” the sheriff told Jackson, “and I don’t want you to do it, it would only cause trouble.”
McCall had not said anything about them not scaring Akerman, though. So the Klansmen drove to Eustis and parked their car across the street from Waterman Memorial Hospital, where they waited for Akerman to arrive for a visit with his client. Only Akerman didn’t—he was working in Orlando that particular day—so Jackson and his men turned their attention to other potential targets, like that Negro who was “a big SOB in the NAACP.”
IT WASN’T LIKE Harry T. Moore at all, Marshall thought. Not only had Moore failed to show up for their Friday meeting in Orlando, but he’d failed even to notify Marshall that he’d not be there.
Over the past twelve months the pressure on Moore from the NAACP’s director of branches, Gloster Current, had been intensifying. A year earlier, the New Orleans field secretary and former Harlem Globetrotter Dan Byrd had been dispatched to the Florida State Conference in Tampa with instructions to do a “hatchet job” on Moore, although, when the delegates’ votes were counted, Moore had managed to hold his position as executive secretary in Florida. In only two weeks, however, the regional director for the Southeast, Ruby Hurley, along with Walter White, would be attending, at Current’s behest, the 1951 annual state conference in Daytona Beach, and Hurley’s reputation was stellar: she “always delivered the votes.” In the past, Marshall had kept himself distant from Current’s branch business, as Moore surely knew. Still, Robert Carter and other of the NAACP lawyers were “wondering if Moore hadn’t gotten cold feet” when he failed to show up for the November 9 meeting, albeit Marshall had made it clear to him that he wanted to discuss the Groveland case.
By November, too, the cumulative stress of the Groveland Boys trial and appeals and the now-thwarted retrial, from July 1949 nearly to the end of 1951, was beginning to wear on the normally self-possessed Moore. His commitment to a rectification of the injustices suffered by Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee had become hazardous. A citrus grower in Moore’s hometown of Mims had opined to an NAACP official that Moore’s “neck ought to be broken.” Also, recently letters had been threatening Moore with injury, or worse, for his work on behalf of the Groveland Boys; he had taken to carrying the letters on his person in the event that harm came to him. He had confided to one NAACP leader that he was now “afraid to travel in the daytime.” His fears were not unjustified; later that winter, on returning with his wife, Harriette, to their house in Mims for the weekend, he found the door lock broken, their home ransacked, and his shotgun stolen.
Nevertheless, despite the threats, and in the face of his fear, Moore had continued—indeed, had increased—his efforts in the Groveland Boys’ cause. He organized mass meetings and protests; he delivered speeches. He helped the Shepherd family retrieve Samuel’s body, with the assurance that the local branch of the NAACP would cover the cost of their son’s
funeral. He seized every twist and turn in the Groveland case as an opportunity to write letters to newspaper editors like Mabel Norris Reese, who was finding it more difficult to defend the injustices of law enforcement in Lake County. He remained Sheriff Willis V. McCall’s most vocal critic. He also continued to support and complement the efforts of Thurgood Marshall and the LDF in Lake County, no matter that, for whatever reason or misunderstanding, he had failed to appear at that meeting in Orlando on November 9.
Late in the evening of November 9, Judge W. Troy Hall began the official proceedings for his coroner’s inquest with a viewing of Samuel Shepherd’s body by the jury in the company of special investigator Elliott, the state attorney Jesse Hunter, McCall, Yates, and members of the press as well as a nurse and a court reporter. On Saturday morning, November 10, the inquest resumed at Waterman Memorial Hospital, where Irvin’s attending physician, Dr. Rabun Williams, was scheduled to, but did not, testify, the judge having determined the doctor’s testimony to be unnecessary. The jury, press, and county officials proceeded with Judge Hall and J. J. Elliott to Walter Irvin’s room, where they heard the same story he’d told to his lawyers and members of the press on Thursday. Both Hall, as coroner, and Elliott questioned Irvin at length, but his recitation of the events of November 6 did not vary in any detail from his previous account. After forty minutes of testimony, Irvin tired; he was wheeled from his room to the waiting ambulance that delivered him to the prison hospital at Raiford.
The inquest next moved to the roadside near Umatilla, where, in the view of Judge Hall, an attempted escape, not an unprovoked murder, took place. Hall led his friend Willis through the presumably evidence-based version of events. In the trunk of McCall’s Oldsmobile lay a tire, the tire that another of the sheriff’s friends, Spencer Rynearson, had changed shortly before most of the witnesses had arrived on the scene Tuesday night; lodged in one of the “grooves between the tread design” of the tire was, as Hall pointed out to the jury and the press, a box nail. Hall then addressed McCall: “I will ask you to examine this nail here in the tire and ask you to state whether or not it appears to have been worn by contact with the pavement.” After claiming that he’d never noticed the nail until “someone pointed it out to him,” the sheriff answered, “Yes, it is worn, it looks as if it had been in the tire while the tire was being run on; of course, it is a little rusty now.”