Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Stetson Kennedy didn’t even stop to pack a toothbrush or his clothes. Bent on flying direct to Washington, he hopped a bus to Orlando and got to the airport, where he found himself short of cash to pay for the passage to D.C.—but not so short he couldn’t buy some bar bourbon, which he spilled down the front of his shirt so that he was smelling, if not entirely looking, like a common drunk. He telephoned Thurgood Marshall, now back at his office in New York. He offered the NAACP a deal: in exchange for a plane ticket to D.C., Kennedy would provide them with information about J. J. Elliott that directly affected the Groveland Boys case. “Red hot information,” Kennedy said, so hot he “had to get out of town in a hurry.”

  “What kind of information?” Marshall asked.

  “Can’t tell you over the phone,” Kennedy answered. “Don’t know who’s listening. Can you meet me at the airport in Washington at 11:30 tonight?”

  Kennedy also hinted to Marshall that he was looking “for further funds to continue further investigation.” Prepared to deal with only one proposition at a time, Marshall agreed to make arrangements for Kennedy’s airline ticket.

  “If the information he has can stand up,” Marshall told the Defender’s Arnold DeMille, who was listening in, “it’ll be a heck of a good story and will mean a lot to the case. Let’s go down and meet the guy. Maybe he does have something.”

  Marshall booked flights for both himself and DeMille, and at 11:30 p.m. on November 11, he arrived in Washington from New York. He checked into Hotel 2400, where he waited in his room with DeMille; a local NAACP attorney, Frank Reeves; and a special agent from the FBI.

  The FBI was unimpressed by Kennedy’s information, whereas Kennedy was “completely surprised” by theirs: that a grand jury had already declined to indict Yates and Campbell on charges related to the beatings of the Groveland Boys. To better represent in his work the treatment of the Groveland Boys by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, Kennedy suggested that the FBI provide him with their internal reports. Further, Kennedy outlined for the FBI agent the nature of the investigation that would be required to effect a reopening of grand jury proceedings; he also indicated that the agents assigned to the investigation should not be from or currently located in the South, as the agents who had worked on the case, he believed, had shown “prejudice to negroes.”

  The FBI agent immediately challenged Kennedy. He wanted names, he wanted dates, he wanted instances, he wanted specifics to support claims of agent prejudice. Kennedy hedged; he required time to consult his files. Still, the FBI would persist; on Kennedy’s return to his home in Jacksonville, the bureau would daily contact him by phone to demand from him the specific information that he had supposedly placed in his files: to either “put-up or shut-up.” The bureau’s internal reports on the meeting with Kennedy in Washington, D.C., would include the directive that if Kennedy failed to provide specifics, agents should “back him down completely on these allegations.” The reports would also make note of the writer’s leftist connections, supported by quotes from interviews with Kennedy’s associates who described him as “the most dangerous Communist in the State of Florida.” After reviewing the reports, J. Edgar Hoover would write across the bottom, “I would waste no more time on Kennedy. He is just a phony.”

  On a call to the FBI the morning after the meeting, Marshall admitted that “it looked like Kennedy had swindled the NAACP into paying his transportation from Florida to Washington,” for in the exchange the NAACP had gained no new information vital to the Groveland case. While Kennedy’s communist affiliations hardly bore upon the case, they did provide Marshall, in his dismissal of the writer’s presumed scoops, with the opportunity to affect solidarity with the FBI. As always, Marshall expressed his appreciation for the bureau’s efforts as well as “the thoroughness of the investigation [the FBI was] conducting.” In return, he was thanked “for his appreciation of confidence in the work of this Bureau and was assured that the Bureau is only too willing to receive any information from him at any time.” Once again, Hoover and Marshall performed their private rites of cooperation.

  DeMille told Marshall he didn’t want to touch the story about Elliott being in the Klan, as it “could result in the nicest, fattest liable [sic] law suit” sure to have “yours truly pounding the streets looking for a new job.” However dismissive of Kennedy’s import Marshall may have been with the FBI, he did put the information regarding Elliott to use in a telegram he sent to Fuller Warren. While Marshall did not refer explicitly to Elliott’s possible affiliation with the Klan, he did imply to Warren that the governor knew exactly what outcome the special investigator would effect on his mission in Lake County, and to whose particular advantage that outcome would be. Also, Kennedy’s firm belief, however vaguely supported, that FBI agents in the South were “prejudiced in Civil Rights investigations” was very much in line with Marshall’s own thinking. (Marshall himself had walked into the same trap with Hoover, who had demanded agents’ names and specific incidents that Marshall likewise had failed to provide.) Moreover, for all the FBI’s efforts to marginalize Stetson Kennedy as a communist and dismiss him as a phony, his reporting on the Groveland Boys case had been consistent with the news stories being published at the same time in Northern papers. Finally, his claim connecting Jefferson J. Elliott to the Ku Klux Klan was one that even the FBI had acknowledged to be “entirely possible,” given that Elliott was “formerly on the Investigative Staff of Governor [Eugene] Talmadge of Georgia,” an admitted KKK flogger and racial demagogue who presided over a “Klan-ridden regime.” The FBI had questioned both Warren and Elliott in this regard, and both had denied that Elliott was a Klansman. “Sometime later,” however, according to FBI notes, Elliott allowed that he was a Klansman, describing his membership as being “part of my job.”

  THE HEARINGS IN the retrial of the now one Groveland boy for the rape of Norma Padgett had been postponed for thirty days because of the shootings. Walter Irvin was meanwhile recovering from his wounds at Raiford. Jack Greenberg had amended the change of venue motion. Thurgood Marshall was preparing to return to Lake County, where a curious item had just appeared in local newspapers. That Judge Truman Futch, on December 4, 1951, had signed a confidential order instructing Sheriff Willis McCall to (again) transport Walter Irvin from Raiford State Prison to Tavares for the change of venue hearing had evidently been leaked to the press by the incensed state attorney Jesse Hunter. Apparently even McCall’s friend Judge W. Troy Hall thought it a bad idea, as he had contacted the FBI to explore the possibility of enlisting a bureau agent to accompany the sheriff as an escort. Marshall contemplated the news piece with incredulity. No matter that Governor Warren had ignored every protest Marshall had wired to him in regard to the catastrophic prison transfer a month earlier, in dismay Marshall pleaded in yet another telegram: “In the name of human decency and justice we urgently request that you replace Sheriff McCall and have Irvin transported by State officials other than McCall. We further urge that you take all of the necessary steps to assure that Irvin will not be killed or wounded on this trip.”

  Hunter’s alarm spared Walter Irvin the experience of another two-hour car ride with the man who had shot him not a month before; Irvin was transferred by the state highway patrol. Willis McCall paid a visit to Raiford, nonetheless. To date, McCall had escaped indictment on criminal charges by the state in the roadside shootings near Umatilla, but the sheriff was fully aware that the FBI had located the telltale sixth bullet buried in the sand where Irvin had fallen. So McCall had located a tale-teller of his own: Merlin James Leiby, a twenty-four-year-old white prisoner on death row at Raiford. The sheriff’s trip to Raiford proved to be fruitful. Leiby, the “doomed murderer” who had been scheduled to die in the electric chair within days, instead was issued a stay of execution by Governor Warren. The governor had thus broken his monthlong silence on the Groveland Boys case, and he had done so on the basis of a written request by the sheriff of Lake County. McCall’s letter reported that prior
to the transfer of the prisoners Shepherd and Irvin from Raiford to Tavares by the sheriff and the deputy Yates, Merlin James Leiby had overheard his fellow inmates on death row “planning to escape.” McCall then made his point: “I believe that testimony from him [Leiby] in person would have great bearing in case the prejudiced groups in New York bring enough pressure to bear in Washington for the Justice Department to place this case before a Federal Grand Jury.”

  Leiby soon found himself telling his tale to two FBI agents. The night before the transfer, Leiby told them, he’d overheard Samuel Shepherd say to another inmate, “I’ll be thinking of you when I’m out there drinking that Calvert Reserve whiskey and juking on Wednesday night.” And on the night of the transfer itself, according to Leiby, as Shepherd was leaving his cell, he told another inmate, “Well boys I’ll be a free man tonight.” On further investigation, the agents learned that another inmate, Robert Cecil Bell, had overheard a conversation as well. In his statement, Bell claimed that he’d heard two prison employees—“free people,” in prison argot—discussing how Leiby could likely escape his date with the electric chair if he had been fortunate enough to have heard Shepherd and Irvin planning their getaway. According to Bell, when one of the two prison guards asked, “Why don’t you suggest it to Leiby?” the other replied, “It’s already been taken care of.” In the end, the FBI found that for every inmate who believed Leiby’s story there was another who corroborated Bell’s statement that the prison employees had planted the idea for the story in the mind of the doomed inmate. The FBI concluded that “no action appears to be warranted.” While the NAACP scoffed at still another of McCall’s efforts to whitewash his shootings—with Walter White noting that in his experience with jailhouse stool pigeons, “it is not the practice” for white prisoners to be housed anywhere near enough to black inmates so as to be able to overhear their conversations—McCall’s effort did result in press coverage of the governor’s stay of execution and in the sort of publicity the sheriff sought in his endeavor to stave off federal charges. It also bought Merlin James Leiby time, until, one year later, the state of Florida pulled the switch on him at Flat Top.

  ON THE WEEKEND of November 23, the Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches held its eleventh annual meeting in Daytona Beach, the city in which all of Harry T. Moore’s family had received their bachelor’s degrees, at Bethune-Cookman College. Harry had actually been the last; he had been awarded his degree only a few months earlier. For most of those few months Harry had been contemplating his options. The college degree provided him with some professional insurance, in the not unlikely event that he should be ousted as an executive secretary by the NAACP: a prospect that he was still not able to fully acknowledge. He could have opted to resign, or he could have chosen to work out some alternative position with the national office. Instead he was doing what he always did. He had chosen to come to Daytona Beach and fight.

  The first resolution on the agenda concerned the Groveland case, with a call for Governor Fuller Warren to “remove Sheriff Willis B. McCall forthwith from office” that might have been drafted by the letter-writing, speechifying Moore himself. It was overwhelmingly approved in a floor vote, unlike resolution 5, which met with more resistance than Harry might have expected and a lot more than Gloster Current and Ruby Hurley had anticipated. The national branches director and Southeast regional director, it turned out, could not deliver the votes, and the resolution to abolish the position of Florida’s paid executive secretary stalled on the floor. It proved to be no victory for Moore, either. Rather than engage in a protracted battle that might cripple the NAACP branches in Florida, Moore agreed to a compromise by which he would receive over time all back pay due to him—more than $2,600—on the condition that he would continue with the NAACP as an unpaid “state coordinator.”

  Moore left Daytona disillusioned. Current and Hurley “came in and took over,” Moore complained, making “this meeting . . . about the worst we ever had.” He returned home frustrated, in large part because his problems with Current and Hurley stemmed from his inability to raise more money in Florida. He told his mother, Rosa Moore, that “he could not understand why the colored people in Florida did not take more interest in NAACP work,” why they could not see that investing time or energy or two dollars annual dues in the NAACP was investing in a better future for themselves and their children. Change was coming, but it would be coming sooner with more support from the black community. As Marshall would often remind the NAACP staff and field workers, “the easy part of the job is fighting the white folks.”

  Again, Moore considered options. He would have some income from the NAACP and from his back pay (one could be cynical about that); also, Harriette’s position in the Palm Beach County school system was secure. They owned their house in Mims, and they were no longer financially supporting their daughters, as Peaches was teaching at a school in Ocala and Evangeline was working for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington. Harry himself had received a good offer to teach, starting in February if he was interested, and he’d also thought he might go back to school for his master’s degree. But again, with or without back pay, as secretary or coordinator, Harry knew he was, as always, in it to the end of the civil rights fight.

  In the weeks before the annual meeting in Daytona, a wave of racial violence had swept through the state of Florida. The year had begun with isolated beatings of blacks by the Klan, but the violence had intensified in March when a Winter Garden man was flogged and then shot to death. In April the violence had escalated. To the state senate’s passage of an “anti-mask” bill, which banned the wearing of hoods as well as unauthorized cross burnings, the Klan responded with a rash of “hit and run” cross burnings up and down the state. That spring, too, in an attempt to unite various Klan factions in common cause, Bill Hendrix, by day a plumbing contractor in Tallahassee and otherwise the Grand Dragon of the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had declared a war on “hate groups,” most notably the NAACP and B’nai B’rith. In Miami, bombings had laid waste to a Jewish community center and a black apartment complex; dynamite had been discovered, but had failed to detonate, at both a Hebrew school and a Catholic church. In the rubble of another bombed Jewish site had been planted a cross bearing “anti-Semitic and anti-Negro slogans” as well as Nazi and KKK symbols. “The Jew has already ruined the northern cities and wishes to invade the South,” read one letter that had arrived at the governor’s office. “They are teaching communism to the colored people, and inciting rioting through them.” By autumn, violence by dynamite had spread to central Florida. The Klan had flattened the Creamette Frozen Custard Stand in Orlando because the owner had refused to dedicate a separate service window for blacks. Before the year’s end the “Florida Terror,” as it was dubbed by the press, had resulted in a dozen disastrous bombings and numerous failed attempts to destroy racial and religious-based sites: the Saturday Evening Post designated 1951 as “the worst year of minority outrages in the history of Florida or probably any other state in recent times.”

  For Harry Moore, all the outrages of white supremacy in Florida were epitomized by one case and one man. On a weekend in December, after the Daytona conference and before the Christmas break at Harriette’s school, Moore sat down at his desk in the Mims house, where he rolled a piece of stationery into his typewriter—still fretful over his treatment by the NAACP, he chose the Progressive Voters League of Florida letterhead—and with “Dear Governor” he began. Heatedly his fingers hit the keys, no matter that the lengthy, indignant letter would be stuck by some assistant to the governor into the Harry T. Moore file, already thick with unanswered correspondence and telegrams regarding Sheriff Willis McCall and the case of the Groveland Boys. Two decades of experience, twenty years of exasperation in the battle for civil rights in Florida informed Moore’s wrath over the Groveland case, in which the state was now complicit with the sheriff in murder. McCall’s rounds of fire, beyond killing one black man and seriously wounding another
, were, Moore wrote, “still echoing around the world.” So he had questions for Governor Warren, questions that had to be asked again even though he had been asking them of Florida governors for twenty years, with no reply. “Is it true that in Florida the word of a Negro means nothing when weighed against that of a white person?” Who will be there for black families chased from their homes by the bomb-throwing Klan? Who will stand up for young Willie James Howard, murdered in front of his father for sending a white girl a Christmas card? Who will demand justice when a white man rapes a young black girl and is only levied a fine in court? By the time he finished writing his letter, he knew who. Harry T. Moore.

  Lately he had taken to carrying a pistol. “I’ll take a few of them with me if it comes to that,” Moore told his two daughters and loyal wife.

  MARSHALL GATHERED HIS legal staff in New York to discuss another fund-raising tour. He thought “the best person would be someone from Shepherd’s family,” but he also had practical concerns. “Shepherd’s father can’t go because you never can keep him sober,” Marshall told them.

  Greenberg chimed in, “We really ought to call the Civil Rights Congress and find out how they raised money.” But Wilkins quashed that idea. “We do not have the same kind of discipline as the Communists do. The people in our branches will never work as hard.”

  “Some of the tactics are what we should use,” Marshall said. “We ought to get the most horrible pictures printed and out to the public.” He finally decided to send out “eight thousand letters to higher income bracket people,” adding, “We can say that Shepherd is dead and we paid for his funeral so that we have cared for the dead. But we must now care for the living.”