Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Marshall was relying upon historians like John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins University to address the Supreme Court’s concerns about desegregation and congressional powers by placing the rationale for Brown convincingly in a social and political context. The task, Marshall repeatedly reminded the historians, who were sometimes given to academic speculation regarding possible Court opinions, was solely to “present a case so persuasive that the Court would be compelled to rule in our favor.” To that end, Marshall had his LDF team introduce research from psychologist Kenneth Clark’s study of the effects of segregation on the mental attitudes of black children, as in his “doll test,” into the Brown v. Board of Education brief and summation. (Clark’s research confirmed what Marshall had himself concluded from conversations with black children, as when he’d ask boys what they wanted to be when they grew up and—heartbreakingly, to Marshall—even the brightest among them would reply, “I’m going to be a good butler” or “I hope I might be able to get in the post office.”) For months Marshall’s team worked and reworked the Brown brief. They incorporated the results of their legal research with those of the historians’ examination of political and social issues germane to the case; they supported arguments with sociological data and the evidence of Clark’s psychological studies. They produced, in 235 pages, a manifesto for equality, its language, depth, and persuasiveness exceeding all expectations, said Franklin. Another historian noted, “It deserves a place in the literature of advocacy.”

  Hours before day dawned on December 7, 1953, blacks were lining up outside the Supreme Court in the hope of witnessing history being made. The morning had broken cold when Thurgood Marshall arrived with his wife and mother, Buster and Norma, who were escorted to their reserved seats. Marshall sat in the well of the court. Before oral arguments began, he glanced over the team of NAACP lawyers who for months, for years, had worked assiduously on the five education cases in Brown v. Board of Education, and: “I realized there wasn’t a single one of them who hadn’t been touched by Charlie Houston. Either taught by him, or friendly with him, or guided in their careers by him. Every one of them, including me.” To Charlie Houston, his mentor and friend, Marshall might have dedicated this day—their day—in court.

  For three days Marshall and his lawyers argued Brown; they were not expecting a decision until the spring. In January 1954, however, they did have word from the Supreme Court regarding another matter: Walter Irvin’s appeal had been denied; the Court had declined to hear the Groveland case. Jack Greenberg had thought the illegal search and seizure of Irvin’s pants and shoes might have supported a reversal of the verdict (it would have seven years later, when the Court determined that a defendant could not be convicted by illegally obtained evidence), had not Dellia Irvin testified that she had retrieved the evidence in question and given it to Deputy James Yates. Greenberg filed a petition for rehearing the Groveland case, which the Court also denied. Irvin’s lawyers had no further judicial recourse to pursue. They could only focus now on staying the date of Walter Irvin’s execution.

  The Supreme Court, Marshall knew better than most, could be wildly unpredictable, especially in criminal cases. He had argued thirty-two cases before the Court, and though he had lost only three decisions over his career, two of them had been death penalty cases. The third had been the 1944 Lyons v. Oklahoma case, in which the black sharecropper W. D. Lyons confessed to murder after being repeatedly beaten and then presented with a pan of the infant victim’s charred bones. Marshall had prepared the brief for the case with William Hastie, and Marshall himself had established the precedent regarding coerced confessions in criminal trials four years earlier, when he had argued Chambers v. Florida before the Supreme Court. He had every reason to believe he stood on solid ground for a reversal. Yet the Court had upheld Lyons’s conviction. There was speculation that Justice William O. Douglas, who had till then consistently voted to reverse in coerced confession cases, might have cast his vote to let the conviction stand because it was possible that he might be chosen to be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate and he wanted, therefore, not to offend the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Or, as the Supreme Court had done in cases before Lyons, it might have upheld the Oklahoma court’s decision to credit the state for the progress it had made in the conduct of criminal trials involving race. After all, the defendant had not been rushed to trial, he had not been sentenced to death, and he had certainly been represented by competent counsel. Nonetheless, Marshall found the Court’s decision to be wrongheaded. Over the next decade, he continued to pressure the state for Lyons’s early parole. He also corresponded with Lyons in prison and sent Lyons money from his own wallet.

  On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in the most important civil rights case of the twentieth century. The Court had found, just as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had observed on their tour of the South twenty years earlier, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” State laws that established separate public schools for blacks and whites were thus ruled unconstitutional, in violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

  The ruling was just cause for celebration in the LDF’s New York offices. Champagne flowed. The staff was boisterous; the din and laughter were thunderous. Marshall playfully chided Walter White for taking the credit for the abolishment of segregation in public schools. The party moved on to the Blue Ribbon, where lawyers and staff and consultants toasted each other and Marshall with dark beer as they shared platters of pigs’ knuckles with their director-counsel. Thurgood’s wife did not attend—she’d been ill and sometimes bedridden the past few months with chest pains and a persistent viral infection in the lungs—and in the early morning hours, when the party was breaking up, more than one of Marshall’s colleagues noticed that he had left the Blue Ribbon with Cecilia Suyat, Gloster Current’s secretary. “Thurgood was very discreet about his affairs,” said John Aubrey Davis, an academic researcher who had worked on Brown. “There was never an example of it except at the victory celebration. He was leaving with Cissy. . . . That was the first time I’d ever seen any indication that she wasn’t just another worker there.”

  The victory was not celebrated in the South. The Brown ruling triggered a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity and White Citizens’ Council activism, whereby “respectable citizens” joined together to exert economic pressures against local individuals and organizations that either supported desegregation or did not openly oppose it. In Lake County, an editorial by Mabel Norris Reese praising Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court’s decision was not inconsequential. The opposition planted a burning cross on her front lawn, smeared “KKK” in red paint across her office windows, and poisoned the family dog with strychnine.

  Ironically, for all the briefs that the LDF lawyers had filed on the Groveland case over the past five years and for all the appearances Marshall had made in the Supreme Court as well as in Florida county courthouses in the attempt of the NAACP to save the life of Walter Irvin, it was Marshall’s Brown victory in Washington that incidentally set in motion a sequence of events in Florida, which, as it happened, gave the Groveland boy his best chance of escaping the electric chair. For the Brown decision infuriated Willis McCall, both in itself and all the more because the case’s celebrated, winning lawyers were the very same who had descended on Lake County and had as much as called its sheriff a cold-blooded murderer. Not that he’d allow them to intimidate him, or their Supreme Court decision to determine how he would maintain law and order in his domain.

  Streams were going dry and farms to ruin in the South Carolina drought of 1954, so in the spring Allan Platt decided to move his family south, to Mount Dora in Lake County, Florida, where his brother helped him find work picking oranges. He and his wife, Laura, enrolled their five children in the white public school, only to discover they were not white enough. The school did not ignore the complaints of par
ents expressing concerns that the brown-skinned Platt children might be Negroes; instead, the principal reported the complaints to the county sheriff. So it happened that Sheriff Willis McCall, accompanied by the school principal, paid a visit to the Platts’ residence, where he conducted his own anthropological investigation. He lined the five children up against the wall, and peering down over his glasses, one by one, he studied them. “You know, he favors a nigger,” he decided, thus dispensing with seventeen-year-old Denzell; as for thirteen-year-old Laura Belle, “I don’t like the shape of that one’s nose”—and in as many minutes as children he determined that all five children were indeed Negroes. Despite Allan Platt’s claims to Irish and American Indian descent, and unconvinced by birth certificates as well as a marriage license which designated the Platts as “white,” McCall ordered the children to be kept out of school, pending further investigation. Platt’s objections fell on deaf ears. If there was one thing Willis McCall could do, he bragged, it was identify both “Black Angus cattle and mulattoes.”

  “The sheriff is the law here,” school officials responded when the Platts protested the sheriff’s dictum. So, too, Mabel Norris Reese reported in a series of articles that would ultimately earn her a Pulitzer Prize nomination and continuing coverage in Time magazine. Taking up the Platts’ cause, Reese also renewed her old feud with Sheriff McCall. “If the children never see the inside of another school, they will not go to a Negro school,” Allan Platt told Reese. For his family had no association with blacks; they had attended only white churches, and his grandfather had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Furthermore, the Platts were legally designated as “white,” though some documents indicated, too, a Croatan Indian ancestry—which, McCall was quick to point out, was defined by Webster’s dictionary as a line of “people of mixed Indian, white and Negro ancestry.” McCall spouted, and Reese’s articles spurred sixty-five pupils at the Mount Dora school to sign a petition stating that the Platt children’s “right to an education has been taken away because of the opinions and prejudice of one man.” The next day, when school opened, the children found a chalk line running down the middle of the sidewalk; one side was marked “White People,” the other “Nigger Lovers.” One child who had signed the petition was stoned with pebbles. A deputy meanwhile visited the Platts with a message from the sheriff’s office “that if they weren’t out by that night, their house would be burned down.”

  In the summer of 1954, the outspoken Willis V. McCall was named a director of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, which devoted itself primarily to the advocacy of racial segregation. At a rally in Delaware organized by NAAWP founder Bryant Bowles, the sheriff from Lake County was introduced to a crowd of five thousand segregationists as an “expert” in race relations and “a man who knows how to handle Negroes.” Decrying the Brown decision, McCall urged everyone in attendance to “go to it” in their opposition to integration. On his return to Lake County he told one newspaper, “I for one, am going to do all I can to forestall such a movement. I am one who, instead of sitting around grumbling about these agitators, goes into action. We need more action and not so much wishie-washie grumbling.”

  News of the sheriff’s call for “action” soon reached Thurgood Marshall in New York, and immediately the NAACP fired off a telegram to Florida’s acting governor, Charley Johns, requesting that he remove McCall from office. Johns responded by telling reporters that McCall’s speech was “ill-advised” but adding that “I have no grounds to remove him.” The partners may have changed, but for fifteen years the dance Marshall had been stepping with Florida governors had remained the same, and they were still stepping on his toes. Only Charley Johns stomped. Johns had become Florida’s acting governor when Dan McCarty died suddenly of a heart attack in September 1953, and Johns had since lost in the Democratic primary to LeRoy Collins, who was running unopposed in the 1954 special election. On November 1, the eve of that election, the acting governor, the “hog and hominy” segregationist from North Florida, with two months more to serve, attended to what for him was a more pressing matter of business. He signed the death warrant of Walter Irvin. The execution was set for Monday morning, November 8.

  The NAACP at once petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for a stay of execution in light of “new evidence,” specifically that Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld, the physician who had examined Norma Padgett after the alleged rape, would have testified, had he been called as a witness, that Padgett “had not been” assaulted. Florida assistant attorney general Reeves Bowen scoffed at the request; he accused the NAACP of sitting idly by “till the last tick of the clock” before bringing the appeal to Tallahassee. The court refused to grant a stay.

  Thurgood Marshall had no other options; he knew what he had to do. He’d done it before, stopped an execution at a last, heart-in-the-throat moment. Except that he had been unable to locate Chief Justice Fred Vinson anywhere—not at home or at any of his haunts around Washington. Then he got a tip: a room number at the Statler Hilton, two blocks from the White House. He busted in. The chief justice was playing cards, Vinson v. Truman.

  “How did you find me?” Vinson asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” Marshall said, sliding the brief toward the justice.

  Vinson’s eyes skimmed the pages; time mattered. He waved the brief at Marshall. “Can you vouch for this being true?”

  “Yes, sir. I wrote it,” Marshall replied.

  President Truman watched in silence. Marshall waited, his breath held. Vinson lowered the brief to the table; he picked up his pen.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, if you’ve got guts enough to break in on this, I’ve got guts enough to sign it,” said Vinson, passing the brief back to Marshall.

  It was late in the evening, Saturday, November 6, three years to the day since Walter Irvin had been lying in a ditch with a gun pressed at his neck—“This nigger is not dead”—not yet—but in less than two days he would be taking his last walk, down the corridor of Flat Top to Florida’s Old Sparky, unless . . .

  Marshall managed to track down Justice Hugo Black, who submitted the signed brief to the Court at a conference of justices. The last-minute stay gave Marshall twelve days to prepare for the meeting of the Supreme Court on November 20, when the justices would again decide whether or not to grant a review of Irvin’s conviction. In the forty-five days between then and January 4, when Governor-elect LeRoy Collins took office, Marshall had no doubt that Governor Charley Johns would deliver Irvin to the electric chair the first chance he got. Nor did Marshall doubt that if he could somehow stretch out the judicial process until Johns had vacated the statehouse in Tallahassee, the likelihood that he could rescue Irvin from execution would increase significantly.

  An affable man at forty-five, the Tallahassee lawyer LeRoy Collins came from “Old Florida,” and like most Southern politicians, he condemned the Brown decision. Even though Marshall did not yet know what to expect from Collins, he knew too well where Johns stood. On November 20, Marshall made a fourth appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to review Irvin’s conviction. Florida had thirty days to reply, at which time the Court would decide whether to hear the case for argument and opinion. Marshall had reset the clock ticking off the time between Irvin and the electric chair. Better yet, he had gotten Charley Johns’s hand off the switch.

  Another clock was ticking at 409 Edgecombe. Buster came home from the hospital for Thanksgiving. She and the doctors had kept the bad news from Thurgood, but time now was short. The chest pains, the virus: it was cancer. Remorseful, reproaching himself for the constant travel, the cases, the endless hours at the LDF offices, the indiscretions, Marshall took a leave of absence from the NAACP. He barricaded himself in the apartment, and at Buster’s bedside, attentive and tender, Thurgood spent the final weeks in the quarter century of their marriage: a marriage that may have years ago lost its intimacy but that had never wanted for love. Suffering with her, as if he could suffer for her, Thurgood pi
ned. His body seemed to be mirroring hers. “He had become cadaverous,” Jack Greenberg observed on one of Marshall’s rare visits at the office. In midwinter, on February 11, 1955, her forty-fourth birthday, Vivian “Buster” Burey left Marshall. It had been nearly ten years ago that she had traveled with Thurgood to the Virgin Islands when he was recuperating from his mysterious illness. Marshall had not taken a vacation since. The NAACP sent him on a cruise, all expenses paid, and Marshall—“morose and unhappy . . . in very bad shape,” as Greenberg noted—sailed sadly off to Mexico.

  UNLIKE ANY OTHER state in the Deep South, Florida was undergoing a large-scale, transformative demographic shift in the mid-fifties. From the end of World War II until LeRoy Collins took office in January 1955, industrial activity in the United States had increased by nearly 11 percent; in Florida it was up more than 50 percent. During Collins’s first year as governor, more than five million tourists would visit the Sunshine State, and from 1950 to 1960 Florida’s population would grow by almost 80 percent. The state was enjoying an economic boom that stood, as Collins said, on “three sturdy legs. Tourism. Industry. Agriculture.”

  At Collins’s inauguration on January 4, thousands gathered at Capital Park in Tallahassee to hear the address of the newly sworn-in thirty-third governor of Florida. Conservative politicians shifted uncomfortably in their seats under the bright sun when Collins adopted a combative tone and promised that the days of a “ward-heeling, back-scratching, self-promoting political system” were over. “Government, too, must have qualities of the spirit,” Collins told the crowd. “Truth and justice and fairness and unselfish service are some of these. Without these qualities there is no worthwhile leadership, and we grapple and grope in a moral wilderness.”