by Gilbert King
Marshall took notice. He made sure that a new host of letters and telegrams, thousands of them, brought the case of Walter Irvin to the new governor’s attention when he took up his post. Marshall had also enlisted Tom Harris, the executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, in the cause. The Times’s coverage of the original Groveland Boys trial had drawn the ire of Willis McCall for having the gall to question the evidence against the defendants, and once again the newspaper began publishing articles and editorials questioning procedures and protocol in the court. Times reporters who had worked diligently on the case, the paper noted, “were never convinced of the guilt of the four defendants” and indeed believed that the defense had shown more than enough reasonable doubt. Thus, the Times argued, the situation now called for “compassion and calm judgment,” and in the event that the courts should in time discover the four defendants not to have been guilty of rape, the best way to ensure justice would be to commute Irvin’s sentence to life imprisonment.
One week after LeRoy Collins took office, the U.S. Supreme Court declined Marshall’s fourth appeal on behalf of Walter Lee Irvin. Among the letters that continued to pour into the governor’s office in support of Irvin were two letters from the prosecution in the case. A letter from Sam Buie, the assistant state attorney, urged the governor, now that he was free to issue a death warrant, to “get rid of this case once and for all.” It was not the first time Buie had attempted to influence the case outside the courtroom. In November 1951, only weeks after McCall had shot the two Groveland boys, Buie had a shocking story to tell, and he chose a high-ranking NAACP officer in Ocala to tell it to. Jesse Hunter, Buie told the officer, was so livid with Marshall after the lawyer attempted to disqualify him from prosecuting the second Groveland Boys trial that Hunter entered into a conspiracy with Willis McCall to kill Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. It was Hunter’s pride, Buie said of his boss, that “caused him to plot this killing with McCall.”
Marshall was immediately notified of the alleged conspiracy and saw right through Buie’s ploy. He suspected that by tipping off the NAACP, Buie was doing the bidding of his friend Willis McCall, who was “trying to drag Hunter into this killing.” Marshall was convinced that Hunter was not involved in such a plot because by that time, Hunter had himself, through Mabel Norris Reese, been keeping the NAACP informed on the FBI’s investigation into McCall’s shooting of the Groveland Boys.
Unlike Sam Buie, State Attorney Jesse Hunter made no argument for speedy execution. Hunter’s letter to Collins focused instead on the chaos that had erupted in Lake County, with the KKK and members of the National Association for the Advancement of White People breaking into targeted homes and threatening the occupants while their mobs huddled menacingly outside the door, all under the permissive eye of Sheriff Willis McCall.
Hunter’s health had worsened since the last Groveland trial. Still, leukemia had not taken the battle entirely out of him. It was Mabel Norris Reese who reported to her seventy-five-year-old friend the recent plight of Allan Platt. While Platt and his family had managed to resist the bullying of Sheriff McCall and his deputy’s threat of arson, their landlady had not. A visit from the sheriff had convinced her to evict the Platts, out of concern, as she told Platt, that the “house might catch fire.” Hunter decided that Sheriff McCall was “out of control,” and on behalf of the Platts, the former prosecutor sued the Lake County School Board. On his own money he traveled to South Carolina to obtain documents necessary to support the Platts’ claims, and in court, demanding that the board produce evidence to prove conclusively that the Platt children had Negro blood, he left the school board’s unsupported and insupportable case in shreds. “Much as I hate it,” said the judge, Truman Futch, he had no choice but to rule in favor of the Platts, who in October 1955 won the right to return to the white public school. “The Lord be praised,” said Allan Platt, near tears. “I knew it couldn’t be any other way.”
The verdict did not please Sheriff McCall any more than did Jesse Hunter’s apparently blossoming friendship with the “Communist” reporter for the Mount Dora Topic. “I have no comment to make whatsoever,” McCall told reporters. “Absolutely no comment.” He did have a comment for Allan Platt, though, a few days later when a band of “night-riding terrorists” firebombed the Platts’ home. McCall’s investigation turned up footprints at the scene that, the sheriff informed Platt, could have been made by some high school boys who “didn’t want to go to school with burrheads.” McCall then placed the blame for all harassment, threats, and violence aimed at the Platts, not to mention the embarrassment brought upon the Lake County School Board, on Platt himself, as he had instigated the whole series of events by contacting Mabel Norris Reese. “I’ve got more justice from Mrs. Reese than I have from you,” Platt told the sheriff.
Again the Platt family had been forced from their home, and the children from their school; eventually they were invited to enroll in a private school in Mount Dora. Jesse Hunter publicly and strongly criticized McCall not only for failing to protect the Platts but also for telling reporters that the Lake County Sheriff’s Department had no cause or intent to protect them. The former prosecutor also, and again, contacted Governor Collins. “Disturbed” by reports like Hunter’s, the governor issued a statement: “Lawlessness of this kind in Lake County has just got to stop. Not only are the rights of the individuals involved but the good name of this fine county and of the state is put in jeopardy.” Sheriff McCall remained undeterred. At a meeting of the Lions Club not long after the firebombing of the Platts’ house, he announced, “In my book, they’re still mulattoes. This only proves that there are some people who will stoop to integrate our schools.”
In New York Marshall had been following the press coverage of the Platt case, and he took particular interest in the coverage by Mabel Norris Reese. That Reese had once called for honor to be avenged in the rape of Norma Padgett and declared Lake County a racial paradise, and that she had lost all regard for the sheriff of that county, attested to the human capacity to change. No longer able, after the sheriff’s shooting of the two Groveland defendants, to turn a blind eye to the racism and white supremacy in her own backyard, she had tipped off the NAACP about the last bullet found in the sand, and she had since kept the New York office informed, through intermediaries, of what she learned further about the case from Jesse Hunter. Hunter himself, it appeared, had begun to rethink the entire Groveland Boys matter, “due chiefly to the influence of Thurgood Marshall,” according to Reese. Hunter may have even begun to regret the “sacred duty” that compelled him, a man stricken with a fatal disease, to win his last capital case in Lake County at the cost of Walter Irvin’s life.
IN HIS FIRST year as governor, LeRoy Collins took countless “Florida selling” trips to New York, where he chased manufacturing deals, the construction of atomic energy plants, and insurance company relocations. He was, as Time magazine observed, “an indefatigable salesman of his state boom.” The last thing Collins wanted to see, then, was a New York newspaper headline asking, “Is There Negro Blood on Your Grapefruit?” Not only would bad press cost the state a tremendous loss in agricultural and manufacturing dollars; it would also stem the flow of money from Northern tourists and winter residents, whose seasonal migrations had prompted a boom in housing and construction. Neither an advertisement nor an asset for the Sunshine State were trigger-happy sheriffs and bomb-planting, torch-wielding mobs in white robes and hoods.
With letter-writing campaigns and newspaper stories rekindling interest in the Groveland Boys case and the plight of Walter Irvin, Thurgood Marshall turned to a friend, a former president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Allan Knight Chalmers, for additional purchase. A highly respected white minister who had chaired the Scottsboro Defense Committee in the 1930s, for seventeen years Chalmers had negotiated tirelessly with the state of Alabama until all nine defendants had gained their freedom. At the time of the first Groveland Boys trial, Chalmers had participated in the invest
igation into the case by the Committee of 100, and he had come away convinced that the defendants were innocent. In 1955, when Marshall contacted him in regard to the fate of Walter Irvin, Chalmers was teaching at Boston University, where he was mentoring a young student named Martin Luther King Jr. In Chalmers, Marshall saw the kind of man by whom LeRoy Collins might be persuaded to favorably address Walter Irvin’s situation, as Collins appeared to be a man moved by words and ideas. Moreover, Chalmers’s 1951 book, They Shall Be Free, struck chords that Collins had also touched upon in his inaugural address, as in Chalmers’s call for “effective action” in what Collins would name a “moral wilderness”:
There are enough staid people in the world holding things as they are. We need no more of them. What we need is people caught by the truth that no one is free when anyone is bound. That is not an easy idea to have get a hold on you. It has to be applied person by person, not just in the pious generalities of the resolutions good people pass when they gather for a moment and separate without effective action.
Marshall’s request produced a letter to clergymen in which Chalmers called for their support of clemency in the case of Walter Irvin: what Chalmers described as a “desperate situation.” In the letter, too, he cited a Florida newspaper that, in the same day’s edition, covered Irvin’s impending date with death in one article and in another reported that a thirty-year-old white man had been fined a hundred dollars in the rape of a fourteen-year-old black girl. The coincidence hardly spoke to the “truth and justice and fairness” Collins espoused in his inaugural address.
The governor did act upon the case, if without fanfare or even an inside-page notice in the newspaper. Shortly after taking office, Collins initiated a secret investigation into the Groveland Boys case by his personal friend Bill Harris, a Tallahassee lawyer. What Collins wanted was an objective, detailed, fact-based report; so, to obviate any social or political fallout for either Harris or the governor’s office, Collins assured Harris, who would be acting only in an advisory capacity, without a fee, that the report would not be made public. A thorough review of the evidence and the testimony left Harris unconvinced that the Padgetts had been able to positively identify the Groveland boys. More apparent was the failure of the state to utilize procedures available for valid scientific analysis of the pants stains, footprints, and tire tracks that “could have nailed this case down and removed any reasonable doubt.” At issue, too, was the lack of any medical evidence to support the rape charges. Harris more than doubted the validity of the prosecution’s time line; he rejected it, for how could the gun in Charles Greenlee’s possession have been used in the crime when Greenlee was already in custody nearly twenty miles away from the scene of the alleged rape? Neither did Harris accept the findings of the coroner’s jury, which concluded that Sheriff Willis McCall was justified in the shooting of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. In his report Harris stated that the shooting was “in its best light an act of gross and willful negligence, and in its possible interpretation an act of criminal negligence.”
Seeded further by the likes of Chalmers and the Committee of 100, the storm of letters and telegrams to the governor’s office did not abate. Clergymen pleaded for clemency. Tourists vowed never to spend another penny in the Sunshine State. Florida residents expressed shame at the sanctioned inhumanity of Irvin’s case. But other voices decried any attempt by committees or agencies or associations to alter the status quo either in Florida or in the case of Walter Irvin. In a letter to Governor Collins from U.S. Attorney Herbert Phillips, who had angered the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI in 1950 when he failed to take action, despite “substantial evidence . . . that the victims were beaten and tortured” by members of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, the avowed segregationist—Phillips bristled at the mere mention of Thurgood Marshall’s name—wrote: “Since I am your personal friend and desire that the NAACP shall not prove itself more powerful than our courts . . . I see no reason why the leaders of the NAACP and those who follow their leadership should expect you . . . [to be] setting aside the verdict of guilt of two juries, the judgment and sentence of the Circuit Judge, the two decisions of the Supreme Court of Florida, and the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding and affirming the death sentence imposed on Irvin.”
Inhumanity, shame, virulence, segregationism—none of it aligned with the governor’s personal vision for his state. Within months of each other, LeRoy Collins and Thurgood Marshall appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1955, but the two men had more in common than political celebrity. Collins, who stood among the first of the “New South” politicians, and Marshall, who was emerging as the architect of a new America, both championed the cause of racial justice, no matter its political inexpediency, and both men would become leading, outspoken opponents of the death penalty in the United States. Marshall would later say, “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” More bluntly, Collins would declare the death penalty to be “Florida’s gutter of shame.” He might have said the same of the racial injustices that had for too long defined the social tenor of the conservative Old South, although in his gubernatorial campaign he himself had opposed desegregation. “I realized we had to change,” Collins said after he had read those letters and telegrams, for without change he could not achieve the new Florida that he had envisioned in his inaugural address: a Florida that could “offer to the people of the world the finest investment on earth—a place in the sun.”
Memorable among the thousands of letters, and moving as well as suasive, was one that Collins received from Jesse Hunter. The prosecutor of the Groveland Boys related how he and Thurgood Marshall had reached an agreement whereby Irvin would receive a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plead, but subsequently, after a lengthy conference, Marshall had informed the state attorney that the defendant insisted he was innocent and refused to plead otherwise. Hunter then recounted for the governor the details of the private meeting he’d had three months before the retrial, on the morning of November 7, 1951, when he had slipped past Deputy James Yates at Waterman Memorial Hospital and stepped into the guarded room. In the hospital bed, barely conscious, with a red tube taped to his face, lay Walter Irvin, the defendant he had already once sent to the electric chair and the man whom Hunter had noticed was still alive the night before. The man’s chances of recovery were uncertain, as Hunter had suspected—that was why he had driven to the hospital at the crack of dawn. The two men briefly discussed Irvin’s condition, and Irvin told the prosecutor he believed that he was going to die. Hunter sensed an opportunity: “Confess to the rape,” he whispered, promising Irvin that anything he said would be confidential and not ever be used against him. “For my satisfaction alone,” Hunter added. And waited, until: “No . . . I’m not guilty,” Irvin rasped.
To Collins, Hunter’s intent in the letter was clear. After his bedside conversation with Irvin, the ailing state attorney had confided to Mabel Norris Reese that he had doubts concerning Irvin’s guilt. Yet the prosecutor in him would not allow him to quit on the case and the chance of a second conviction. Now, seventy-six years old, leukemic, his health failing, the former prosecutor was striving to clear his conscience, to do what was right—to persuade Governor LeRoy Collins to commute Walter Irvin’s death sentence.
Hunter’s intent was clear to Willis McCall as well, and it rankled the sheriff even more than the Supreme Court’s reversal of the first Groveland Boys verdict. After meeting with the governor, McCall sent Collins a letter of his own, in which he tried to explain away the former prosecutor’s change of heart as “a demonstration of senility . . . greatly influenced by a radical female editor who in the opinion of many citizens in this county has pink leaning in her editorials.”
In the letter McCall argued further, with a parting shot at Thurgood Marshall and his New York lawyers, that commutation of Irvin’s sentence to life “would only be a victory for NAACP who has set out to destroy the authority of our cour
ts, as it is an undisputable fact that they are the ones behind this movement. Should they accomplish this goal, it would mean one thing. That all a Negro criminal would need to do would be to pick out some innocent helpless white woman as a target to satisfy his ravishing sexual desires, keep his mouth shut, proclaim his innocence and let NAACP furnish the money and lawyers to beat the rap. Governor, at this time I have great confidence in you as a deep thinking man, I am praying that you will see fit to let the verdict of the Court stand and keep our great State safe for our fair womanhood. This obligation we owe to our children.” The sheriff’s argument might have persuaded Collins’s predecessors, Fuller Warren and Charley Johns, but the New South governor had no ear for still more racially motivated cries for blood and vengeance. Collins was persuaded more soundly by Bill Harris’s less biased report, which by the way showed Willis McCall’s fingerprints to be all over the Groveland Boys case. From the start, McCall had wanted the four Groveland boys dead, and he had proved himself ready to execute them himself if the state of Florida hadn’t the stomach for it.
Mabel Norris Reese had no stomach for it, or for the renegade sheriff of Lake County. Neither did Jesse Hunter any longer. Eventually in the matter of Groveland, and in the Platt case, both Reese and Hunter had stood up to McCall at the risk of their families and their property, as had Harry T. Moore, whose protests of injustice had cost him and his wife their lives. Like Collins himself, Reese and Hunter had been willfully blind to the issues of race in Florida, and Collins, like them, had “realized we had to change.”