Devil in the Grove Read online

  At nightfall, beside a tomato shed near the station platform, with his suitcase for a pillow, Charles did manage to sleep for a few hours. Sometime after midnight he awakened to the buzz and bites of mosquitoes. Tucking the revolver in his belt, he headed across the street to L. Day Edge’s gas station. There he filled his soda bottle with water at a drinking fountain, and there the flashlights of two Edge Mercantile night watchmen spotted him.

  “Is there anywhere a fellow can get something to eat?” Charles asked the watchmen.

  “Hold still a minute, boy,” one said, drawing his gun. Charles instinctively raised his hands in the air.

  They marched Charles across the street, back to the depot, where they rifled through his suitcase. They examined his Social Security card and driver’s license. They questioned him about the gun, which, as it turned out, wasn’t loaded. Because he didn’t want to involve Ernest in the inquiry, Charles said the gun belonged to his father up in Santa Fe, Florida, north of Gainesville. They were about to release him when another man from the filling station appeared.

  “What road camp you break out?” the man asked. Charles patiently explained where he had come from, but the man was cautious. “You don’t know what that boy done done,” he told the watchmen. “You better hold him till morning.”

  One of the men stepped into a phone booth, and not long after, at about 3 a.m. George Mays, Groveland’s chief of police, arrived. He decided it was best to put Charles in for the night. The two night watchmen brought to the jail more cookies and another bottle of water for him; they also told him they’d like to “work out something with the gun” if he was interested in selling it. So Charles hadn’t worried. The men were treating him well, and they would soon enough discover he hadn’t done anything wrong. Charles had figured he’d be out of jail by morning.

  But he wasn’t. The next morning, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell arrived at the jail, both of them in a foul mood.

  “Stand up, nigger,” Campbell had said as they’d entered the cell, and immediately they’d begun peppering the teenager with questions: “Where are the boys you were with last night?” “Where’s the car?” “Was it an old Buick or a new Buick?”

  Charles was confused. “I wasn’t in any car,” he replied, adding that he hadn’t been with any boys last night, either. The deputies made the boy drop his pants, as Yates was looking for “anything to indicate he was connected with the rape.” When he failed to find anything, dissatisfied, he walked away in a huff.

  “You’re lying,” Yates growled.

  Soon after, Charles became aware that a crowd of men was gathering around the jail. He’d heard a few remarks from outside about “what they would do and what they would not do if they got ahold of this boy Greenlee.” Then he heard footsteps approaching.

  Chief Mays led a young white couple over to Charles’s cell. Standing there shirtless, Charles lowered his eyes to the floor as Willie and Norma Padgett looked him up and down.

  “He’s not one of the boys,” Willie said.

  Norma turned to Mays. “He looks like one of the boys,” she said.

  Willie took another look. “He is not one of the boys,” he said again, then left with Norma.

  Returning a few minutes later, Willie quietly asked Charles if he’d been with any boys the night before. Charles replied that he didn’t know what boys Willie was talking about. “The boys what took me out of the ditch last night,” Willie said.

  “No, sir,” Charles answered. “I wasn’t one of them.” Willie described them in more detail and again asked if Charles had seen them. Charles responded that he hadn’t seen anyone last night “but the men who had put me in jail.”

  Willie Padgett appeared satisfied and left the jail, but others arrived to question Charles further about some boys in a car the night before. He had no idea why until finally Chief Mays told him: “Boy, if you don’t know it, you in trouble. Some boys raped a white woman last night and robbed a man. If I don’t hurry up and get you away from here they gonna take you out and kill you.”

  With the clamor outside the jail growing, Charles begged Mays to “hurry up and take me away.” The police chief told him that some cars were on the way.

  At about the same moment, Elma Lee Puryear, the mayor of Groveland, saw about fifty Bay Lake men standing outside the jail as he was driving by. Feeling uneasy and suspecting they “might cause some trouble,” he learned from a Lake County deputy that the crowd believed the jail was housing a Negro who had raped a Bay Lake girl the night before. Puryear and the deputy determined that the Negro should be moved from the rickety Groveland jail. They hustled the teen outside, past the gathering mob, and into the mayor’s car. Charles was transferred to Tavares without incident.

  At Tavares, Charles found himself in the bullpen, where he saw, among the prisoners, “two colored boys who were all beat up.” Their faces were swollen and bloody; they sat slumped in resignation; they said nothing. One of them, Charles noticed, “had a big hole knocked in the back of his head.” When the prisoners were served supper, the two beaten ones were removed from the cell. The taller of the two returned before Charles had finished his meal. He removed his shirt; bruises and welts covered his upper body.

  The turn in Charles’s fate was hard for him to fathom. He had never been in any serious trouble with the law. The day before, he and his friend Ernest had set out for Groveland, where they’d be sure to find decent jobs picking citrus. They’d even lined up a place to stay. Most important, Charles had traveled with the blessing of his parents, who hoped that by striking out on his own he’d have a chance for a fresh and optimistic start in a new town. When his father told him, “Go ahead and try,” Charles felt ready for an adventure. But not for this one.

  Night had fallen. Charles Greenlee had been in the supposedly more secure county jail in Tavares for about nine hours when the angry shouts of a much larger crowd had the prisoners on the top floor stirring. Unlike his fellow inmates, Charles had some idea why the mob had gathered, and he was scared for his life. He could hear some men moving from cell to cell. When they reached the bullpen, he immediately recognized Willie Padgett, the man who had talked to him earlier that day in Groveland. Padgett recognized Charles, too; just as he had told Norma, he now told her father that Greenlee wasn’t one of the boys.

  “That’s the boy they picked up in Groveland for carrying a gun,” Padgett said. Charles sighed in relief; he began to think this whole misunderstanding would be cleared up soon.

  Except that Leroy Campbell was eyeing him with suspicion and menace. The “stout white man dressed in a white shirt with bloody specks, felt hat, brown summer pants, revolver strapped to his hip, and a small brown badge on his belt” was one of the deputies who had grilled him in Groveland, and at Tavares he’d been conducting the two brutalized colored boys back and forth from the bullpen.

  After searching the basement and the other floors in the courthouse, the three Bay Lake men—Padgett, Tyson, and Cockcroft—were finally satisfied that Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin had been moved to Raiford, just as the sheriff had said. Still, they weren’t happy, and they left the building grumbling. The mob outside assured Coy Tyson that they’d take care of things their way if the law failed him and his daughter. Willis McCall urged them all to go home.

  “You’ve got families and responsibilities,” he told them. “I’m sure you have many things to do on a Saturday evening besides sit here and argue with me about some nigras. I’ve secured them, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got to follow the law. Now, you fellas give it up and go on about your business. Some of your wives are probably waiting supper, or they may be wantin’ for you to take ’em out to a movie or something.”

  Slowly, and to McCall’s great relief, the crowd began to disperse.

  By the end of the weekend, Sheriff Willis McCall would be proclaimed a hero in newspapers across the country for successfully preventing a lynching in Lake County. The Orlando Sunday Sentinel trumpeted McCall�
��s fortitude before the mob under the headline “Lake County Bride Kidnapped,” while a paper as far away as Eugene, Oregon, shouted, “Sheriff Staves Off Lynching.” Even the New York Times noted that the “fast talking” sheriff moved quickly to “disperse a mob of about 100 armed men who came to take two Negroes from his jail.” The Miami Herald praised McCall’s “steadfast courage,” but added, “the whole setting smells Ku Klux Klan.”

  A steady Florida rain had begun to fall as the dispirited Bay Lake vigilantes returned to their cars and trucks with their rifles and ax handles. McCall decided that now would be a good time to talk to the young boy who was the third suspect in the rape of Norma Padgett. He rode the slow elevator in the courthouse up to the jail on the top floor.

  For both Sheriff Willis McCall and Charles Greenlee, their evening of fear was far from over. And their weekend would be anything but quiet.

  BY THE SUMMER of 1949, Walter White, who had been suffering from a heart ailment, had become the focus of a damaging controversy within the NAACP. After admitting to an affair with Poppy Cannon, a white South African socialite, White divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Gladys, a black woman, and married Cannon in June. The interracial marriage did not sit well with the black press, and the distraction was causing a rift within the NAACP, where “all hell broke loose.” Roy Wilkins, editor of the Crisis, the organization’s official organ, and, like Marshall and White, a resident at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, thought it best that White not attend the NAACP’s annual convention. White had become a lightning rod for criticism among those who had previously viewed him as a race leader, and the blond-haired, blue-eyed Negro who “dressed like a tweedy English country squire” and was known as “Mr. NAACP” did not make things any easier for himself that summer. He wrote a provocative piece for Look magazine’s August issue, “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” in which he pondered the benefits of hydroquinone, an antioxidant that could be used to remove melanin from human skin, and wondered whether the ability to turn dark skins pale might “solve the American race problem.”

  For his part, Marshall felt White was entitled to marry “whomever he wished provided she consented,” but that did not stop White from considering Marshall “obstreperous” and even “mean-spirited” at the time. Marshall had never shied from confronting White about his lack of a law degree, and he bristled whenever the executive secretary attempted to exert his influence in the LDF’s legal affairs, especially when White began traveling to Washington to observe Marshall’s arguments before the Supreme Court—during which proceedings White would sit “within the rail,” a section reserved only for members of the Supreme Court bar.

  “Now look,” Marshall told him, “you’re not supposed to be in there, and they know you’re connected with me, and one of these days they’re going to find out you’re not a lawyer. And I’m gonna get blamed for it. And it’s going to affect my standing. And I don’t believe in letting anything affect my standing in the Supreme Court. So I’m telling you, don’t let me catch you sitting there again. If you do, I’m going to tell the guard.”

  “You wouldn’t,” an indignant White replied.

  “Try me,” Marshall said.

  Not long after that exchange, Marshall spotted White again within the rail. Marshall quietly approached a guard and, pointing to White, whispered, “See that fellow over there? I don’t think he’s a member of the bar.” The guard politely requested White to move to the spectators’ section in the rear of the court.

  The next time Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court he was pleased to note that White had chosen not to defy him. That is, until he discovered the executive secretary even more exclusively seated. At White’s behest, Justice Hugo Black arranged for him to sit as a guest in the judge’s box. Marshall could only shake his head. “So he won, anyhow,” he said.

  Despite the fact that White still had the full support of Eleanor Roosevelt, he ultimately decided to take a leave of absence in the summer of 1949, leaving Marshall and Wilkins, now the acting secretary, responsible for day-to-day operations at the NAACP. Aside from the teachers’ pay, voting, education, and transportation cases that constantly occupied the LDF in its multipronged legal attack on Jim Crow, a steady stream of capital rape cases continually flooded its offices. Marshall had long been aware that such charges raised serious human rights issues, since the death penalty for rape was “a sentence that had been more consistently and more blatantly racist in application than any other in American law.”

  Since sex cases involving race were complicated and controversial, Marshall always worried over their potential to “crowd out other important work.” He had also learned, however, that headline-grabbing press coverage of the NAACP’s more salacious criminal cases produced an increase in both membership rolls and financial donations more immediately and more dramatically than the segregation cases that they’d labor on quietly for years. As special counsel, Marshall was the public face of the NAACP, and he too was capturing headlines. His presence inside and outside courtrooms around the country on behalf of defenseless blacks seeking justice had cemented his reputation as Mr. Civil Rights. He was collecting important victories before the Supreme Court, including Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), wherein the Court, siding unanimously with Marshall, ruled that the enforcement in a state court of a restrictive covenant that barred “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from owning property violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Marshall’s name was being splashed across the headlines of every major newspaper in America, and on radio broadcasts he was being hailed as “the Joe Louis of the courtroom.”

  On July 17, 1949, the day after Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin stopped to assist Willie and Norma Padgett on a lonely stretch of road just north of Groveland, Florida, Marshall was 2,500 miles away with Wilkins in Los Angeles, where the delegates to the NAACP Annual Convention were still buzzing about Walter White. Half of them, Wilkins noted, “wanted to lynch Walter for leaving Gladys, and the other half wanted to string him up for marrying a white woman.” The organization’s attempt at damage control on the West Coast required most of the executive staff and LDF lawyers, so the national office in New York was working with a skeleton crew. Marshall had left only one young lawyer behind at the home office, associate counsel Franklin Williams, in the event that any legal emergencies arose.

  CHAPTER 6: A LITTLE BOLITA

  The Groveland Boys. From left to right: Sheriff Willis McCall, jailer Reuben Hatcher, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, and Samuel Shepherd. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

  BY THE HUNDREDS, blacks cleared out of Groveland on the backs of citrus trucks. Others took blankets, food, and water and fled with their children into the pine leaf forests, surer than rumor that the Ku Klux Klan would be coming from all directions to burn down Stuckey Still, the black enclave west of Groveland.

  Not satisfied that he had appeased the mob at the jail for the night, Sheriff McCall took some highway patrolmen down to Groveland, where he was troubled to see that the Bay Lake men hadn’t gone straight home to their wives and families as he’d suggested. Their numbers, in fact, were growing. The sheriff estimated that some 250 men had gathered in the streets, around their cars and trucks, and more vehicles were spilling into town by the minute, their horns blaring. The streets of Groveland were noisy with dangerous excitement. Two of the rapists may have made it to Raiford, but that didn’t mean the night was over.

  Ernest Thomas had seen the writing on the wall, what with Norma Padgett claiming she’d been raped by “four niggers” and his friend Charles Greenlee in jail, where a large crowd was aching for a lynching party. Ernest wanted out and hopped on a bus heading north that morning.

  Disappointed that they had left the Tavares jail empty-handed, Coy Tyson and Flowers Cockcroft made it clear to the “sullen, glint-eyed” mob that they still had some business to settle. And they’d settle some of it in Stuckey Still, an are
a just outside Groveland where blacks lived in wooden, weather-beaten shacks on small plots of land dotted with palm scrub and pines. By nightfall, however, most of the blacks had already evacuated.

  McCall was trailing cautiously behind a cluster of cars when a volley of shotgun blasts rang out. In a din the cars sped off in all directions and disappeared in clouds of dust. Stunned, the sheriff’s gaze followed the trajectory of the shots. It took him to their target: the Blue Flame, the juke joint owned by Ethel Thomas, Ernest’s mother. As he was assessing the damage to the cinder block shack—the windows had been blown out by “15 loads of buckshot”—McCall discovered one man inside: he’d been roused from his sleep but was uninjured. The sheriff figured the shooting at the Thomas place had at least blown some steam off the mob. He monitored the area for a while, but apparently the Bay Lake rabble had headed home to sleep things off. The rest of the night was mostly quiet around Groveland.

  BOY,” LEROY CAMPBELL said, stepping toward Charles, “I believe you lying. That gun what you got came from Groveland.”

  Not long after Campbell had escorted Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett out of the courthouse, the stocky, forty-year-old part-time truck driver and deputy returned to the fourth floor; it made Charles Greenlee nervous that the deputy was eyeing him again. The mob may have left the precincts of the courthouse, but the boy did not feel that the danger had passed. Not with this deputy, who’d barked “nigger” at him that morning in Groveland, standing outside the bullpen, glaring in at him. He’d come and go, Charles noticed, and he’d murmured words that Charles could barely make out: something about the gun; Charles thought he’d heard Ernest Thomas’s name. Sitting on the floor, his bare back against the wall, Charles tried to snatch some sleep as the hours blurred, and every set of bootsteps he’d hear on the cement floors of the Tavares jail caused his heart to race. But the stocky deputy, Leroy Campbell, had come to pay him another visit, still focused on the gun.