Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  I’M WILLIS MCCALL and you’re a damn liar!”

  In 1948, thirty-four-year-old reporter Mabel Norris Reese hadn’t been in Lake County for very long when “this great big hulk of a man in a ten-gallon hat burst through the door.” She was still trying to understand the Jim Crow world that she found herself in after her husband, an Ohio newspaperman, purchased the Lake County weekly newspaper, the Mount Dora Topic, the year before. It wasn’t long, either, before Reese, as the Topic’s editor, had her first run-in with Sheriff McCall. She’d written a story about McCall’s “political shenanigans” in his first term as sheriff, when he’d claimed to raid the warehouse of Lake County’s King of the Slots. As it turned out, the King had not been one of McCall’s backers, but rather a political opponent, who in fact had gotten out of the slots business by then. Nor had McCall smashed to pieces any pinball and slot machines, according to the King, whose garage was housing only machine parts he hadn’t disposed of yet. McCall, the King told Reese, had put on a show and tried—unsuccessfully—to pin a slot machine rap on him.

  Patiently producing her notes for the irate and intimidating sheriff, Reese showed him direct quotes by his accuser and explained that she was only reporting the words of others. McCall was not satisfied. He left the office in a huff, and at every store and office up and down the quaint, tree-lined business streets of Mount Dora, he stopped to recommend strongly that they not advertise in the Topic.

  For several days following Axilrod’s release and banishment, McCall was apoplectic. The CIO, effectively barred from Lake County by the sheriff, hired pilots to buzz the citrus groves in small planes. From out of the sky, leaflets fluttered to earth. They accused McCall of running union organizers out of the county at gunpoint and resorting to “Hitler’s gestapo technique” by using the sheriff’s office to intimidate workers in order to drive them back to their “cut-rate jobs,” all in violation of the law.

  Mabel was at home when she received a tip that a black picker who had been spotted talking with a labor union representative had gotten into some trouble. On arriving at the black laborer’s house, she found him bandaged from head to foot. The beating, he told Mabel, had been executed by two of McCall’s deputies, one of them his right-hand man, James Yates. “Now let that be a lesson to you,” the picker had been warned. “Don’t talk to any of these organizers again.”

  That “lesson” was exactly the hard-line stance that whites in Lake County had come to expect from their sheriff, and the threat of a union-organized labor strike in the groves and packinghouses of Florida’s interior citrus belt during the height of the harvest season spelled bad news for any opponents hoping to unseat Sheriff Willis McCall. McCall had shown that he was, according to the CIO, willing to throw up a “big ‘red scare’ trying to hide the illegality and one-man campaign of intimidation,” and he was not afraid to play hardball with blacks, either. More worrisome to McCall were the sustained efforts on the part of the NAACP to unsettle his, and central Florida’s, political way of life. The Democratic Party had controlled Southern politics since Reconstruction, and most general elections were determined by the outcomes of Democratic primaries. For McCall, as for many sheriffs and politicians in the South, once they’d made it through the all-white primaries, Republicans usually did not have the numbers to challenge.

  In the landmark case Smith v. Allwright, Thurgood Marshall had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944 that it was unconstitutional for the state of Texas to ban blacks from voting in the Democratic Party’s primary. The Supreme Court agreed and overturned the party’s practice of all-white primaries, a ruling, Marshall noted, that was “a giant milestone in the progress of Negro Americans toward full citizenship.” He later assessed the Smith v. Allwright victory to be “the greatest one” of his career.

  When the Court’s decision was announced in June 1944, a raucous party broke out at Manhattan’s NAACP office. Phones were ringing off the hook, and the secretaries made a game of transferring the various, ceaseless press and congratulatory calls around the office in circles. Marshall cracked a bottle of bourbon with his staff—and managed to miss a call from Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy, who later told Marshall that “a guy had the right to get drunk at a time like that.”

  Attorney General Tom Clark made the victory even sweeter when he “told the other states they’d better fall in line or he’d whack them one.” It was indeed a watershed moment that, Marshall knew, would usher blacks closer toward full citizenship and enable them to vote in primaries everywhere once and for all. He knew, too, that the South would not acquiesce to the Court’s decision without a fight, as by reflex states erected legislative hurdles to slow the tides of change. Still, with blacks in Texas no longer prohibited by law from voting, a revolution in Southern politics had truly begun, as had the dismantling of white supremacy at the ballot box.

  Meanwhile, not far from Lake County, a quiet but relentless NAACP man was about to make Sheriff Willis McCall’s life difficult. A schoolteacher from Mims, Florida, Harry Tyson Moore had been closely following the Smith v. Allwright case because he himself had had the opportunity to work with Thurgood Marshall on an equal pay case in Brevard County a few years earlier. Not long after the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling, Moore and some of his NAACP associates organized the Progressive Voters League, which mounted an aggressive campaign to register blacks onto the voting rolls in Florida. By 1948, he had brought nearly seventy thousand new black Democratic voters into the system, and with Florida’s black population growing significantly every year, Moore’s voter registration drive represented the single greatest threat to the citrus belt, to the Southern way of life, and to Willis V. McCall.

  It was no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan held five rallies in Lake County in the weeks leading up to Election Day to show their support for McCall as well as presidential candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was running as a member of the splinter group of segregationist Southern Democrats who became known in 1948 as the Dixiecrats. Clearly, any CIO-backed candidate for sheriff was going to have a tough time getting black voters to the polls. To make it tougher, on the eve of the election 250 hooded Klansman formed a motorcade that snaked its way through Lake County, “warning blacks not to vote if they valued their lives.” Trailing behind the motorcade in a big Oldsmobile, his trademark white Stetson visible to all, was the incumbent sheriff himself, “making no attempt to interfere” when the Klansmen stopped to burn a cross in front of a black juke joint in Leesburg. The evening ended in a field just north of Lake Okahumpka, with Klan speeches and a barbecue. It may as well have been a celebration of what would prove by a landslide to have been the inevitable—the reelection of Willis V. McCall. Thus began his most eventful term as sheriff of Lake County.

  CHAPTER 7: WIPE THIS PLACE CLEAN

  State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and Deputy James Yates visit the remains of Henry Shepherd’s home. (Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  GROVELAND WAS A ghost town.

  Mabel Norris Reese slammed down the phone and sped south to see for herself.

  “Everything was silent,” she observed. The reporter for the Mount Dora Topic had never seen anything like it. Blacks had simply vanished. She wasn’t there long when she heard the roar of the engines in the distance and experienced a “scary feeling” when a long line of cars rolled into town, and it was only as the noise grew louder that she began to get a glimpse of anyone. “People would rush inside and shut their doors, pull their blinds,” she said. Blacks ran for the woods “or streaked for miles into the groves.” Mabel tried to count the cars; there were more than two hundred vehicles, she observed, many with license plates from Polk and Orange counties. Her instincts told her to get home to Mount Dora to be with her husband and young daughter, but as a reporter, Mabel sensed trouble. She couldn’t leave.

  INSTEAD OF DRIVING back home to Eustis after the Saturday night ruction of the Bay Lake men, Willis McCall commandeer
ed a room at the Groveland Hotel in the event that they were planning another ride. The night, though, was mostly quiet, and the sheriff even managed to get a few hours of sleep in the old hotel on Cherry and Main streets. On Sunday morning he went with his deputies to survey Mascotte and Stuckey Still for damage, but apparently only Ethel Thomas’s bar, the Blue Flame, had been shot up. At mid-morning Groveland had the eerily quiet atmosphere of a town deserted, as if warnings of a landfall by a powerful hurricane from the Atlantic had driven the residents away. It was clear to McCall that a black exodus wouldn’t have occurred without good reason, and his instincts told him to hold on to his room key at the hotel—that more trouble might be yet to come. A few miles to the south, in the Bay Lake homes with telephone service, white farmers and their wives were spreading word to friends and relations that four Lake County Negroes had raped Coy Tyson’s seventeen-year-old daughter.

  McCall kept himself busy. Annoyed that Ernest Thomas had managed to skip town before he’d had a chance to talk to him, McCall telephoned the Gainesville Police Department and the sheriff of Alachua County to put them on the lookout for the young black man wanted for kidnapping and rape. He interviewed Norma and Willie Padgett to ascertain their version of events since Friday evening, and he concluded a meeting with State Attorney Jesse Hunter by assuring the prosecutor that he’d find more than sufficient evidence, beyond the accusations of the young Bay Lake couple, to show that a kidnapping and rape had occurred in Lake County. He’d already gotten confessions from the prisoners, and Deputy James Yates was collecting physical evidence including tire tracks and shoe prints from the crime scene; a physician in Leesburg had examined Norma. He’d bring the attorney a case rock-solid, McCall told Hunter, and he’d get Ernest Thomas.

  By mid-afternoon Groveland was getting unquiet. “Knots of men stood about on the main street, hard-eyed and watchful,” and McCall noticed that the automobiles—some parked, others cruising the streets—had come from neighboring counties, as well as from Georgia. It was common Klan practice to use outside Klaverns on “rides” or “jobs” in cars with the license plates intentionally obscured so that local riders could not be easily identified. At dusk, a twenty-car procession rolled into Groveland; flyers advertised the cause. Headlined “Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan,” they extolled the virtues of white supremacy under the logo of Dr. Samuel Green’s Association of Georgia Klans. An Atlanta obstetrician and Grand Dragon, Green boasted that the Klan was once again growing by “leaps and bounds” in its purpose to establish “a beachhead in Florida.” Outraged by President Truman’s espousal of civil rights legislation, Green had promised that any Yankee attempt to force equality between the races would oblige Americans to “see blood flow in these streets. The Klan will not permit the people of this country to become a mongrel race.”

  Willis McCall sensed events could easily escape his control. Hailed as a hero in the morning’s papers for preventing a lynching on the steps of the Tavares jail, the sheriff knew that he and his handful of deputies would be powerless should the four hundred to five hundred men now milling about in the business section of Groveland decide to make a second move on Stuckey Still. He knew, too, that in countless instances in the South angry mobs had pressured, sometimes at gunpoint, local sheriffs who were holding black men accused of raping white women to walk away from their jails. What usually followed were lynchings “at the hands of persons unknown.” (The NAACP defined “lynching” as an illegal killing by three or more persons claiming to be serving justice or tradition.) The case in Groveland was uncomfortably similar to events seventeen years earlier in Scottsboro, Alabama, when two white women accused nine black youths of rape and Sheriff M. L. Wann headed off a lynch mob outside the Scottsboro jail, declaring, “If you come in here I will blow your brains out,” before he called in the National Guard. In his stand against the KKK, Sheriff Wann may have been a hero to the North, but under mysterious circumstances he was also shot dead one year later by a white man who was never apprehended. Willis McCall realized fully how fine was the line he’d have to walk between the requirements of the law and the unspoken expectations of the Klan. For neither politicians nor the powerful citrus barons held sway over white mobs bent on vengeance in the matter of Negroes, the flower of Southern womanhood, and rape.

  A group of Lake County’s leading citizens met with McCall to voice their concern over developments in Groveland. Among them was Norton Wilkins, one of the owners of Groveland’s B&W Canning Company, the largest employer of any canning operation in the state. With more than five hundred plant workers, mostly women, who famously dressed in nurses’ uniforms, and countless more pickers in the groves, B&W was, in 1949, shipping a million cases of canned fruit and 250,000 boxes of fresh oranges and grapefruit annually. Wilkins was concerned that Klan violence would lead to a mass exodus of blacks, which would have a disastrous negative impact on production, and profits, at his plant. Also present was L. Day Edge, a wealthy businessman and former state senator with extensive real estate holdings in the county. His family had once owned a turpentine still, which stood on all the land that was now called Stuckey Still; when the still shut down, Edge gave the “colored people their homes and property for being so faithful in his service.” In attendance as well were Groveland’s mayor, Elma Puryear (who had on Saturday transported Charles Greenlee from Groveland to Tavares), and a few other prominent Lake County residents. Fearing that the gathering restive mob intended more damage than a few potshots at a black juke joint, they discussed a course of action for “protecting lives and property of persons in the colored section of Groveland.” They ultimately agreed that McCall should place a phone call to Florida’s governor, Fuller Warren, to request assistance. Within minutes, Warren notified the National Guard, informing commanders that following the rape of the Bay Lake girl, the “situation was getting out of hand” in Groveland.

  By 11 p.m. troops had arrived from the National Guard in Leesburg and Eustis. At McCall’s behest, they were dispatched to strategic locations in black sections of town, mostly for, as McCall told them, “psychological effect.” The commanding officer on the scene observed five hundred armed men in cars stalking the streets of Groveland, and Lieutenant James Herlong saw immediately that his twenty men were far outnumbered and stretched too thin over the potential areas of disturbance. He phoned the governor to request additional troops. By midnight, some seventy more guardsmen were spreading over the vacant lots and open fields around Stuckey Still.

  Around 1:30 a.m., McCall observed that the unwelcome cars in Groveland had begun to disperse—the local whites were returning to their homes in Bay Lake. The presence of the National Guard had gone a long way toward preventing any further mayhem, the sheriff was convinced, and once he was confident the threat had passed, McCall relieved both the Eustis and the Leesburg units from duty. At daylight, he and State Attorney Hunter met in the sheriff’s office with several reporters and a photographer from the Associated Press. Hunter and McCall had succeeded not only in maintaining law and order in Lake County, but also in averting a labor crisis in the citrus groves; they wore smiles of accomplishment. Outside the courthouse, however, some men from Bay Lake were again milling around in a restless manner, and the sheriff’s teeth gritted behind his smile. He still had work to do, as word had obviously made it out of Tavares that the third rapist was being held in the county jail. While the affable Jesse Hunter entertained the reporters, McCall slipped upstairs with his deputies Leroy Campbell and James Yates.

  The prisoners had just been served breakfast. Charles Greenlee, half dazed by the beating he’d endured at the hands of McCall’s deputies, was sitting in his cell. Crusted in dried blood, his shirtless body ached; his eye was swollen shut. He could barely crane his neck when he heard the familiar footsteps of Deputy Campbell. For the second time in twenty-four hours, the boy was told that he’d have to be moved to a more secure jail or else he’d be facing a lynching. He didn’t doubt it was true. The deputy took Charles upstairs, where
, according to the plan devised by McCall, Campbell and Yates had the boy change into a prisoner’s work outfit before they took him downstairs to McCall. The sheriff shoved a scythe into the boy’s hands and told him to walk, “as if he was a trusty going out in the yard to cut grass,” all the way out to an unmarked blue 1948 Ford in the parking lot. Limping stiffly along, grimacing in pain, the glass cuts in the soles of his feet burning more with each step he took, he finally reached the patrol car. Campbell grabbed the scythe from the boy’s hand and told him to lie down out of sight on the floor. Campbell and Yates hopped in the front, and the three of them began the long ride to the state prison at Raiford.

  Later that day, McCall received a telephone call from the manager of a Leesburg radio station who wanted to confirm a news story before he put it on the air. McCall listened intently; the manager had been informed that one of the prisoners in the Lake County rape case had been seized from two deputies and lynched. The sheriff was shaken: Had a mob gotten to Greenlee? Had somebody gotten wind of the transfer and tipped off the Klan? Or had Campbell and Yates themselves? Immediately the sheriff called Raiford and learned that less than two hours after the deputies had left Tavares, Charles Greenlee had been safely delivered to the Florida State Prison, where he’d joined Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin behind bars. McCall’s sigh of relief was abbreviated by the noise of the crowd loitering outside the courthouse walls.

  The reporters had come to see the “High Sheriff” who had prevented a lynching just two nights before, and McCall was determined to convey the cool confidence of a man who had his county under control. The local papers had already reported that he had confessions from three of the rapists; that morning’s edition of the Ocala Star-Banner had run the front-page headline “Three Negroes Confess to Rape Near Groveland.” As the news had spread about the sheriff’s call upon the National Guard to quell a potential riot, journalists had begun descending on Lake County, pressing McCall with questions about reports of Klan activity around Groveland. McCall answered that he didn’t know much about the cars that had rolled into town from Orange and Polk counties; nor was he around when any KKK literature was distributed, he said.