Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  McCall was more interested in conveying the message that he had three rock-solid confessions, and that he would have four if he hadn’t been so busy trying to hold back the mob on Saturday; but for that, he would have apprehended Ernest Thomas by now. “There’ll be no lynching of Negroes in Lake County as long as I am sheriff,” McCall proclaimed. Indictments, he told reporters, would be coming down soon, and he wanted it to be known that the prisoners would be treated well and they’d receive a fair trial. “We’re not going to run anything over on them,” he said. Although he conceded that there might be more “demonstrations” over the next night or two, he wasn’t expecting any violence. McCall was telling the reporters, especially the Northern ones, exactly what they wanted to hear, and he was basking in the adulation.

  Willis McCall was also a man who did not shy away from speaking his mind, even with reporters. In fact, he divulged to them that he had received a call from a woman at, of all places, the New York office of the NAACP. (Most likely, it was from LDF attorney Constance Baker Motley, who would, a few years later, help write briefs for Thurgood Marshall for Brown v. Board of Education.) She wanted to know what the sheriff’s department was doing to protect the black citizens of Groveland. “I told her we were looking after them all right,” McCall announced to reporters, “and I said we’d take care of half of those in Harlem if they wanted us to. Then I hung up.”

  AT SUNSET, ON Monday, July 18, a mob of more than one hundred men was spotted just a few miles north of Groveland. They’d set up a roadblock and were stopping cars, searching for blacks. Rumor reached McCall’s office that the “Ku Klux Klan was planning to wipe out the entire Negro community of Groveland.” The sheriff grabbed a handful of deputies and made a dash to Stuckey Still, where they waited with the National Guard, watching as cars loaded with whites circled the streets. Suddenly there was a volley of gunshots as riders began firing their guns indiscriminately into houses. Most of the black residents had already cleared out of the area, but some continued their nightly retreat into the swamps and woods, fearful of more violence. Joe Maxwell wasn’t one of them. He had stayed behind with his family, in the small house that he had built himself, determined to ride out the night. Maxwell had recently returned from military service; with a wife and three small children to provide for, he was planning on being in the groves the next morning, where it was entirely possible he’d be working for some of the same whites night-riding in that long line of cars menacing Stuckey Still. He could hear the roar of the motors, the ugly shouts of fired-up men.

  There were at least three cattle trucks packed full with men, all of them screaming and hollering, their guns poking out from the slotted sides. Behind them followed countless cars with long guns poking out the windows. Maxwell heard a frightening cry: “That’s old Joe Maxwell’s house over there!”

  Maxwell told his children to hide under the bed, and trying to keep them safe, he piled mattresses up around them. He “heard a window break and that’s when they shot in the house,” Maxwell later recalled. Shotgun fire pelleted a bag of crayons just inches above his six-year-old daughter’s bed. Glass shattered everywhere. The screams of Maxwell’s children inside counterpointed the horrific rebel yells from outside.

  McCall and his deputies sped toward the shooting. When someone warned, “You better not go down there, they’ll kill you,” he replied, “I don’t have any choice.”

  Shots were echoing nonstop in the dark, but the sheriff could make out the flickering figures of men running in the glare of headlights. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “Now they got me mad.”

  The sheriff jumped out of his car and fired a tear-gas canister into the crowd—to no effect; the mob just moved farther ahead. McCall reloaded the tear-gas gun and fired at a truck; this time the smoke cleared the crowd from the area. When the sheriff and his deputies made an attempt to follow the mob, the wind blew the tear gas back at them and they were temporarily incapacitated.

  By this time reporters had also made their way to the scene. The mob had parked along Route 50 to regroup and clear their eyes. Deputies Yates and Campbell and Lieutenant Herlong of the National Guard joined McCall, and together, with reporters in tow, they approached the mob. McCall recognized many in the crowd as the same Bay Lake men who had descended on the Lake County Court House two nights before, including Flowers Cockcroft, the man who had accompanied Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett up to the jail in their search for Shepherd and Irvin. Cockcroft, the proprietor of a general store and filling station in Mascotte, had sold out all of his ammunition earlier in the day; he was leading the mob.

  “You fellas don’t want to do this!” McCall shouted. “You’re breaking the law, and I want you to know I’ll arrest you. You got no business here. Go on home.”

  A voice pierced the darkness. “We wanna wipe this place clean of niggers!”

  The men were riled up, and McCall could sense that they were in no mood to abandon their plan as they had two nights ago at the jail and the night before when the National Guard had appeared. The men were shouting McCall down; his threats of arrest were making no impact on them. He tried one more time to appeal to reason, telling them that their families would suffer if they did anything rash. “Don’t go out there and do something you’re going to be sorry for.”

  But they didn’t retreat. Exasperated, McCall huddled with Herlong. The sheriff and the guardsman had to come up with a plan—fast. As McCall surveyed the crowd, among the unmasked faces he sighted many men he knew, some of them as law enforcement officers, like C. E. Sullins, the police chief in Clermont. Groveland’s Curtis Merritt was one of the leaders, as was Wesley Evans, the stout, illiterate citrus grove caretaker the sheriff himself had on occasion recruited: proficient with a leaded hose in his treatment of black pickers, Evans proved to be useful in helping the law obtain confessions from black suspects in the basement of the Lake County Court House. McCall also recognized Sumter County’s deputy sheriff, James Kimbrough—he’d be forced to resign when state patrolmen identified his car as the source of shots being fired at black residences—and Klansman William Jackson Bogar, who “was the chief of the Klokann Committee,” an investigative unit within the Klan. McCall had attended meetings with Bogar at the Apopka Klavern of the Association of Georgia Klans, where many central Florida law enforcement officials were initiated into the Ku Klux Klan. As one reporter noted, it was impossible “to tell where the mob left off and law enforcement began.”

  Mass arrests being out of the question, McCall and Herlong were considering a more prudent alternative when, behind them, one of the riders offered his solution to a guardsman. “Why don’t you take that peashooter and go home,” he said. “You look like a Boy Scout.” In reply, the guardsman popped several loud rounds from his M3 submachine gun into the ground and asked the rider if that sounded like a peashooter. The air was thick with smoke and tension.

  McCall and Herlong decided they’d best confer with the apparent leader of the riders, Flowers Cockcroft. After a few minutes of bargaining, the obdurate Cockcroft nodded, but his eyes hardened. Apparently he and McCall had struck a deal. Herlong ordered the guardsmen to withdraw.

  If the guardsmen were confused by Herlong’s order, reporters were more so, especially as the sheriff appeared to be unprepared to make any arrests. One writer from the Associated Press asked McCall for the names of the rioters. “I don’t know the names,” McCall replied. “I don’t know who they are.” Pressing McCall, the reporter asked why a mob firing weapons into homes of blacks in Stuckey Still warranted no arrests. McCall brushed him off.

  Word of the inquisitive reporter reached Cockcroft, who confronted the sheriff. “Where is that son of a bitch that wanted our names?” Cockcroft demanded. Knowing that “all hell would break loose” if he fingered the journalist, McCall merely shrugged. And Cockcroft fumed: “I’ll tell him my goddamn name and I’ll fix his ass, too.” As if on cue, the rioters began threatening all the newsmen, telling them to get out of town and warning them
not to print any lies about what was happening in Lake County.

  McCall urged Herlong to execute his order and withdraw his troops “down the road toward Leesburg and wait out of sight.” The sheriff, as agreed, pulled his deputies back; reporters tagged along for safety. Cockcroft stood glaring while the law and the Guard withdrew. Then he turned to his men. “Go and get more ammunition,” he barked, “and clear the streets of women and children.”

  The cattle trucks, again packed with armed men, started rolling away, with dozens of cars following behind. The National Guard and Lake County law did not pursue. In less than half an hour, driving along “miles of clay roads into the backwoods farmlands” of Bay Lake, the rioters were igniting bottles of gasoline and tossing them through the windows and onto the roofs of the Negroes’ deserted homes. By the time McCall and the journalists caught up with them, a church had been shot up and two houses were in flames. A third, the home of confessed rapist Samuel Shepherd, was smoldering—it had already burned to the ground. The Klan and the Bay Lake whites watched in indifference as the flames licked the pines and the heat exploded the crackling sap. A nine-year-old girl, “Little” Mary Hunter Valree, was separated from her family as she fled from the mob. Terrified by the angry shouts and explosions, she hid for hours, then fell asleep alone in the woods. (The missing Valree girl turned up the next afternoon when she returned to the site of her charred home to look for food.)

  At midnight, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Baya arrived in Bay Lake with more than two hundred National Guardsmen from Tampa. He immediately reported to McCall, who refused to identify any of the men involved in torching the Negroes’ homes, although “he knew all of the ringleaders who were responsible for the mob’s actions.” The sheriff allowed that many of the men were from Bay Lake and were related to either Norma Tyson or Willie Padgett, but he was unwilling to have any of them arrested or even brought in for a conference. McCall justified his refusal to identify or arrest Coy Tyson, Flowers Cockcroft, and fellow Klansmen like William Jackson Bogar as necessary steps in ensuring peace and preventing a full-blown race riot. Handled his way, McCall reasoned, the riders, by torching deserted houses in the Negro section of Bay Lake, were able to blow off steam without causing any bloodshed.

  Baya’s meeting with Flowers Cockcroft was no more satisfying. Cockcroft’s riders would take no further action against the blacks as long as the National Guard maintained its presence, but once it withdrew, they would resume until they accomplished their goal of “terrorizing the negroes” and driving out “five or six negroes whom they believed were undesirable.” Cockcroft added that he could not speak for any of the other “out of county” people who were pouring into Groveland by the carload, heavily armed. Nonetheless, the riot and its evident destruction of the Negroes’ homes, and especially the Shepherd property, seemed to have appeased Cockcroft’s mob for the time being, and by 1:30 a.m. Lake County had quieted down again.

  Cockcroft had advised his men that their work was done for the night, that they should return to their cars and disperse. Muttering darkly, he had given a glimpse of his true resolve to a lingering reporter.

  “The next time,” he said, “we’ll clean out every Negro section in south Lake County.”

  IN GROVELAND, L. D. Edge, Norton Wilkins, Mayor Puryear, and other prominent white citizens and business owners brooded over the terror unfolding in their community. Whatever racial views they held, they held them secondary to economic interests, and the shooting, razing, and torching of homes in black communities could have devastating economic consequences. Edge and Wilkins both owned businesses that relied heavily on black labor in a county where labor shortages were already a serious problem. Puryear, who owned a number of homes that he rented out in black neighborhoods, “had all of his life savings tied up” in the Negro economy.

  For these pillars of the white community, the situation in Groveland’s black enclaves was unfolding in a manner uncomfortably close to the events of the Rosewood Massacre in Levy County, Florida, twenty-six years earlier. With law enforcement in Rosewood complicit in the rioting, white owners of turpentine and lumber mills, whose businesses would be devastated by a black exodus, appealed to the governor for help. The sheriff, however, insisted that it was unnecessary to call in the National Guard, as he had the situation under control. Any control he may have had, though, he lost when hundreds of unmasked Klansmen joined local whites in driving out black residents by gun and torch. The vigilantes destroyed every Negro home in Rosewood.

  The trouble that began in Rosewood in January 1923 bore eerie similarity to what occurred on Friday night in July just outside Okahumpka after Willie Padgett left the dance hall with his seventeen-year-old estranged wife. In Rosewood, neighbors discovered twenty-two-year-old Fannie Taylor bruised and beaten in her own home one morning; she’d claimed that a black man had forcibly entered her home and assaulted her. Coupled to the rumors that the white girl had also been raped was the dubious report that an escaped prisoner was hiding in the same area. Both stories spread like wildfire throughout Levy County, and a mob of hundreds gathered. Torching homes, the mob sent blacks fleeing into the swamps. The violence escalated when blacks attempting to defend their homes fired back at the mob. Churches were burned. A white turpentine mill owner, W. H. Pillsbury, helped blacks escape the area—he even hid a black man in his home—at the same time that he pleaded with whites to cease the riot. Unfortunately, rioters learned that Pillsbury was harboring a Negro. They made the black man dig a grave; then they shot him dead. One woman was shot in the face while hiding under her house; Fannie Taylor’s brother-in-law took credit for her death. An undetermined number of blacks were killed in the rioting, but no escaped convict was ever found. Nor was it ever proved that a rape, or even an assault, had occurred. In a forced migration, the blacks who survived the massacre moved on, never to return, and the white businesses that depended on their labor or patronage suffered tremendous losses.

  Twenty-six years later and a little more than one hundred miles to the south, L. D. Edge and Norton Wilkins and their cohort of wealthy business owners wanted no repeat of Rosewood in Groveland.

  THEY TELL ME my chickens and ducks are all gone,” Henry Shepherd said.

  The father of Samuel Shepherd had holed up with his family at a daughter’s home in Orlando and was listening to the radio when he learned that his house had been burned to the ground during the violence in Groveland the night before.

  Not long ago Shepherd had been a proud, successful farmer. He had raised a large family and dramatically improved its economic lot by rising from tenant farmer to landowner, but events over the last few years had left him broken and despondent: a “ravaged ghost” of a man, who was often heard to mumble that he wanted “no more trouble.” Henry Shepherd was convinced that the previous night’s terror in Groveland was more about him than about his son Samuel’s alleged rape of Norma Padgett. His own neighbors, he later learned, were the very men who’d thrown lit kerosene-filled bottles through his windows.

  To Henry Shepherd, a lifetime picking fruit in groves owned by wealthy whites in Groveland did not seem like much of a future. Though forced labor and peonage conditions continued in Lake County, there had also been a movement toward “Negro self-emancipation” over the last several years. Some blacks had purchased swampland around Bay Lake as cheaply as eight dollars an acre, and in their spare time drained the swamps and cleared the land to create sustaining farms. Once the land was drained, the surrounding acreage was automatically relieved of water, and white farmers bought up the adjacent land at bargain prices. The unintended consequence of the wasteland drainings was a breakdown in segregation in Bay Lake. As a result, Henry Shepherd’s northernmost land bordered the Padgett farm. The two families were no strangers to each other.

  Determined to escape the backbreaking work in the groves, Shepherd lived thriftily and augmented whatever meager savings he could muster from tenant farming with Samuel’s army allotments. In 1943, for $255, he pu
rchased fifty-five acres of swampland in Bay Lake. Working tirelessly to drain the swamp, not to mention enduring countless snakebites on his legs, he was eventually able to cultivate rich Florida soil. Before long he had good crops, hundreds of chickens, and a few cows, while his wife, Charlie Mae, had “the best preserve cellar in the area.” He also built a relatively modest six-room house on the property.

  Not by intent, Shepherd also drew the resentment that festered among the poor white farmers in Bay Lake. Neighbors tore down Shepherd’s fences, thus allowing cows to graze on his farm—and to destroy his crops just before harvest. Shepherd confronted them, but to no avail, and when it happened again he called upon Sheriff McCall to help him with the dispute. McCall merely confirmed what Shepherd already knew: “No nigger has any right to file a claim against a white man.”

  For want of any legal recourse, Charlie Mae tried appealing to civility. She suggested to Oscar Johns, whose cows had again ravaged Shepherd’s crop, that they might come to some sort of agreement regarding compensation for loss. Johns responded by cussing and threatening to kill her.

  The harassment continued. Fences were torn down and rebuilt, crops replanted. And the Shepherds refused to leave Bay Lake.

  Despite the setbacks, Henry Shepherd continued to prosper, in part because the older of his six children worked on the family farm rather than in the citrus groves: another irritant to many whites. So was Shepherd’s refusal to allow his teenage daughter, Henrietta, to do service in the home of a white neighbor who, Shepherd knew, had attempted to rape a prior teenage maid. When James Shepherd, the oldest son, found work as a mechanic and started driving a late-model Mercury around town, the Shepherds had become, in the eyes of local whites, “too damned independent”: an “uppity nigger” family with two cars outside their house.