Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Envy of Shepherd’s prosperity and growing bargaining power intensified when Samuel, home from the army in 1949, did not return to the citrus groves but worked with his father instead. The sight of that “smart nigger” Samuel, still in his military uniform, driving around town in his brother’s Mercury, rankled whites. It was about time “that somebody put both Henry and Sammy in their places.”

  Terence McCarthy, a British economist and writer studying peonage in the South, arrived in Groveland in the aftermath of the rioting. On a tour of Stuckey Still and Bay Lake, his driver, a Klansman, pointed out the ashy remains of Henry Shepherd’s home. McCarthy noted “three twisted bed frames warped by the fire’s heat, a smashed camp cot, an upturned stove”; he could hardly believe anyone had ever lived there. Marauding neighbors had stolen Shepherd’s chickens and Charlie Mae’s preserves. When McCarthy asked why, his driver replied, “They should never let those niggers live here. We should keep ’em together where we can keep our eyes on ’em and not let ’em buy white man’s land.” McCarthy learned that whites in Groveland (who accounted for about 60 percent of the town’s population of one thousand) were tolerant of blacks, as long as they continued to work in white-owned citrus groves. “The Negroes do most of the work around here,” the Klansman told McCarthy. “It’s these nigger farmers—they’ve got to go.” Black farmers like Henry Shepherd and his family threatened, “by their example, the whole system of servitude and forced labor which is the base of the local economy,” McCarthy wrote. He noted that the whites he spoke with were less interested in seeking revenge for the rape of Norma Padgett than in seeing the demise of “all independent colored farmers.”

  A FEW OF HENRY Shepherd’s children, reluctant to leave the farmhouse undefended, had decided to stay in Bay Lake. Worried by the radio report of the riot, Shepherd went back to Groveland the next day to look for them. He arrived at his property and discovered that more than a thousand dollars in tools and equipment had been looted, as well as a hand drill press, a gristmill, and thousands of auto parts. He found his family; they were still hiding in the woods.

  And his son Sammy was locked up in jail, staring at a death sentence. No one in his family was safe. “I keep getting orders to stay away from Groveland,” Shepherd said. “They say the mob is after everyone in my family and that they was going to kill us.” Henry Shepherd knew he had to leave his farm, and he knew he could never return. As proud as he was of his house and the farm that for six years had supported him and his family, he knew he had no choice but to walk away. “My family is all scattered,” he said.

  Terence McCarthy, after seeing the burned ruins of Henry Shepherd’s house, wondered what would become of the other blacks who dared to desert the groves and independently farm land they had purchased. His Klansman driver didn’t have to wonder. “They’ll get out, be driven out or be killed, especially around Bay Lake.”

  THE MOB HAD disbanded, but Groveland was restless, impatient for justice. One Lake County resident bluntly told a newspaper, “We’ll wait and see what the law does, and if the law doesn’t do right, we’ll do it.” Both Sheriff McCall and State Attorney Jesse Hunter hoped to forestall mob violence by ensuring that the wheels of justice moved swiftly in the Groveland rape case. Hunter began drafting indictments. On Tuesday, July 19, however—before any charges were made, before any details of the alleged crime had been announced to the public, and while the National Guard was still patrolling the area to prevent any further mob and Klan violence—the Orlando Morning Sentinel published prominently on its front page an editorial cartoon titled “No Compromise!” It featured a drawing of “The Lake County Tragedy” depicting four empty electric chairs, side by side, with a sign over them reading “The Supreme Penalty.”

  As Sheriff McCall had let it be known that the New York office of the NAACP had contacted him about the violence around Groveland, the Morning Sentinel addressed the possibility of an NAACP defense in an editorial:

  If smart lawyers or agents of different organizations seek to hamper justice through the employment of legal technicalities, they may bring suffering to many innocent Negroes.

  The paper also reported that Norma Padgett had been “bludgeoned” by her assailants; that all three prisoners had confessed to rape; and that Norma had identified Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee. While none of it was true, the Morning Sentinel editorial effectively captured the sentiment among most Lake County whites, especially in its implicit warning, or threat, that unless the accused men were, as McCarthy wrote, “offered up as a ‘legal’ blood-sacrifice . . . evil will befall the rest of the Negro community.”

  Mabel Norris Reese did her part as well to assure Lake County residents that lynching was unnecessary because McCall and Hunter would efficiently see to it that the rapists be executed soon by the state of Florida. In her editorial “Honor Will Be Avenged” in the Mount Dora Topic, Reese wrote, “It was a sorry thing that happened to the young couple. The trampling of their honor must be avenged [and that] revenge will be accomplished by a more frightening and awful means than a mob has at its command.”

  Sheriff Willis McCall, fearful of more violence, was not eager to release the National Guard, but by Tuesday morning he was butting heads with the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Baya, over a host of issues. For one, Baya knew false rumors were being circulated—that the blacks who had fled Groveland were now arming themselves and preparing to return—in order to allow groups of deputized whites to stop vehicles and confiscate weapons from blacks. For another, the commander knew that McCall, who had issued orders in writing that “any persons bearing arms shall be disarmed and turned over to the sheriff,” was himself ignoring this edict if the persons were white. For a third, the sheriff not only had refused to furnish Baya with the names of the mob’s ringleaders but also had declined to apprehend them himself, being “too busy trying to catch the Negro who had gotten away.”

  Because McCall was unwilling to arrest or implicate white rioters, on the grounds that such action “would result in a terrific race riot,” Baya wanted to withdraw his two hundred plus troops. He contacted Governor Warren, recommending that political pressure be put on McCall to pick up the ringleaders and take “positive action against them.”

  Willis McCall had been up all night and most of the morning. The hot Florida sun was beating down when he parked his car in front of the Groveland Hotel. He trudged to his room, where he hoped to catch a few hours of sleep before sundown, in the event that the Bay Lake men, and maybe the Klan, should night-ride again. He’d talked with Coy Tyson, and told him that the rioting had to stop—that Tyson had to make it stop. They’d made their point, McCall told him—houses had been burned to the ground, property destroyed—but if they rode out looking for trouble again, McCall couldn’t guarantee he’d be able to keep them out of jail. He told Tyson he had three Negroes locked up at Raiford, and he and Jesse Hunter were going to see to it that all three boys were found guilty and sent to the electric chair for raping his daughter. He’d get the fourth one, too, McCall promised.

  Coy Tyson talked it over with some of the ringleaders. He reported to the sheriff that they “had agreed to stop any further violence.” With that news, McCall phoned Governor Fuller Warren. He convinced the governor that he had the situation in Groveland under control. But, he added, he’d like to keep the Guard around through the weekend, just to be safe.

  CHAPTER 8: A CHRISTMAS CARD

  Sheriff McCall and Deputy Yates (behind him) confer with the National Guard in Groveland. (Photo by Wallace Kirkland/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  YOU CAN EITHER jump into the river, or take what is in this gun.”

  Standing at the rock’s edge, the white man held the pistol steady and waited for the boy to make his choice. James Howard, helpless, watched his sobbing fifteen-year-old son—hands and feet bound by rope—shuffle back off the edge of the embankment, watched him plunge into the cold, deep water of the Suwannee River, where he disappeared.

 
The lynching of Willie James Howard in January 1944 occurred more than a decade before the fourteen-year-old black youth Emmett Till was beaten and shot, and his body then dumped in a river in Tallahatchie County in Mississippi for reportedly whistling flirtatiously at a young white woman. Tens of thousands of mourners viewed Till’s disfigured body in an open-casket funeral in Chicago, and the ensuing investigation and trial of two white men accused of the murder generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage and outrage that crossed racial lines. Both suspects were acquitted, and young Emmett Till became a civil rights martyr.

  By contrast, the killing of Willie James Howard barely attracted any attention inside or outside Florida, and presented Thurgood Marshall with one of his earliest introductions to violence and whitewashed investigations in Florida. In December 1943 Willie had a job sweeping floors at Van Priest’s Dime Store in the sleepy city of Live Oak. He was a precocious boy with a round face and a sweet singing voice, and his good-natured disposition had prompted his family to nickname him “Giddy Boy.” It also prompted Willie to present his coworkers at the dime store with Christmas cards.

  Among the recipients of Willie’s cards was a fifteen-year-old cashier at Van Priest’s named Cynthia Goff, a student at the town’s all-white high school. Offended by the black boy’s gesture, she reported it to her father, Phil Goff, a former member of the Florida House of Representatives and the postmaster in Live Oak. Willie, meanwhile, aware that he had displeased Cynthia, wrote her a note in which he attempted to explain himself. He gave Cynthia the note on New Year’s Day 1944. It read:

  Dear Fried:

  Just a few line to let you hear from me I am well an hope you are the same. this is what I said on that christmas card. From W.J.H. with L. I hope you will understand what I mean. that is what I said now please don’t get angry with me because you can never tell what may get in some body I did not put it in there my self. God did I can’t help what he does can I. I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you all we want to be your all friends but you want let us please don’t let anybody see this I hope I haven’t made you made if I did tell me about it an I will for get about it. I wish this was an northern state I guess you call me fresh. Write an tell me what you think of me good or bad.

  Sincerely yours, with,

  From. Y.K.W [you know who]

  For Cynthia Goff

  I love your name. I love your voice,

  For a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice.

  Willie Howard’s choice of Cynthia as his sweetheart incensed the Goff household. According to Lula Howard, the boy’s mother, on the morning of January 2, Phil Goff and two other white men arrived at the Howards’ house and asked for her son Willie. When the two men tried to drag Willie off the porch, Lula Howard struggled to hold on to her boy—until Goff pulled a gun on her. She released Willie, who was then shoved into their car.

  The three men drove to the Bond-Howell Lumber Company. There they picked up the boy’s father, James Howard, a company employee, and then drove the father and son down a red clay road in the woods. They stopped at an embankment on the Suwannee River. Inside the car, once the boy admitted that he’d written the letter to the girl, Goff and the two white men bound the fifteen-year-old’s hands and feet with rope. When James Howard tried to speak to his son, he was ordered, at gunpoint, to keep his mouth shut.

  The next order forced James Howard to remove his son from the car and stand him up several feet from the riverbank. With the boy in place, bound and now crying, Goff asked him if he understood “the penalty of his crime.”

  Willie sobbed. “Yes, sir.”

  By now, James Howard knew his boy would find no mercy in these woods, and finally permitted to speak, he said to his son, “Willie, I cannot do anything for you now. I’m glad I have belonged to the Church and prayed for you.”

  Goff allowed the boy a last request, and Willie asked his father to take his wallet from his pocket. The postmaster lifted his gun and forced the boy to choose between a bullet and the Suwannee. Bawling and terrified of the gun, Willie staggered backward and toppled over the rock’s edge, into the river, where the deep, dark water swallowed him.

  The three white men returned James Howard to the lumber company. In the Bond-Howell office Lula had been waiting, hysterical, for about an hour. Looking “terribly afraid of something,” James Howard told his wife, “Willie is not coming home.” He would say nothing more.

  Later that evening, Phil Goff and his two friends, along with James Howard, appeared before the Suwannee County sheriff to give an affidavit. The three white men claimed that they had taken Willie James from his home in order to have his father punish him for the offensive note he’d written to teenager Cynthia Goff. The three men had bound the boy’s hands and feet only to prevent him from trying to run from the whipping he deserved, but the boy had become hysterical. He’d refused to be humiliated by anyone, including his own father. He had stated he’d “rather die,” and with that he had jumped into the river and committed suicide. The three men entered their signatures on the affidavit, which James Howard was also required to sign so as to indicate that he agreed with the version of events therein. A second document stated that James Howard had recovered the body of his son and that he did not desire a coroner’s inquest.

  Three days later the Howards sold their house and moved to Orlando.

  The lynching of Willie James Howard soon came to the attention of Harry Tyson Moore, who had grown up just outside Live Oak and had attended school with Lula Howard. With two daughters, Peaches and Evangeline, close in age to Willie James, Moore was infuriated by the murder of a fifteen-year-old boy. On learning that James Howard was willing both to testify he had been threatened into signing the affidavit and to provide the true version of the events surrounding his son’s death, Moore, who was president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, contacted the national office. To Moore’s surprise, not only had the New York office already caught wind of the lynching but also Thurgood Marshall was already working on the case.

  Armed by Moore with an eyewitness to the lynching, Marshall wrote a letter to Governor Spessard Holland requesting an investigation. The governor assured Marshall that protection would be provided for James Howard during his testimony, in light of which Holland roundly condemned the murder but at the same time warned Marshall not to get his hopes up, stating, “I am sure you realize the particular difficulties involved where there will be testimony of three white men and probably the girl against the testimony of one negro man.”

  Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America’s international reputation: “the type of material that radio Tokio [sic] is constantly on the alert for and will use effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war.” Claude Pepper refused to get involved.

  In Florida, Harry T. Moore continued to press for action, even though past experiences in lynching investigations had convinced him that it would be “a waste of time to seek help from state authorities.” On May 8, 1944, the state of Florida convened a grand jury in the death of Willie James Howard. Sheriff Tom Henry did not appear pleased that the boy’s father showed up to testify. Nonetheless, Howard’s testimony failed to return an indictment against Phil Goff and his two friends. Moore could have predicted it; the case would not even go to trial.

  Still, Moore refused to quit. Commenting upon the grand jury proceedings, he wrote to Marshall, “We are forced to wonder if the sheriff himself is not involved in this crime. It is very probable that he at least has tried to help cover up the facts in this case.” Nor was Marshall ready to give up on Will
ie Howard. He dispatched new affidavits to Attorney General of the United States Francis Biddle and requested a federal investigation. A few weeks later, Tom C. Clark, the assistant attorney general, replied that the Justice Department had begun a preliminary investigation into the boy’s death. Weeks turned into months, months into a year, and the Justice Department had not yet any progress to report. Moore could not hide his disappointment; in a letter to Clark he opined, “The life of a Negro in Suwannee County is a very cheap article.”

  The death of Willie James Howard was effectively shelved in 1945. Beyond the Justice Department, Moore and Marshall had nowhere to go. The process of the case, frustrating in the extreme from its deplorable beginning to its unjust end, was a repulsive reminder to Moore and Marshall of the ruthless measures men took to protect the flower that was “Southern white womanhood.” It was a lesson no doubt made more bitter that same year in the case of a Suwannee County constable who had forced a black man, again at gunpoint, to jump off a bridge to his death by drowning in the Suwannee River. Not surprisingly, a local grand jury refused to indict. In federal court, however, the constable was tried—and convicted, but not of murder. The sentence—for civil rights violations—did not satisfy Harry T. Moore: “Thus a man gets off with only a year in jail and a fine of $1,000 for committing first degree murder. So long as these conditions exist in America, our democracy is little more than ‘sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”