Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Moore’s tireless work did not go unnoticed by the national office of the NAACP in New York. “Your letters on lynching and mob violence in which you point out cases within your own state are excellent and help us focus the attention on the need for Federal legislation,” wrote Gloster B. Current, director of branches. Current, like Marshall, knew that the state of Florida, despite recording a higher number of lynchings and registering more members of the Ku Klux Klan than any other state in the South, inexplicably remained in the shadows of Dixieland in the 1940s. Florida was epithetically “south of the South,” and racial incidents that would have likely attracted national attention had they occurred in Mississippi or Alabama somehow managed to escape scrutiny because they’d taken place in the forgotten land of sun and surf. The postwar years would find Moore involving himself in more and more criminal cases, including the (often confessed) rapes of black teenage schoolgirls and maids by whites who’d be sprung from jails not by angry lynch mobs but by family members posting bail. Without Moore’s voice, his agitating letters, and his telegrams of protest, the all-too-frequent atrocities committed in his backyard would have been that much easier to conceal or ignore.

  He would raise that voice, too, when another Florida sheriff demonstrated his contempt for the civil rights of blacks and justice for all, in Groveland in 1949.

  SEVENTY-FIVE MILES TO the east, in the small town of Mims, just off the Atlantic Ocean, Moore had been following the events in Lake County with much distress but little surprise. As the NAACP’s executive secretary in Florida, he’d been traveling the state for more than a decade: holding meetings, raising money, investigating lynchings and incidents of police brutality, and then pressuring politicians into action. Without pay, he’d worked for the black people’s cause on weekends and in whatever spare time he could manage outside his teaching job in the Brevard County school system. Both he and his wife, Harriette, also a teacher, were forced out of the jobs they’d held for twenty years because Harry was deemed, in the summer of 1946, a “troublemaker and Negro organizer.”

  Insightful yet quiet, unassuming, and mild-mannered, Moore composed his public speeches with passion and focus, but his delivery, soft-spoken and understated, reflected the manner of the man and contrasted sharply—and for evangelistic Southerners, unfavorably—with the customary fire-and-brimstone, church-pulpit rhetoric. Moore, however, was not about to allow an uninspiring delivery to impede the urgent messages he wanted to spread. Recruiting his teenage daughter to speak on his behalf, every night after dinner he would rehearse her delivery of his words, which she had memorized, so that she could dramatically place a pause or drive home a point to stirring effect. Evangeline was nearly paralyzed with fear the first time she spoke at a Baptist church in Lake County, but she finished the speech as perfectly as she had practiced it. Moore began traveling the state with his family in their blue Ford sedan, with Evangeline dividing her time between homework and the demanding work of the NAACP.

  The Moores lived in a three-bedroom, one-story wooden frame home that Harry had built in 1926. Approximately forty-five feet long and twenty-two feet wide, it was propped up on wooden blocks nearly two feet off the ground. The house had a large front porch that stood behind four wooden columns at the end of a white sand driveway off Old Dixie Highway. Orange, grapefruit, and palm trees brightened up the landscape close to the house. Whereas most of the black laborers in Mims lived in wooden shacks on small parcels of scrub, the Moores’ house sat on nearly eleven acres of land and was set deep in an orange grove. Whites referred to it as the place where “that rich Professor Moore” lives. Though far from rich, a family with two educated, working parents in a home packed with books was no doubt more exceptional among the blacks in Mims.

  Harry’s political activism continued to render him unemployable, but after nearly two years of job searching, in May 1948 Harriette was offered a teaching position in Palm Beach County, about two hours south of Mims. The Moores decided to rent a bedroom in a private home in Riviera Beach during the school year so that they could keep the house in Mims. Still, they had some financial belt-tightening to do, especially with two girls enrolled at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. While Harry had always planned to live off his grove when he retired, he had not been planning to retire in his mid-forties. Nor was he planning, whatever his circumstances, to retire from the cause he had dedicated his life to: the civil rights of the Negro in Florida.

  Born in Florida in 1905, Harry T. Moore was just three years older than Thurgood Marshall, and both men had started working for the NAACP, though at a distance of a thousand miles from each other, before their thirtieth birthdays. Moore founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP in 1934, the same year that Marshall began assisting Charles Hamilton Houston in civil rights suits. What introduced Moore to Marshall three years later had its roots in the Margold Report, a study commissioned by the NAACP that would ultimately lay out a legal strategy for racial reform.

  In 1930, the NAACP hired the Harvard-educated lawyer Nathan Ross Margold to study areas in which legalized segregation might be most vulnerable to attack in the courts, and finding discrimination in the financing of public schools to be especially assailable, Margold advised the NAACP to “boldly challenge the constitutional validity” of black schools that were systematically underfunded in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause; for in every case, when states exercised their discretion to spend public funds designated for elementary and high schools, appointments to white schools significantly exceeded those to black schools. After studying the report, Houston devised a long-term plan whereby the NAACP would establish over a number of years a series of precedents in courts across the South regarding inequalities in public school budgets and facilities—to demonstrate that “the law functioned to sustain white supremacy.”

  Harry Moore had been following events at the national office of the NAACP closely, and in 1937 he wrote a letter informing Walter White that the association’s Brevard County branch had hired a lawyer to file suit for equal pay for teachers in that county. When the letter landed on Marshall’s desk, the young lawyer could barely contain his excitement. It was exactly the type of case he and Houston were looking to pursue, and it appeared that Moore not only was fully committed to the lawsuit but also had already done much of the legwork. The letter occasioned the first of many meetings between Marshall and Moore over the next decade, some of them at Moore’s house in Mims. There Moore played host to Marshall (in part because the local hotels were closed to blacks) as they prepared the case against the Brevard County school board.Marshall said of Moore, in a letter to Walter White: “He seems to be a fine sort of fellow,” if “under tremendous pressure because of his actions in the teachers’ salary case.” Moore in many ways perfectly complemented the ebullient, self-assertive, larger-than-life New York lawyer Thurgood Marshall in that the erstwhile teacher was exactly the selfless, committed, and detail-oriented sort of person on whom the attorney depended. The two men thrived on their mutual respect. In time the school case in Brevard County would inspire similar lawsuits in counties across Florida, and Harry T. Moore would be the first to credit their success to Thurgood Marshall’s energy and dedication. “Thurgood was the savior,” said Dr. Gilbert Porter, Moore’s friend and colleague. “We never started winning any cases until he came. But after he won a few, all you had to say to a white superintendent, ‘Well, I’m gonna talk to Mr. Marshall,’ and they’d cooperate.”

  Marshall’s visits to Florida had an undeniable impact on Moore. With even more ardor he discharged the monotonous tasks at his local branch—collecting signatures, raising a few dollars here and there from the poorest blacks in the state—because he saw it did make a difference. He spent hours at night bludgeoning countless typewriter ribbons, writing letters to politicians and membership reports to the New York office, whose field administrators saw in Moore a valuable point man in a state with unlimited potential for growth. In the postw
ar decade Florida would also prove to be a state with a boundless capacity for racial inhumanity, even by measure of the rest of the South, and Marshall and Moore would find themselves challenging law enforcement officers and elected officials determined, without conscience, to whitewash some of the most horrific lynching cases of the twentieth century.

  From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana. But neither Marshall nor Moore needed statistics to know that by World War II, Florida still ranked high among the most violent states in the South. Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida history professor who studied racial violence in the South, concluded that “a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country.” Alarmingly, despite the shocking and heinous nature of the lynchings in Florida, the crimes and the cover-ups generated little attention, let alone outrage—beyond the black newspapers. The state of Florida—that tropical vacation territory lying south of Georgia and, it would seem, of the Jim Crow South—appeared to be immune to media scrutiny.

  HARRY T. MOORE saw no hero in the newspaper accounts of Willis McCall’s stand against mob violence in Groveland following the supposed rape of Norma Padgett by four black men. To Moore, the devastation of the black homes and property occurred not in spite of the sheriff’s brave watch but because of his blind eye: it simply wasn’t plausible that McCall neither knew nor could discover the parties responsible for the rioting in Lake County. On Wednesday, July 20, 1949, Moore sent a telegram to Governor Fuller Warren urging “prosecution of mob leaders responsible for terrorism and vandalism against innocent Negro citizens of Lake County.”

  Warren at least seemed to be more sympathetic to the Negro cause than his predecessor, the segregationist Millard Caldwell, who viewed the murder of blacks as a political nuisance, and once had his executive secretary request a local judge to launch an investigation because “[l]ynching of negroes is really beginning to give the Governor a terrific headache. . . . ”

  Fuller Warren had won the 1948 election by running as a moderate and promising to ease racial tension and violence in Florida. He’d denounced the Klansmen who paraded through Lake County on election night (with Sheriff Willis McCall following behind) as “hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks,” and Moore cautiously held out some hope for the new governor. Warren had admitted to being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but renouncing his past, like many a politician before and since, he’d stated that he had joined years before “as a favor to a friend” and that he “never wore a hood.” Moore did not adopt a wait-and-see approach with the new governor. On July 22, 1949, two days after his original telegram to Warren in regard to Willis McCall, Moore wired a second message to the governor, in which he used the sheriff’s own words to make his point. “Since mob leaders are known,” Moore wrote, “we again urge that they be arrested and vigorously prosecuted for the damage done to innocent Negro citizens. . . .”

  Moore’s telegram was intercepted by a staff person at Warren’s office. “Have written him enough,” the aide scratched across the top and filed the telegram away.

  WITH HUNDREDS OF National Guardsmen camped around Stuckey Still, Mascotte, and Bay Lake, and with only one arrest (for public intoxication), Tuesday night had passed without incident. Convinced that speedy indictments of the three Negroes in custody would significantly curb the violence around Groveland, McCall and State Attorney Jesse Hunter had met with Judge Truman G. Futch on Wednesday, July 20, to expedite the formal charges against Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, and Charles Greenlee for the rape of Norma Padgett. By late afternoon the grand jury, which included the first black ever to so serve in Lake County, had been seated in the courtroom to consider the evidence. Norma Padgett told the court she’d been raped by four men. Willis McCall testified that he had confessions from three of them. By midnight, Hunter had his indictments.

  The only reporter present, Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic, who’d been invited by the state attorney, was impressed with the strength of the case against the accused. She had only praise for “sage and trial-trained Jesse Hunter” and Sheriff Willis McCall, who, she wrote, had “earned a badge of honor” for the way he conducted himself during Lake County’s “eye-blackening rape case.”

  Things were beginning to quiet down around Groveland. McCall could finally focus on hunting down the fourth rapist.

  FRANKLIN WILLIAMS HAD been following press reports of the violence in Groveland from the NAACP’s midtown Manhattan office, but with most of the staff counsel still in Los Angeles for the annual conference, he could do little more than gather information so he’d be prepared to answer any questions Thurgood Marshall might raise. Constance Baker Motley had already spoken with Sheriff Willis McCall about protecting blacks in Lake County from rioting whites; the conversation had not gone well. Harry T. Moore, down in Mims, had learned that Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee had been indicted for rape with a trial date set for Monday, August 29. That left barely a month to prepare for a capital case that would most likely sentence three men to the electric chair, and they didn’t even have legal representation yet. Moore had dispatched a young black lawyer from Tampa to Florida State Prison in Raiford for the purpose of taking down statements from Shepherd, Irvin, and Greenlee.

  Marshall returned to a New York office in chaos. The phones were ringing nonstop with calls from the Florida branches about the assaults upon the Negro communities in Lake County, as well as from NAACP members who had concerns about events at the annual convention in Los Angeles, where delegates had just passed a resolution to permit its board of directors to weed out known communists from local branches. Marshall had begun a tricky political dance with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. With Hoover’s agency being the key to the public’s perception of the Red Scare, Marshall was eager to demonstrate the NAACP’s (anticommunist) patriotism. At the same time, Marshall’s gravitas and popularity with the press exerted pressure on Hoover to reshape the image of the FBI as a government agency with no commitment to the civil rights of blacks. Each man uttered his public statements about the other’s organization with politic caution.

  Behind the discreet public statements, though, lay decades of tension. Marshall had seen, time and again, the FBI arrive at the scene in the aftermath of a lynching, and time and again leave without any suspects. Moreover, Marshall had learned, the bureau’s agents in the aftermath of a lynching evinced so much antagonism toward the black victims and witnesses that the latter simply would not talk to the FBI, out of fear that any information they provided would be relayed to local law enforcement and thus put their lives in danger. Marshall had aired his complaints against the FBI in an appearance before the President’s Committee on Civil Rights: “You don’t investigate a lynching in the same way you investigate a hot automobile. . . . You have more local feeling to overcome. You have more unwillingness of people to talk.” Agents, he said, needed special training, and most important, Marshall stated, they must “themselves believe in the enforcement of civil rights.”

  After a black army veteran, Isaac Woodard, had been beaten and blinded in South Carolina in early 1946, Marshall seethed when he was yet again informed that an FBI investigation had been unable to acquire sufficient evidence to pursue the case further. That summer had borne witness to a rash of lynchings across the South—all of which had gone unsolved (if not uninvestigated)—and a frustrated Marshall wrote a letter to Tom C. Clark, asking the attorney general to investigate the bureau itself. “The FBI has established for itself an uncomparable [sic] record for ferreting out persons violating our federal laws. . . . [This] extends from the prosecution of vicious spies and saboteurs . . . to nondescript hoodlums who steal automobiles and drive them across state lines. On the other hand, the FBI has been unable to identify or bring to trial persons charged with federal statutes where Negroes are the victims.”

  Clark, in turn, forwarded
Marshall’s letter to Hoover. Furious, the FBI director fired back, “I have found from previous dealings with [Marshall] that he is more careless to the truth and facts in the charges which he makes against the FBI.” He added, “I believe that Mr. Marshall’s obvious hostility to the Bureau dominates the thinking of his associates in the legal operation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Hoover then challenged Marshall to provide specific names of Southerners who believed they had been wronged by the FBI—a challenge Marshall refused to meet.

  By all accounts, Hoover cringed at the start of every civil rights investigation, before “rushing pell-mell” into them at the urging of “vociferous minority groups.” Satisfied that the FBI had put together a very strong case for prosecutors, with “clear-cut, uncontroverted evidence of conspiracy” in lynchings, Hoover himself became apprehensive of Southern courtroom justice when all-white juries either acquitted defendants or refused to indict suspects altogether. For it was the bureau that bore the brunt of criticism in such cases, not the prosecutors or juries who chose to ignore sound evidence. In Hoover’s estimation, such cases, perceived by the public as losses, weakened the FBI’s reputation.

  When Walter White attempted to arrange a meeting between Marshall and Hoover in the hope that they might come to a truce, Marshall was not optimistic. “I . . . have no faith in either Mr. Hoover or his investigators,” he wrote to White, “and there is no use in my saying I do.” Hoover simply refused to meet. White persisted, however; in the face of the mounting anticommunist fervor he felt the NAACP needed to be viewed by the FBI as a bastion of democracy, not as a target. In April 1947, putting together an NAACP anticommunism position pamphlet, White requested a patriotic encomium from J. Edgar Hoover, who replied that it would be his “pleasure.” Hoover offered: “Equality, freedom and tolerance are essential in a democratic government. The NAACP has done so much to preserve these principles and to perpetuate the desires of our founding fathers.” A few months later, White finally persuaded Marshall to travel to Washington to meet Hoover, and the director, in his turn, extended an olive branch of future cooperation. It didn’t take long for Marshall to win Hoover over “with his charming, good-ol-boy, ‘I’m a little ol’ Baltimore lawyer’ persona, which worked so well with southern sheriffs and politicians.” He made it clear to Hoover that the NAACP could help him avert criticism that the FBI was uninterested in race crimes, and Hoover recognized the value that an endorsement from someone of Marshall’s stature in the black community would have on the public’s perception of the bureau and, concomitantly, on the agency’s reputation. Marshall asked only that the FBI recommit itself in cases where the civil rights of blacks were clearly violated.