Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Norma Padgett had appeared at the whites’ entrance to the hospital with her father, Coy Tyson, and her husband, Willie Padgett, on the morning of July 16. In the absence of the senior physician and founder of the hospital, Dr. Howard Holland, Binneveld had attended. The father and husband remained in the waiting room while in an exam room the doctor explained the procedure they’d follow. He noted that the girl appeared to be in “emotional shock” and that, if what she was saying was true, she had not slept in more than twenty-four hours, as she had spent the night hiding and wandering in the wooded area outside Okahumpka. In his external examination he found scratches on both knees and on the palm of her right hand; the soles of her feet were “irritated.” When he had proceeded to the pelvic examination, he observed that the labia majora and labia minora were “very red and irritated” and there were “several small mucosal lacerations about posterior fornix” as well. He attributed a small amount of blood present in the vagina to her regular monthly menstrual period, then in its last stages, since he otherwise “found no evidence of tears or wounds in the vagina other than the lacerations mentioned above.” Laboratory analysis of a vaginal smear revealed “no spermatozoa were present in the vagina, nor were any organisms resembling gonococci found.” Binneveld’s conclusion to the report read: “Finding—Traumatic vaginitis,” a noninfectious inflammation that might result from vaginal exposure to a condom, soap water, or douches, among numerous other possibilities.

  Because he had not examined the accused men, and “since VD is so prevalent among the colored people he treats,” the doctor told Agent Roper that he had consulted with a physician and former instructor of his at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He had recommended that Binneveld put Padgett on penicillin, aureomycin, and some other prophylaxis to prevent any possible venereal infection and that he “give the patient the benefit of the doubt.”

  Binneveld had of course, by way of Sheriff McCall, provided the state attorney with a copy of the report, and he said that he’d also informed the sheriff “there were no other gross signs of bruises, breaks in the skin, or other signs of violence.” The doctor had not, however, discussed with any other party the results of his examination, as he emphatically stated to Special Agent Roper. Nor did Dr. Binneveld—the only physician, insofar as he knew, who had examined Norma Padgett—have any idea how such confidential information might have been leaked to the NAACP or anyone else. Agent Roper’s final question for the doctor echoed that of Sheriff McCall the month before: how would he testify should he be called as a witness by the prosecution and asked if Norma Padgett had been raped? The doctor had been pondering the answer to that question for weeks. He didn’t have to think about his reply. He’d said it before:

  “I don’t know.”

  THE LAST WEEK of August 1949 brought newspaper reporters from all over the country to cover the trial of the Groveland Boys, a case that the press was calling “Little Scottsboro.” Certainly it was strikingly similar in many ways to the infamous 1931 case, in which young white women’s accusations of rape by young black men triggered coerced confessions, lynching attempts, and mob violence involving powerful sheriffs, unruly posses, and the Ku Klux Klan in Scottsboro, Alabama. In central Florida, the black papers had been covering the Groveland story since the rioting in mid-July, largely on the basis of information passed on to them by Franklin Williams in the course of his investigation. In late August local reporters were joined in Tavares by correspondents from the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender as well as a few “Northern” writers who had taken an interest in the story. So had the Christian Science Monitor, but surprisingly, to Williams, the Associated Press and United Press International had not. Yet while Marshall and the NAACP in New York were trying to focus national attention on the racial tension and racist violence in Groveland, Florida, the big race story that August was unfolding in their own backyard.

  On August 27, 1949, in Peekskill, New York, Paul Robeson had planned to perform at a concert for the benefit of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization led by his friend the black communist, lawyer, and activist William Patterson. Earlier that summer Robeson had unpopularly delivered his controversial anti-American speech in France, and at the moment he was about to sing his first selection, hundreds of protestors stormed the stage, pelted the musicians with rocks or slammed them with chairs, and burned the “Dirty Commie” song sheets. Police did little to intervene, but Robeson vowed to return the following week. True to his word, he did, along with twenty-five thousand supporters and hundreds of union members who formed a human wall around the grounds at Cortlandt Manor to protect the performers onstage. A mob of protestors meanwhile threw rocks, overturned vehicles, and shouted epithets like “Kikes!” “Nigger lovers!” and “Go back to Russia!” They burned Robeson in effigy on a nearby hillside; close by they burned a cross.

  Five months later, in a speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy would brandish what he claimed was a secret list of more than two hundred known communists working for the U.S. State Department. Thus began the strong wave of venomous anticommunist sentiment that for the next decade would threaten not only government entities, but academia, the motion picture industry, labor unions, and the NAACP. Thurgood Marshall, ever vigilant, would strive continually to safeguard the reputation and activities of the NAACP from the taint of communism. As Roy Wilkins wrote, “We were having enough trouble getting Congress to consider even the most elementary civil rights legislation. The last thing we needed was to give ammunition to red-baiting southern congressmen and senators, who would have loved nothing better than to paint us pink.” For all that, neither McCarthy’s list nor the HUAC’s unduly upset Marshall, who later said, “If you were a Negro and you were not on both of those lists, you should blow your brains out.”

  That the eyes of the nation were fixed on Paul Robeson and the Peekskill riots late in the summer of 1949 afforded Marshall some relief, for it kept the CRC more fully occupied with its own affairs and thus less disposed or able to insert itself into the Groveland case as it had in the trials of the Scottsboro Boys. Supposedly, “Franklin Williams had falsely accused [the CRC] of trying to steal the case” in Groveland. The accusation may have been false but Williams’s suspicions would have been justified, for it would not by any means have been the first case the CRC had tried to steal from the NAACP.

  In May 1949, seven young black men in Virginia confessed to the rape of a white woman, and in a series of six trials over a period of eleven days, each one of the “Martinsville Seven” was convicted and sentenced to death. Only after the trials did the NAACP enter the case, at the request of relatives to the condemned men. Sensitive though Marshall was to the fact that the NAACP did not function as a legal aid society, he was equally attuned to opportunities for the establishment of important legal precedents through the process of appeals. The death sentences of the Martinsville Seven offered apparent grounds for appeal in that since 1908, when the state of Virginia instituted use of the electric chair, all forty-five of the men executed for rape had been blacks convicted in attacks on white women. Problems arose when one of the wives of the Martinsville Seven agreed to allow the CRC to represent her husband in an appeal. Marshall was livid.

  Marshall and Patterson were deeply divided in their philosophies on both legal tactics and civil rights. Marshall particularly resented the CRC’s strategy in high-profile capital cases, which, he believed, “was to go into the local community, spit on the door of the courthouse, cuss at the judge and raise holy cain—and, incidentally, get the men electrocuted.” In Marshall’s eyes, the CRC existed and operated primarily to raise money, lots of it, for the communist cause—by calling attention to racial and economic oppression under American capitalism and “giv[ing] foreign governments something they can yell about.” Unlike the NAACP, the CRC did not apply the bulk of the funds it raised for the actual defense of its clients, what with the production of leafle
ts, advertising on billboards, and fashioning of “high-powered petitions that the jury will never read” commanding significant expenditures. Patterson, for his part, maintained that nationwide awareness was vital and that “only the movement of the people as a whole guarantees a victory.” Nonetheless, Marshall contended, a noisy mass campaign led by an organization that had been cited as subversive and communist by the Truman administration could only be detrimental to the defendants in appeals to higher courts. Ultimately, Patterson pulled the CRC from the defense of the Martinsville Seven. He chose instead to maximize publicity for the case—and raise consciousness of the communist cause—without risking a possible loss in court.

  There was no love lost between Marshall and Patterson, personally or professionally. They exchanged letters, and on occasion they attended meetings held by interested third parties hoping to broker a treaty between their two organizations—a futile effort, as both men were equally entrenched in their positions and fiercely committed to their opposing principles. Their relationship was further strained, since both men happened to live at the same address, 409 Edgecombe, in Harlem, although Marshall’s demanding travel schedule limited possibilities of chance encounters, or contention, with Patterson in New York. Of course, Patterson did his own share of traveling, and that late summer of 1949 he was more than contemplating a trip to Groveland. Marshall issued a warning to his neighbor: “These cases, the Groveland cases and any other cases under the jurisdiction of this Association will be carried forward in a lawfullike [sic] manner with the lawful machinery of our Government. We have never been convinced that the Civil Rights Congress is primarily interested in the protection of the rights of Negroes [or] in the particular Negroes involved. . . . We therefore have no intention whatsoever of permitting you to interfere in any of these cases.”

  Marshall forwarded his letter to Stephen Spingarn, who was working in the White House as assistant to the special counsel to the president, with the following note:

  Dear Steve:

  I thought you would be interested in the latest developments in the efforts of the Comrades to move in on our cases. These boys never give up and it is a pleasure to crack their knuckles.

  Sincerely,

  Thurgood Marshall.

  AS THE PRETRIAL hearing proceeded in Groveland, Franklin Williams phoned in the rulings on motions to Thurgood Marshall in New York and updated him on the roster of witnesses and composition of the jury. Williams assured Marshall that in the jury selection process the defense would challenge in any way they could, but he and Marshall both knew that at the end of the day, twelve white Lake County jurors were going to be seated in the box. “I never believed that we would have anything but a verdict of guilty,” Williams said. “It never entered my mind. . . . I hoped that we might get life rather than death. But I never believed that these boys would be found innocent.”

  Marshall had full confidence in Williams, who, he observed, “can come up with more ideas in a minute than most people I know of. And they’re darn good ones.” Williams was ambitious but also dedicated to the mission of the NAACP—a man who willingly “puts in a real day’s work,” Marshall said. Nonetheless, Marshall recognized that Williams was facing heavy odds by having been hobbled with the lightning-fast trial date when he’d barely had time to find a Florida lawyer, let alone map out a sound strategy. The want of time would force Williams and Akerman into reactive lawyering once the trial began, and Williams promised Marshall “every bit of energy and effort [would be] directed toward trying to create an error in the case, so that we could get it reversed on appeal.” The job, Marshall stressed, was, as always, “to cause constitutional error or to find constitutional error in the process.”

  Both the prosecution and the defense were required to submit to the court lists of their evidence before the trial began. Jesse Hunter kept it simple; his list included a mere ten items:

  1.Handkerchief & lint

  2.Cast of left rear tire

  3.Cast of right rear tire

  4.Cast of left front tire

  5.Cast of right front tire

  6.Left shoe & cast

  7.Right shoe & cast

  8.Pants of Walter Irvin

  9.Pistol

  10.Almanac

  The list reflected the simplicity, and strength, of the prosecution’s case as Hunter would argue it for the jury, whoever might be sitting on it. Hunter hardly had to worry about jury selection; as Mabel Norris Reese noted in her pretrial coverage, “Jesse Hunter won’t have to ask probing questions of the jury because he already knows all about them, and probably he could call any of the 100 or so selected jurymen by their first names.” Nor did he have to worry about the credibility of his witnesses or their testimony. He had reviewed thoroughly with the state’s witnesses the testimony they would present, from Norma and Willie Padgett to the sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen. He indeed had reason to feel confident that, as Reese wrote, “Honor Will Be Avenged” in just a matter of days.

  If Hunter’s list was strategically simple, the evidence for the defense was perforce limited: forty-one local newspaper articles published on specific dates in July and August 1949. The list of witnesses for the defense indicated that they would call only three: Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Charles Greenlee. And then they would pray.

  Judge Truman Futch had a list of his own. He had posted his “Special Rules of Court” on telephone poles outside the courthouse. Among the twelve rules for spectators at the trial were bans against loitering in the halls and stairways; the conveyance of bags, bottles, or packages into the courtroom; and hand clapping or outbursts in response to testimony or argument. The judge’s rationale, he stated, lay less in any fear of a disruption in the proceedings by the Ku Klux Klan than in his concern that outside “agitators or agents” may have been dispatched to Tavares, perhaps by the NAACP, purposely to start trouble at the trial so that “critics of the south might have something to base criticism upon.” Judge Futch had also taken other, more visible preventive measures against the unwelcome presence of any suspect strangers, as Williams and Akerman noticed when they arrived at court on the first day of the trial and viewed the heightened security. “They had deputies who stood every 10 stairs coming up the staircase into the courtroom,” Williams recalled. “They were all big characters with guns on. It was a very intimidating scene.”

  It did not intimidate Mabel Norris Reese, however. Nor did the lawyers for the defense, who had called her as a witness in the pretrial hearings so that her exclusive coverage of the “worst crime in Lake county’s history” could be entered on record. On that occasion, under oath, she had indicated that the source for her many articles and editorials about the case had been State Attorney Jesse Hunter. She had also stated that, on the basis of her observations, “there is considerable more satisfaction among the negroes here” in her adoptive South than in her native North and, indeed, she had found no evidence of prejudice in her part of Lake County. On the morning of the trial itself, intercepting Williams and Akerman on their arrival at court, Reese asked them for a statement regarding their expectations in the courtroom. In a rare unguarded moment, Williams responded that he did not hold out much hope for justice in Judge Futch’s courtroom and that anyway, the “Supreme Court is the aim.” Off the record or not, his comments appeared on the front page of the Topic the next day, and the relationship between Williams and Reese continued only to sour thereafter. In the same front-page article Reese looked forward to the relief that would come “to the staunch believers in the wonderfulness that is Lake county when the smudge against her fair name is removed” by the trial, as again she lamented the sensational press stories in the North about beatings and mistreatment of Negroes, which stories, she wrote, strive “to make Lake county sound mean and cruel—unfitted for the God-given loveliness about her.” Of course, since Reese relied on Jesse Hunter as her main source of information about the case, she knew that before Lake County could return again to being the “Ga
rden of Eden” it had always been, the prosecution would have to recount the unspeakable events of that night in July “when the true story of what happened to that young Bay Lake couple will be told, probably in unpretty details so that a jury can be convinced.”

  Relief, for Franklin Williams, at least in regard to the press, came to Tavares in the form of Ted Poston, a black reporter from the New York Post who had successfully lobbied his editor to fly him south to cover the trial for the newspaper. Formerly a resident at 409 Edgecombe, he had long been friends with Thurgood Marshall. In fact, Poston had once accompanied Marshall on one of the NAACP attorney’s late-night adventures, on this particular occasion to obtain affidavits from blacks who were being terrorized by police in Freeport, New York, then (in the 1930s) a hub of KKK activity. On learning that the Klan-infested police were out looking for two troublemakers from Harlem, Poston was, in his words, “damned scared”; but, as much as he wanted to “get out of town fast,” he spent the night dodging the Klan with Marshall as the lawyer continued collecting his affidavits, which he hid in a spare tire, and meanwhile making “more and more outlandish jokes about what [the police would] do to us if they ever caught up with us.” The jokes may not have eased Poston’s anxiety, but the affidavits enabled Marshall eventually to win from the state attorney general “a restraining order to close down KKK activities” in Freeport. Poston could only admire the courage of a man and attorney who “involv[ed] himself in a case to that degree.”

  Nor did Poston want for courage, savvy though he also was in protecting himself. In 1933, when he was covering the Scottsboro trial in Alabama for the Harlem-based Amsterdam News, each night after court he would sneak out to the railroad tracks in order to deposit his stories “in the mail car of the midnight special.” He was evidently not sneaky enough, however, as one night some young white men were waiting near the tracks for the black reporter on the Scottsboro case. They put a pistol to his back and Poston produced fake credentials identifying him as a reverend with the African Methodist Episcopal Church—for which he got a “kick in the pants” but otherwise escaped harm. When Scottsboro had completed the retrial and Poston his assignment, he made a show of reserving a seat on the day coach at the train station so that the ticket seller would be sure to remember him. Then he quietly slipped out of town by bus. He later learned that, as he had feared, about the time the train he’d reserved the seat on was due to arrive, a crowd of angry whites, nearly a thousand strong, had turned up at the depot, obviously not to offer him a friendly good-bye.