Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  A second heart attack landed Houston in the Freedman’s Hospital at Howard University. Despite the setback, and critical as his condition was, Houston was not prepared to have his family come back to Washington. His aunt Clotill was a frequent visitor, however, and together they would read and discuss the lessons in Peace of Mind, by Joshua Loth Liebman. Aunt Clotill had given the book to her nephew, and he exacted her promise to pass the book along to Bo, should he not make it out of the hospital.

  In the early afternoon of April 22, Mazique was preparing a medication for nausea and his patient was resting in bed when Joseph Waddy stopped in to visit. “Hi, Joe,” Houston said softly, as his slightly raised hand slumped to his side. Charles Hamilton Houston had drawn his final breath. Beside his bed lay his copy of Peace of Mind. In its pages Houston had written some last words for his son:

  Tell Bo I did not run out on him but went down fighting that he might have better and broader opportunities than I had without prejudice or bias operating against him, and in any fight some fall.

  He had driven a young Thurgood Marshall across the South; he had opened his onetime student’s eyes and mind to the inequalities blacks suffered by law. For decades he had been laying the groundwork to overturn the injustices enacted against his race in Plessy. He did not live to see the culmination of his labor. The funeral services for Charles Hamilton Houston at Howard University’s Rankin Chapel were attended by Supreme Court justices Tom C. Clark and Hugo Black, an official from President Truman’s cabinet, numerous civil rights activists, and hundreds of friends and colleagues. Houston’s cousin, William Hastie, whom President Truman had nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1949, paid homage to a civil rights champion’s “unremitting struggle to win for the Negro full status without discrimination.” Hastie celebrated a warrior’s spirit: “Yet, as we grieve, we cannot forget that he believed, perhaps above all else, in strength; strength to do and to bear what lesser men would regard as impossible or unbearable. He counted nothing, no physical weakness and not even death itself, as an obstacle to the onward sweep of strong men and women in the accomplishment of worthwhile ends. He had a soldier’s faith that winning the fight is all that matters; that every battle must be fought until it is won and without pause to take account of those stricken in the fray. He reflected that conviction in a slogan which he gave to his students: ‘No tea for the feeble, no crepe for the dead.’ I know he would wish all of us to carry on in that spirit.”

  Marshall was one of Houston’s pallbearers. He was also one of the NAACP executives who would ensure that Houston be posthumously awarded the thirty-fifth Spingarn Medal, a tribute that came years too late. “Whatever credit is given him is not enough,” Marshall said of his mentor, whose contributions to the cause of civil rights were ultimately immeasurable as he had so willingly and unselfishly toiled behind the scenes while others received credit for the gains. It was Marshall’s idea to present the Spingarn Medal to Houston’s son at the NAACP’s forty-first annual convention, in Boston. In a photograph that appeared in newspapers across the country, Marshall—the trace of a smile barely masking his sorrow—can be seen standing over the shoulder of the boy as little Bo is being handed his father’s medal.

  Four years earlier, in Cincinnati, Charles Hamilton Houston had presented the Spingarn Medal to Thurgood Marshall. Even then, Marshall had not outstripped his mentor or ceased to follow his lead. Rarely in the two decades before or four years since had Marshall made an important legal decision without consulting Houston, and with his passing Marshall, too, had lost a protector and a champion. The master’s mantle had fallen onto the pupil’s shoulders. The legal strategy, Houston had told Marshall, was in place; all that was needed was the courage and strength to see it through. As Hastie had so eloquently eulogized him, Houston “guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land . . . closer than even he dared hope. . . .”

  THE CRUEL APRIL passed, but the spring, as in Eliot’s metaphor, had begun to breed lilacs out of the dead land. Just weeks after Houston’s death, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decisions on Sweatt and McLaurin. In both cases the justices’ opinions were unanimous.

  Marshall immediately called Heman Sweatt. “We won the big one!” he proclaimed, explaining to the letter carrier that the Court did not find “substantial equality” between the University of Texas Law School and a basement equipped with a pile of textbooks. “Now the state will have to age law schools like good whiskey,” Marshall told him.

  The New York Times opined that the Court’s decisions left Plessy in “tatters.” More privately, some justices on the Supreme Court concluded that Sweatt and McLaurin, along with Henderson v. United States—a railway segregation case that was decided on the same day—had sealed the fate of Jim Crow. The South braced for the inevitable end of segregation in elementary and secondary schools.

  In June 1950, then, Marshall was finally again in the mood to celebrate. Once again he was “Thurgood . . . a party man. ‘Party’ was his middle name,” said Constance Baker Motley. And he proved it. He hosted a victory party at the midtown office, where, as young Jack Greenberg remembered, there was “lots of Scotch and bourbon, clouds of cigarette smoke, lots of laughter and noise and bragging, jokes about race and racial banter, and the almost obligatory poker game.” Bobbie Branch, the office manager, “an ample woman who resembled Bloody Mary in South Pacific,” was especially excited after the decisions; she was swaggering around the place and “swearing like a marine,” Greenberg recalled. The press was ringing the phones off the hook, and visitors were parading through the office with their congratulations. Nobody wanted to go home.

  Of course, Marshall knew that the decisions had not gone so far as to obliterate Plessy completely, but he was at last beginning to see the fruits of the seeds Houston had planted after he and Marshall, in 1930, had sat down together to study the findings in the Margold Report. In the twenty years since, they had honed “the tools to destroy all governmentally imposed racial segregation.” The work was not done, but it had unquestionably and irrevocably begun. “It will take time. It will take courage and determination,” Marshall said, as if to convince himself that he had the fortitude to continue the mission without the man who had envisioned it.

  PERHAPS THE BIGGEST surprise that spring came to Marshall and the LDF lawyers in the form of a three-part exposé that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times in early April. Norman Bunin, a twenty-six-year-old copy editor who had closely followed the Groveland case as it had unfolded in Florida, had felt that some of the testimony simply did not add up. To satisfy his own curiosity, he began reading the trial transcripts and trying to piece together exactly what had happened on the night of July 15, 1949. From the outset, it seemed glaringly apparent to Bunin, by virtue of the accounts of several witnesses, that at the time of the alleged rape Charles Greenlee was already in jail. Only Norma Padgett’s testimony placed Greenlee at the scene of the supposed crime, and in fact, with a stunning lack of physical evidence, the prosecution had based its case entirely on the word of Norma Padgett and her identification of the alleged assailants in court. Other details in the court records nagged at Bunin, such as the prosecution’s list of witnesses, nearly all of whom were never called to testify: Why? Bunin wondered.

  The more he wondered the more obsessed Bunin became with the case. Whatever days he could—he had not been officially assigned to the case for the paper—he spent buried in the court records, and on weekends, driving from the Gulf Coast to Lake County, he did the legwork that the defense had not had time to do before the trial. He drove to Eatonville, and back toward Mascotte, then up toward Okahumpka, to the spot where Willie Padgett’s car had stalled. He drove to the scene of the alleged rape near the Sumter County line, and then drove back to the Groveland train depot. He jotted down speeds and minutes and distances; he tried to make sense of the prosecution’s time line. But
it made no sense.

  Bunin not only located alibi witnesses that Williams and Akerman had been unable to find, but also tracked down Lawrence Burtoft, the young man who had spoken with Norma Padgett in his father’s café the morning after she’d allegedly been kidnapped and raped. Jesse Hunter had interviewed Burtoft on two occasions, and chose not to call him as a witness. Bunin began to understand why; for, by Burtoft’s account, Norma had said that her so-called kidnappers, whom she could not identify, had not in any way harmed her. Moreover, she had appeared to Burtoft to be quite calm, despite the fact that, as she’d claimed, her husband might be lying murdered by the side of the road. She had not asked Burtoft to notify the police. All she wanted, she’d said, was a ride home, and “she waited patiently while he [Burtoft] had his breakfast.”

  One weekend Bunin drove to Bay Lake. A long, looping road took him to the Tyson farmhouse, where he hoped to interview Norma Padgett. His hopes were not in vain: Coy Tyson voiced no objections, perhaps because Bunin was not a reporter for one of those New York papers nor a person connected in some way to the NAACP, or perhaps because his daughter’s rapists had been safely tried and convicted. Norma, in a green farm dress, her hair mussed and her bare feet very dirty, scarcely resembled the girl with the blond curls and homemade bolero who had appeared in the courtroom at Tavares. Her story, however, was much the same, although Bunin did note a few discrepancies, most significantly in regard to her state of mind that morning of July 16. Norma told Bunin that she had been “crying profusely and [was] visibly shaken” when she’d spoken with Burtoft about her rape by the four Negroes, and that she had been anxious to find out if her husband was still alive after the black men had beaten him. Her story did not match entirely her testimony in court, and it did not match at all Burtoft’s description of her behavior that early Saturday morning. As for her testimony, almost casually Norma mentioned that her daddy hadn’t had much confidence about her testifying in court—he’d even bet a man that she’d “mess up” on the witness stand. She also told Bunin that she didn’t care for that “nigger lawyer” one bit.

  Bunin’s three articles, which were printed in the St. Petersburg Times with hand-drawn maps of key locations in Lake County to illustrate the facts in the fiction of the prosecution’s time line, infuriated Jesse Hunter, who called the stories “a dastardly lying libel on the people of Lake County as a whole.” He added that Bunin and the Times “are creating, or attempting to create race hatred and discord in Lake County, where relations between whites and coloreds have always been good.” Not one to miss an opportunity to attack Senator Claude Pepper—derisively nicknamed “Red” Pepper by his political adversaries, for he favored civil rights and organized labor—Hunter also made political hay of the “libel.” He demanded that Pepper, currently in the midst of his heated reelection bid, repudiate the stories because the Times “has become recognized as your most ardent supporter and what they publish is considered a part of your campaign.”

  Bunin’s series only confirmed what Franklin Williams had suspected but had neither the time nor the resources to prove: the prosecution had been hiding witnesses and evidence. He shared the articles with Marshall and Greenberg, then filed them away. They could be very useful, if the NAACP’s appeal could convince the Supreme Court to overturn the verdict in the Groveland Boys case.

  IN MAY 1950, after nearly a year’s leave of absence, Walter White, having failed to find another job, decided to return to the NAACP. He was not exactly welcomed back with open arms. While a sizable contingent within the NAACP had, according to Roy Wilkins, “tried to keep him from coming back,” board member Eleanor Roosevelt was not one of them. Rallying behind White, she convinced the board that he should be allowed to resume his role as executive secretary, on the condition that he relinquish administrative duties to Wilkins. Franklin Williams appreciated Roosevelt’s intervention on behalf of his ally and advocate, through whose influence he hoped to strengthen his position within the LDF.

  In White’s absence, NAACP membership had declined significantly. The drop-off was attributed in large part to the doubling of the one-dollar annual dues to two dollars, but there were concerns, too, about the growing organizational divide between local branches and the national office because of failures in leadership and coordination. Only a very small percentage of the black population—in 1950, approximately 15 million—contributed financially to the NAACP. To Morehouse College president and civil rights activist Benjamin Mays, such lack of support constituted a “tragedy” and a “calamity”: “If we are going to achieve a larger share of freedom we will have to be willing to pay for it,” he admonished.

  Harry T. Moore had hoped that the publicity generated by the Groveland case could be used to boost membership in Florida, but there, as in most of the states, the NAACP was suffering from a crippling budget deficit and a spiraling decline in membership. Gloster Current, the director of branches, had expressed to Moore his concern over the “deplorable state of Florida branches,” which accounted for his decision to dispatch Daniel Byrd, a Louisiana friend of Marshall’s, to Florida to meet with the state’s branch representatives. Current had also informed Lucille Black, the national membership secretary, that Moore, though certainly well-intentioned, was simply not “doing as much as could be done to revive the work in that State.”

  While on his speaking tour in Florida to raise money for the Groveland Boys defense, Franklin Williams had, at Current’s request, visited some of Moore’s urban branches in the state. Having met with representatives in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville, Williams had returned to New York with an authoritative report, concluding that Florida’s plummeting membership could be attributed directly to Moore’s leadership. Although the members in the NAACP branches of all three cities agreed that Moore’s voter registration drives were impressive, they roundly criticized his endorsement of candidates through the Progressive Voters League, since it was alienating Democratic and Republican Negroes alike.

  No doubt, Moore could read the writing on the wall. Nonetheless, he continued his push for justice and money. By citing unresolved issues in the Groveland case, Moore had lobbied and successfully arranged for a delegation of black leaders to meet with Governor Fuller Warren to discuss a wide range of topics politically crucial to blacks, from police brutality to voting rights. He continued traveling from county to county in Florida, and continued making speeches and raising money to fund LDF appeals in the Groveland case. He continued writing letters to editors of Florida newspapers, among them Mabel Norris Reese, in which he severely criticized Sheriff Willis McCall, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, and Judge Truman Futch. Months after the convictions, Moore was keeping the Groveland Boys case alive in his hope of saving their lives and his job, his mission, his calling. “I plan to touch many more [branches] while this Groveland Case is fresh in their minds,” Moore wrote to the New York office.

  Harry Moore was not the only one in the employ of the NAACP whose job stood in jeopardy. Jack Greenberg was sitting at his desk on the fourth floor of the NAACP’s Manhattan headquarters working on the Groveland writs when Franklin Williams strode straight past him and into Thurgood’s office. The door slammed shut. The women in the office braced themselves; they had witnessed the like of it before, a year earlier, when behind a closed door, in a bout of angry shouting, Williams had confronted Marshall about arguing Watts v. Indiana before the Supreme Court. Within minutes Greenberg heard “a lot of yelling and screaming and carrying on” about the Groveland Boys appeal. The Supreme Court might be hearing the case soon, and Williams wanted to be assured that he’d argue it in Washington as he did in Tallahassee. Only Marshall was not guaranteeing anything, a response that Williams interpreted as an undeserved vote of no confidence, and the disputation became even more heated. Fed up, restive, Williams wanted and demanded a straight answer. Was the Groveland case his?

  Marshall told him no, and Williams exploded with “I won’t take it!”

  “Well . . . ,” Marshall r
eplied, with a glance toward the door to indicate that Williams was free to go.

  Williams ignored the gesture, holding his ground, and Marshall laid into him like, Marshall said later, a “Dutch uncle”: “Frank, I know what you’re shooting at. You’re shooting for either my job or Roy Wilkins’s, and so far as I’m concerned, you better start shooting for Roy’s because you can’t take mine. You’re not man enough.”

  Williams stormed out of Marshall’s office and into Walter White’s.

  It wasn’t just about Groveland. Thurgood knew that Williams had been complaining to White, before the executive secretary’s leave and since his return, that Marshall was “less than bold in his leadership,” particularly in the LDF’s assault on Plessy. White apparently agreed; in 1949, he himself had voiced his displeasure with Marshall’s not expressly combative tactics to the civil rights–friendly Judge Julius Waties Waring of South Carolina, before whom Marshall was bringing the school desegregation test case Briggs v. Elliott, the first of the five cases that would ultimately constitute Brown v. Board of Education. Waring, in turn, had arm-twisted Marshall into filing a more aggressive attack on the state’s segregation laws. The confrontation had “made Marshall look either incompetent or craven,” in Robert Carter’s opinion, when in fact he was “not dragging his feet in this” but merely “struggling to find the right way.” More important, in regard to the staff and operations of the LDF, Marshall believed that the source of his embarrassment over Briggs lay with Franklin Williams, who had used Walter White to influence Judge Waring.