Gilbert King, author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America:
I was going through Thurgood Marshall's files and I saw this letter from a lawyer in Florida saying, "Thurgood, we need help. Please notify the Department of Justice, the FBI. This is a dangerous case." You pick it up and it's, you know, handwritten. You can feel the desperation. Thurgood Marshall took this extraordinarily dangerous case where these four Black men are accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. She said initially that it was too dark, she couldn't recognize them. But then you had a sheriff come in, Sheriff Willis McCall, and he basically said, "Yeah, I know who it was. I'll take it from here." And he started rounding up Black people that he had problems with. The Groveland Boys, they arrest them, they take them into the basement of the courthouse, basically handcuff them to pipes and just beat them senseless until they confess. Before 1940, coerced confessions were completely legal. And these men are fighting for their lives. They're gonna be facing the death penalty.
Sherrilyn Ifill, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at the Howard University School of Law:
This case is emblematic of a system of terror that holds Black people, not only making them subject to violence, but the impunity of it. The feeling that this thing has happened to us and there's nothing we can do about it. That's the condition of Black people in many of these Southern towns through the '30s and the '40s.
King:
White supremacy, you see it at every stage of this trial. Somebody like Willis McCall could not exist unless powerful people had his back and allowed him to continue this. After the Supreme Court decision overturning the Groveland case, the sheriff, Willis McCall, took it upon himself to execute the defendants. Sam Shepherd was killed instantly. He was handcuffed to his best friend, Walter Irvin, who was shot three times, but survived. He was laying there with his eyes closed, and he hears a deputy standing next to McCall say, "This one ain't dead yet." And he opens his eyes and he's staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber gun, and he sees the flash, and the bullet goes clean through his neck. I think about this a lot. Like, if Walter Irvin had died on the side of that road like he should have, the official narrative that lingers is that these convicted rapists tried to escape and kill our fine sheriff, and fortunately he was able to defend himself, and let's move on. Well, in that hospital room, Marshall was there, his lawyers were there, the FBI was in there, and Walter Irvin started telling the story of his execution of his best friend and his shooting. Walter Irvin told a story of coldblooded murder. Now, the horrible thing is Walter Irvin, in the retrial, he's the only one left, he's convicted. He gets sentenced to life in prison. And Sheriff Willis McCall was asked by a journalist, "Do you think that this shooting is going to impact your chances for reelection?" And he just kind of laughed and said, "This'll probably get me elected six more times." And he was wrong about that. He got elected seven more times.
Ifill:
It's so hard, I think, for people to understand the level of terror millions of Black people lived under during this period and how little recourse there was for it. People tend to talk about LDF's work as impact litigation, which it is. Sometimes we just take cases because it's just too awful and you cannot turn away from the truth of it.
King:
Thurgood Marshall in his role as the director of the LDF, he would often get these lynching photographs that would come in. Marshall saw probably more than anybody else, but there was one photograph that really haunted Marshall. That particular photograph, it wasn't the bulging eyes, it wasn't the rope that was cutting into the neck. It was the faces of these young white children who are smiling and posing around a dangling corpse. He would wake up in cold sweats at night thinking that someday his time was gonna come, he was going to be lynched, and the children would come out in their Sunday best and celebrate it around his body.
Thurgood Marshall, he had a lot of resistance, even within the NAACP, like saying, "Thurgood, we have all this civil rights litigation that's coming in the pipeline. You're invaluable to the Civil Rights Movement. We can't risk you going out and doing these death penalty cases in the dangerous Antebellum South." Well, it turned out in the Groveland case that he got so much coverage, media coverage, that all of this money began flowing into the NAACP, money that they'd never had before. And what a lot of people don't realize is that Brown versus Board was really funded on the back of the Groveland case.
