Black Florida Night, White Smoke

Nights like this — soaked and swampy from rains,
hot already at 5 a.m., the dark refusing to wake —
make me think of the road to Umatilla that night
back in 1951 when Sheriff McCall’s car pulled
over and then the rest and the cars settled there
like smoking white beasts of prey. No one
recorded the Sheriff saying end of the road boys
but what followed was exactly that: The
two black prisoners lined up next to the car
with all that wild forest night everywhere
and then shot three times each. The Sheriff
settling the score at last no matter what those
Supreme Court judges had ruled. End of the line.

A white teen girl said four black youths had raped her
— the flower of Southern youth the banjos crooned —
and so Lake County found some criminals, four
black men, wrong place wrong time.
Two GIs who’d gotten uppity while in Europe,
a Bolo operator and his unwitting accomplice,
a sixteen year old boy just wanting to work the groves.
Lots of reasons to string those four up. It was
about time white justice prevailed again.
The Bolo operator skedaddled just in time
but the police caught the others. In the Tavares
jail the three were tied to pipes while two deputies
took turns beating them with lead-filled hoses.
Making them stand on shattered Coke bottles
until after hours of beatings two confessed.

Meanwhile white fury kindled, burned.
Fury at the flower of black youth. Fury at black
farmers who were too good to work the groves.
Fury at grove workers for listening to
labor’s pimps. Fury at the black GI who presumed to
wear the same uniform of glory. Uppity niggers,
defiant and so black in the bare white Florida
heat. The Klan was already strong in Lake County
but soon engorged with hundreds coming in
from all around the state, from Georgia and
Alabama too. A mob descended on the
jail in Tavares demanding the police give
the boys up for the hanging tree. Florida
the capital of Southern lynching, hidden
in dark groves while the rich played romance
on beaches white and clean as cane sugar.

Sheriff McCall would have gone for it
but he was beholden to the rich orange
grove owners who couldn’t afford
to have all their workers chased off.
So he had the boys secreted off to the
state prison in Raiford. The mob went
home to load up on whiskey and ammunition
and put on their white Klan robes. They
said they were the ghosts of dead
Confederate soldiers, burning Atlanta
back with their flaming nigger cross,
leaving behind only ruin and smoke.

Then headed for the black houses in
Groveland. The residents had already
fled for the groves but still the mob
took a long hard swig on hate’s bottle
and emptied their shotguns in the walls
and hurled torches through the windows.
Groveland burned and how. Let justice
be swift and cruel, the Orlando newspaper
declared, posting on its front page
an editorial cartoon of four chairs plugged
into Old Sparky. White smoke, black death.

News came that the fourth suspect had
been spotted up near Gainesville and
so Sheriff McCall deputized a posse of
nearly a thousand men to hound the
nigger in the woods. When they caught up
with the exhausted terrified man
he was shot not thrice or ten times
but hundreds, even a thousand times.
So bad his father couldn’t identify him
a few days later in the morgue. End of the road.

A white court sentenced the three remaining
black youths to death (the youngest, because
he was still a minor, got life in prison). When
Henry Moore, working with Thurgood Marshall
and the NAACP legal group, finally got the
sentence overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,
Sheriff McCall took two of the prisoners
for a ride up past Umatilla. The last light of
civilization gets lost out there, just the great
sweltering black forest of Ocala and eternal
nigger night and just a few lonely brave white men
fighting for dominion and justice against dark things.

They said Sheriff McCall defended himself nobly
when they attacked him trying to escape.
Emptied his six-shooter into them. The Boss of
Lake County, hero of white men. Only one of two
wasn’t killed, he just lay there faking his death
until the ambulance came. Walter Irvin, one of
the two GIs. On the night of the bogus rape he’d
been partying in Eatonville in Orlando,
the all-black town where a man could party
free and in the open. Irwin never admitted
to trying to escape. He was brought to trial
again for the rape and found guilty again
and sentenced to death all over again.

Henry Moore lobbied to get McCall removed
from office for his abuse of black prisoners.
On Christmas night 1951 Moore and his wife
(both teachers) were killed by a bomb.
McCall was implicated but the FBI failed
to find enough evidence. That’s how it works —
the killers all fade back into those woods,
whispers of Die Nigger turning to smoke.

Thurgood Marshall eventually got
the death sentence commuted to life in
prison, which back then was the equivalent
of not guilty for a black man. In the late ‘60s
Irvin finished his sentence and was freed.
For some reason he traveled back to Lake County
in 1970 and was found one morning in his
car, dead of causes never fully declared.
Justice served in a coil of white smoke.

When McCall finally failed to get reelected
in 1972 (a black prisoner had been beaten
to death in his jail), he retired to his home in
Umatilla. The road near his house was renamed
after him in 1985. Black residents who had
lived there for 50 years complained and complained
and finally Lake County commissioners
changed the road back to County Road 450A —
a blank, nondescript way of remembering
the road to nowhere is named after smoke.

Nothing to be afraid of where I live, but that’s
exactly the point: all that can’t be reconciled
lives on the black side of town where there’s
churches and shack homes and beater cars,
unemployment and welfare, drugs and teen mothers.
Sometimes late at night I hear a car go by
with Compton rap blasting and I wonder
what are they complaining about anyway?
On such night as this, so blanketing, so
swelteringly dark, with a house like mine to
coil back into? Perhaps the ghost of Sheriff McCall
is still on rounds, lanky and gentlemanly with
a cracker twang, wound in his dread Klan sheet,
two smoking holsters stuffed with bloody black feet.

— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)

NOTE

Gilbert King supplies many of these details in his Pulitzer-prize winning book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2013).

My interview with Gilbert King for the Mount Dora Citizen here.

State Senator Geraldine Thompson is trying for a second time to move a bill through the state legislature which asks Gov. Scott to exonerate the Four. Last fall she spoke about the bill with Mount Dora High students in a mock interview. My story here.

Groveland Mayor Tom Louks will read a proclamation asking for exoneration of the Four at the city’s council meeting on Feb. 16. Gilbert King and Geraldine Thompson will attend, as will some of the relatives of the four. Louks has received threatening phone calls from residents who say he should “let dead dogs lie.”

I wrote about the dangers to the white community for letting dead dogs lie here.

A photo taken 15 minutes after Sheriff McCall shot two of the Groveland Four
as they were allegedly trying to escape, Nov. 1951.