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 ([email protected])

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.