Cleaning Up the Past: An Interview with Gilbert King
A Pulitzer Prize-winning book set in Lake County is spurring a growing cry for justice for four men trapped in a dark chapter of our not-so-distant past.
October 31, 2015
Gilbert King’s Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2012) continues to spur cries for justice for crimes committed by Jim Crow-era Lake County.
King got his inspiration for this book while researching his first nonfiction book, The Execution of Willie Francis (2008). There he ran across memos from Thurgood Marshall, then-NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice), on how to conduct the case. Blacks didn’t stand a chance in Southern courts, where all of law enforcement and the legal system were united against them. Marshall knew that only public pressure could move the scales of justice just enough; a guilty verdict was always a foregone conclusion, but sometimes courts could be moved on later appeals that could be influenced by public support.
Intrigued with how Marshall learned to work the public to gain leverage in a hostile court system, King got access to FBI investigations and NAACP trial notes that had previously been sealed. From those files, King found a Lake County crime story that had never been fully — or truthfully — told to the public.
The story King uncovered is ugly. In 1949, four black men were accused of rape by a 17-year-old white girl in Groveland, Florida. Two of the men were nowhere close to the crime, and the others had a confrontation with the girl’s husband who had been drunk. Enraged white men from as far away as Georgia drove into Lake County with the intent of burning Groveland to the ground. The National Guard was eventually called in, with Lake County sheriff Willis McCall involved apparently at the bequest of grove owners who were afraid the county’s black citrus workers would be scared off by the violence.
One of the four was killed by a posse in a swamp up near Gainesville, shot so many times his body couldn’t be identified by his father. Two of the arrested were beaten viciously by Lake County deputies to produce confessions for the trial. The three survivors went before a white court and a white jury and in short order were found guilty of murder. Two were sentenced to death while the third, a minor, received life in prison. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall fought in vain for the accused in the trial, suffering death threats. (At one point, the KKK pursued he and his fellow lawyers back into Orange County in a wild car chase that would have had deadly consequences had they been in a slower car.)
In 1951 Marshall successfully got the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction. En route from Raiford back to Leesburg to stand trial again, prisoners Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irwin were in Sheriff Willis McCall’s car when he pulled over, saying there was a flat. Asking them to get out and help change the tire, McCall then shot both prisoners, alleging they were trying to escape. His deputy James Yates shot one of the prisoners a third time in the neck. Shepherd died at the scene, but miraculously, Iriwn survived. and was able to tell his story to the FBI from his hospital bed in Eustis.
Still, when Irwin went to trial again, this time in Marion County, he was again found guilty and sentenced to death. At the same time a wave of KKK violence spread across Central Florida, resulting in a Christmas Eve bombing that killed Florida NAACP leader Henry Moore and his wife.
With the KKK deeply enmeshed with local law enforcement, the FBI could never find enough evidence to bring any white person to trial for all the violence. Marshall worked relentlessly to get the death conviction reduced and in 1955 was finally successful, though he rarely mentioned the case in later years. Walter Irvin was paroled in 1968 but died under mysterious circumstances in Lake County in 1971. Charles Greenlee, the minor who had received the life sentence, was released in 1962 and died in 2012.
The prevailing attitude in Lake County in the decades since has been one of irritation at outside meddling and a wish to forget old history. In a telling moment of the book, King tries to approach the house of Norma Padgett and is waved off by a relative who tells him, “let sleeping dogs lie.”
Following several years of increased scrutiny upon race relations in America, Devil In the Grove has awakened a grass-roots movement to officially finally find justice for the Groveland Four. Florida state senator Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, is trying to get a bill onto the floor of Legislature to posthumously clear the four men. A University of Florida student organized an online petition asking Florida Governor Rick Scott to exonerate the men, and almost 6,000 signatures have been collected. A Facebook page, Clear The Groveland Four, has been started by local writer and historian Gary McKechnie. In a recent op-ed by Lauren Ritchie of the Lake Sentinel, she chastises inaction by Lake County legislators who have inherited this awful legacy and done nothing to remedy it for their constituents. A movie of the Devil in the Grove by Lionsgate is said to be in production, and King is not done writing about Lake County.
Gilbert King spoke to a packed Mount Dora Community center a few years back, so some residents are probably familiar with the book. But with Devil in the Grove continuing to grow in the state and national conversation, we thought citizens would like to know more about the book, his research, and what else he’s working on — especially at it relates to Mount Dora, where much of the drama of the early 1950s was keenly felt.
Questions and responses were handled by e-mail with King, who lives in New York City.
The extent and degree of violence against blacks committed by Sheriff McCall and his deputies (including James Yates of the Mount Dora police department), is described in shocking detail in Devil in the Grove. (In once scene, to produce confessions from the Groveland Four, two were taken down to the basement of the Lake County courthouse by Yates and another deputy, forced to stand barefoot on broken Coke bottles and then beaten repeatedly with lead-filled hoses.) Was this only a Lake County low, or do you suspect that such violence against blacks in the Jim Crow South to have far more routine than historians until now have been willing to admit?
No, this wasn’t a Lake County low, and violence against blacks (and poor whites) didn’t end in Lake County with the Groveland Boys. I think historians want to quantify violence, and lynching statistics are one way to do that. But lynchings can only be documented with a body, and they don’t account for murders, killings in the custody of law enforcement, or instances of “missing persons.”
You’ve said that many Lake County residents in their 60s and 70s still didn’t know much about the incidents described in Devil in the Grove when the book published. In your mind, does that denial run thicker than ignorance?
I don’t think it’s ignorance. These weren’t comfortable issues to talk openly about at the family dinner table. I still get letters from people who grew up in Lake County at the time and had no idea this was happening around them.
How widely do you think it’s repeated throughout American culture?
I think younger generations are more in tune with the things that are happening around them, mostly because of the age we live in today. But also because the culture is different. The “Greatest Generation” was notoriously tight-lipped about extreme life experiences. How many times have you heard those stories about children of WWII veterans finally finding out, after the father has died, that he was a hero in one battle or another? Or that he would never talk about his experiences during the war? I think there is often the same unwillingness to discuss racial atrocities.
You uncovered a lot in Devil in the Grove. Was there more you felt you couldn’t publish?
Sure, there were stories that probably merited further exploration, but I didn’t want to get too far off track in terms of the story’s narrative.
Have you heard of any negative reactions to the publication of Devil in the Grove?
I’ve heard a few negative things, mostly along the lines of “Why drag this stuff back up? It happened so long ago and the country is different now.” I guess I understand the sentiment, but I strongly believe that these stories didn’t happen so long ago, and it’s important not to whitewash the past.
Mabel Norris Reese, the editor of the Mount Dora Topic, was one of the first figures in Central Florida to stand up to Willis McCall. How did that come about?
Mabel was interesting because she was following McCall’s lead, printing the kind of stories he wanted to see in the press for a time. But after witnessing some of the violence against blacks, Mabel began to see things differently, and she was no longer willing to write about Lake County through rose-colored glasses. She began to question some of the things she saw around her, and that created a good deal of trouble for her.
Reaction from Mount Dora residents to her editorials was largely critical and McCall’s intimidation of her was intense (Her dog was allegedly poisoned, bombs were thrown in her yard, a cross was burned and Sheriff McCall pressured local businesses to pull their ads from the Topic). Do you think that’s why she and her husband sold the paper in 1962?
Yes. I think Mabel paid a price for her editorials and reporting, and she was hit where it hurts — in the pocket book. I don’t think she had any choice but to give up the paper and move to a place that would pay her to write the kinds of stories she wanted to write.
Reese went on to work for the rest of her career at the Daytona Beach News Journal, and was a constant advocate for integration and rights. This was back when most “lady journalists” stuck to the pink pages. How do you think she felt about the city that rejected her?
I think she held a bit of a grudge against the forces that lined up to run her out of town! She continued to report on the activities of Sheriff McCall from Daytona.
In your book you write that Sheriff McCall was beholden to Lake County citrus grove owners for keeping order among workers.
Right. Once Willis McCall was elected into office, he had to balance answering to the electorate with appeasing the moneyed people of Lake County, and those interests weren’t always aligned. The citrus barons didn’t want to see the KKK roll into Stucky Still and drive out the labor force in some Rosewood-like exodus, so they actually provided protection. It wasn’t a matter of being racially enlightened. It was purely economics.
At one point in your book you quote someone as saying, “The groves are full black bodies.” To what extent to you see those grove owners responsible for beatings and deaths incurred by McCall and his deputies?
I would argue that the responsibility goes much deeper. In the time of Jim Crow, people felt as though they needed protection from blacks, and law enforcement, or as Willis McCall would say, “lawnorder” was what they wanted in their communities. So you saw the birth of the “high sheriff” who was basically given free reign to keep blacks in line by any means necessary. This was true across the South. Institutionalized white supremacy couldn’t exist unless we, as a nation, were willing to tolerate it.
How deep do you see the connection between Klan activity and the rule of Sheriff Willis McCall?
According to multiple informants in reports I’ve seen, Willis McCall was strongly connected to the Klan. In those days, the line between Klan and law enforcement was blurred throughout the South.
Deputy James Yates went on to become chief of the Fruitland Park police, which has Klan affiliations up to the present. Do you have any sense of the extent of Yates’ criminal beatings and murders under the guise of law?
In some ways, Yates was emboldened by the Groveland case. He certainly didn’t tone down his activities when it came to falsifying evidence, and from reports I’ve seen, he was still quite capable of violence.
The Supreme Court’s reversal of the death penalty of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin in 1951 sparked a wave of KKK violence across Florida, culminating in the killing of Florida NAACP chief Harry Moore and his wife Harriett with a bomb on Christmas Day. Clearly Jim Crow did not go down without a fight. Although Brown vs. The Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down segregation in schools, was passed in 1954, Mount Dora schools, like many throughout the South, were not integrated until the mid 1960s. To this day the town’s neighborhoods remains segregated.
I’ve met lawyers in Florida who were still working on segregated school cases into the 1970s. Many of these battles had to be waged county by county over decades. We segregate our schools differently today.
Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in his Atlantic Magazine essay “A Case for Reparations” that white America is obliged to right the wrongs of its past. “An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane,” he writes. “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.” What harm does America do to itself by refusing to correct its history?
I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s vital to understand the brutality of our country’s racial past. We tend to whitewash the less palatable moments in our history because they don’t fit the self-image of America that we like to hold on to. We talk about slavery, but we quickly transition to Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and it becomes the story of American exceptionalism. The same is true with Jim Crow. We aren’t comfortable talking about those day to day realities because they are abhorrent. Instead, we’d rather talk about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the passage of civil rights legislation. So the depth of our understanding of life for blacks in America under Jim Crow strictures can be conjured up in a single image of a drinking fountain for Negroes. I think if there’s one thing you learn about Jim Crow in my book is that if you were black and living in Lake County, or anywhere in the South for that matter, separate drinking fountains were the least of your worries.
One measure of control of grove labor is what you describe in Devil in the Grove as “debt peonage.” You write, “The ‘Florida bail bond racket’ was, according to a former Orlando newspaper editor, ‘the most lucrative business in the state.” Can you describe how that worked?
The “work or fight” laws were still being used by sheriffs in Florida well after World War II. They enabled law enforcement to pick up any able-bodied adult male who wasn’t in the military and who wasn’t working that day, and throw them in a jail. The sheriff would then get on the phone with a citrus foreman, saying he had a dozen men ready to go, and grove owners would get cheap labor from these men who had to work off their fines. By law, the sheriff could keep fines up to $7,500 per year. So sheriffs like Willis McCall were incentivized to round men up, (usually blacks) and you can imagine how much power this gave him. He could take away a family’s wage-earner without a moment’s notice.
Douglas Blackman has argued that this system began to fall apart during the Second World War simply because some feared it would be used for enemy propaganda. One distinctive thing about the Groveland Four is that two were veterans. Were they included as a convenient way to send a message?
Blacks who served in the military often returned to the South and continued to wear their uniforms as a silent protest against the second class citizenship of Jim Crow. They fought and were willing to die for this country, and many of them experienced more freedom and acceptance overseas. Continuing to wear the uniform was considered provocative, or “uppity” and there were quite a few soldier lynchings across the South after the war. So it wasn’t a surprise that Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd weren’t considered “good Negroes” by Willis McCall.
The system, however, hasn’t gone away, as it has been shown how the justice system can trap black offenders in municipal court debts that they never can repay, resulting in suspended drivers’ licenses, arrests, lost jobs and lost housing. Have things changed all that much from the days of Jim Crow?
A great deal has changed in the justice system, thanks to men like Thurgood Marshall. The justice system is hardly recognizable today compared to what Marshall was enduring in criminal courts back in the 30s and 40s. But we have a much greater percentage of the U.S. population in prisons today than ever before. So many of the problems and challenges are the same.
In the 1980s, a series of freezes sent the citrus industry in Lake County into full retreat. Many of those grove owners are now becoming rich selling their landholdings to developers whose ties to Rick Scott, Florida’s pro-business governor, run thick. Single-family home development in Lake County will cover those old groves (and graves) in asphalt. Will sleeping dogs now have to lie?
It sure does seem that way. I suppose the upside of growth and development will mean that more swamps may have to be drained. So perhaps some new evidence of atrocities will come into light.
As I hear it, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Devil in the Grove came as a surprise to you. Can you describe the moment?
I think it’s a shock to almost everyone who wins the Pulitzer Prize because everything is done behind closed doors. No one knows which books are nominated and passed on to the Pulitzer board, and the voting and results are kept secret until the prizes are announced. I received the news (text message) while I was on a golf course in Lake County, and I was more shocked than anyone. I was scheduled to do a book talk at The Villages the very next day, and I think they just assumed I would cancel and fly back to New York or something. But I showed up at The Villages and got a standing ovation from everyone in the book club. So that was a moment I won’t ever forget.
Florida state senator Geraldine Thompson has proposed a resolution for the 2016 legislative session to clear the names of Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas — the Groveland Four — pointing to “egregious wrongs” perpetrated against the men by the criminal justice system. And recently, an online petition for Governor Rick Scott to formally exonerate was started by UF senior Joshua Venkataram and has gathered almost 6,000 signatures. Is your book getting a second wind from these recent events?
It’s hard to say, but an exoneration is important to the families. Anything that keeps the story of what the Groveland Boys endured helps in that effort. I talk about it wherever I go. It took a very long time for all of the Scottsboro Boys to be officially exonerated, so it’s my hope that the wait won’t be so long in this case.
In 2013 it was announced that Lionsgate had picked up the rights to film Devil in the Grove, and Anton Corbijn (The American, A Most Wanted Man) had been hired to direct. Can you tell us any more about the film?
It’s moving forward. I’ve been to a few story meetings recently and everyone seems to be committed to making a great movie. So that’s exciting, and I’m sure there will be more news to come very soon.
What are you now working on?
I’m currently doing research on several cases in Lake County about ten years after the events of Groveland. So there are a few familiar characters like Mabel and Willis McCall, and some new folks. Lake County is very fertile ground for narrative nonfiction!
For more about Gilbert King, visit his website: gilbertking.com
Copies of “Devil in the Grove” are available at Barrel of Books and Games in Mount Dora, 128 W. 4th Ave.
To sign the online petition requesting Governor Rick Scott to clear the names of the Groveland Four, the website address is: https://change.org/p/exonerate-the-groveland-four
Originally published at www.mountdoracitizen.com on October 30, 2015.
