Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 151. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 6

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon continues a riveting conversation with pulitzer-prize winning author, Gilbert King. We pick up with the involvement of J.Edgar Hoover and the case of The Groveland Four, including the political dance Thurgood Marshall did with Hoover to strategically move the Civil Rights movement forward.  Often flying under the radar in history, Florida, for some years, was far worse than higher profile areas in the Cotton Belt when it came to violent acts against Civil Rights advocates and the Black community. Florida had the highest per-capita rate of lynching of any state in the country, but as the land of “surf and sun,” it did not fit the narrative of the broader movement of the Civil Rights era that followed Brown vs. the Board of Education. What does “tranquility of the South” have to do with an investigation that was quashed by a U.S. attorney? How did the momentum of a diligent author lead to the exoneration of The Groveland Four 72 years after their arrests? And how did the work of Harry T. Moore and Harriette T. Moore single handedly change the voting demographics, and sacrificed their lives for? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 6 of our special series called Momentum. This series is about ordinary Americans and their struggle for freedom. In Episode 5, I began my conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning author Gilbert King. He has written a phenomenal book called Devil in the Grove, Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys, and The Dawn of a New America. And I cannot recommend it enough. I read widely and extensively. Gilbert King is an incredible writer. The story is gripping. It has the kind of characters that if they were in a novel, you wouldn't believe it. I think every American would benefit from reading Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King. I want to give you a little content warning that this episode, like episode

five, discusses some heavy topics that might not be appropriate for tiny children. You might want to listen to this episode with your headphones on. But these are topics that are important. These are topics that we can no longer afford to gloss over. These are topics that as Americans, we can no longer sweep under the rug, minimize, whitewash, or relegate to boxes of files in a basement somewhere. These are topics that must be brought to light. So let's continue my conversation with Gilbert King. You will not believe where this goes. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. What involvement, if any, did J. Edgar Hoover have in this case? You know, Hoover was directly involved.

Marshall was constantly trying to get him to get investigators down there. And to Hoover's credit, I mean, he has a very complicated reputation when it comes to civil rights. a very complicated reputation when it comes to civil rights. But I think what's really interesting about this case is Thurgood Marshall began to learn how to basically, I want to say any other word, manipulate Hoover. He realized very early on if he could complement the work that Hoover was doing with his assistants, he could get what he wanted. And so they did this kind of little dance where Marshall was less critical in the white press of Hoover. He would say that these agents are the best agents and they're on it and I trust them. And when Hoover heard that, he would just give Marshall more agents and say, work with him, work with him. He's okay now. And so once they figured that out, even though Marshall would go around to churches and black communities and say, why is it that the FBI can solve every interstate car theft?

But when it comes to lynchings, they're always baffled. They can never solve anything. And on Hoover's side, I guess you could say that these civil rights cases were really complicated for him because a lot of times they would go in to the Deep South and do these investigations and they would come up with these airtight cases of lynchings and other civil rights cases, but they could never get indictments locally. And every once in a while, they would get an indictment and it would lead to a trial. They could never get a conviction. So Hoover hated these cases because he felt that they gave the FBI a real black eye. It makes sense that he wants to maintain his ability to

have law and order throughout the country. And if it involves him not even be able to return an indictment for somebody that his agents say committed a crime, that makes his agents look incompetent, when in reality, it was the makeup of the juries. Yes, absolutely. I mean, and that's one of the things that's really disturbing because back then, in order to survive and keep white supremacy sort of indoctrinated, there's a lot of compromises that have to be made. And that's what Thurgood Marshall used to say, this isn't good for white people either. And that's one of the things I think you really see in the course of this book is that the difficulties that it puts on white people to keep this facade of white supremacy

going, they're expected to perjure themselves. They're expected to acquit officers accused of anything. They're expected to convict the people that the prosecutor and the sheriff want them to convict. And it's very difficult to stand up to that. In fact, Justice Jackson, in his opinion, said, what these cases really need is some sturdy white person to stand up to this, and we never see it. And it was really true that there was a lot of pressure. These are dangerous men, and they could make your life miserable

if you didn't go along with these stories. And so that's a lot of what you see is just witnesses disappearing, businesses being burned down because people aren't cooperating. It was a really difficult thing for white people to survive in this kind of environment, too, because it was racial terrorism and white people were expected to play a role. That's such an interesting point that nobody was benefiting from the system of white supremacy. Even the wealthy citrus barons. And this was another thing that really shocked me when I was working on this story. I just expected to follow that old adage of, you know, follow the money. If you want to find the power, well, it's going to be the money people who put Willis

McCall in power. That's the citrus barons. And it was true to an extent. But once Willis McCall was elected, he was responsible to the electorate. And basically in these rural southern communities, it was heavily Klan infested. I mean, Sheriff Willis McCall was leading the Klan in this community. And so this is how Willis McCall stayed in power. So when you had the Klan coming in and start burning down black homes, they started targeting the wealthy citrus parents. And they're saying, if you talk to the FBI and you name any names, we'll burn down every business you own. And so you saw these, some of these people were like state representatives and they were terrified of the constituency because they were violent.

And so that was one of the things that Marshall was just absolutely surprised by, too, is that, you know, all these wealthy white people are now like terrified of the Klan in this community. So that was really where the power was resting. I have read statistics about the incredible levels of violence and lynching in Florida during this time period. That we always think it is Alabama and Mississippi that is like what comes immediately to the forefront of people's minds. Those places were terrible. But Florida in some years was far worse. You know, and that's what was really chilling to me because I would see these cases that happen in Florida and they're very similar to ones that we're all familiar with, like the lynching of Emmett Till.

Well, 10 years before that, there's a lynching of a 14-year-old kid in Florida. Thurgood Marshall gets involved with Harry T. Moore. They're begging the Department of Justice to investigate. the Department of Justice to investigate. This was an out and out lynching with witnesses, and they got nowhere with it. And nobody knows the name Willie James Howard, but this kid was just like Emmett Till. He was lynched for writing a Christmas card to the white cashier in the drug store that he worked sweeping floors. And because he wrote that card, this girl's father and two of her friends came out and just lynched this kid, shot him, dumped him in the river. I mean, it's terrifying. And Thurgood Marshall could get nowhere with these cases. And they didn't get any kind of the coverage that Emmett Till got.

And it just it was just Florida was like this wasteland. And I think the way to describe it, Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching any other state in the country. It was the most dangerous state to be black in. But we don't think of it that way. We think of the cotton belt South as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. When you had these kind of atrocities happening in those cotton belt states, people sort of expect, well, that's a civil rights thing. When it happened in Florida, people didn't know what to expect. You know, I refer to it in the book as being South of the south. It's the land of surf and sun. It's kind of progressive way down in the south Florida. People just didn't know how to think of Florida. So when these cases came up, they were sort of aberrations and they didn't fit into that civil rights movement mode. And do you think that that contributes to why people like Harry Moore are not regarded as heroes of the civil rights movement? Yeah, I mean, I'm actually stunned by that because, you know, Harry T. Moore was really the first modern martyr to the civil rights movement. So Thurgood Marshall,

he wasn't a lawyer, but he was the executive secretary of the NAACP at the time. And he was really a key part of civil rights in Florida. One of the things Harry T. Moore did was bring more than 100,000 black people onto the voting rolls. So he basically changed the political landscape of Florida. And as you can imagine, for that, he was hated. But when the Groveland story happened, Thurgood Marshall, who knew him well and worked with him in the past, sort of put him on the job and said, keep the pressure on Willis McCall in the media and in politics. This is where this case will grow. More attention on what Willis McCall has done.

And so that's exactly what he became, a thorn in Sheriff Willis McCall has done. And so that's exactly what he became, a thorn in Sheriff Willis McCall's side. In the middle of trial, I mean, it was Christmas night, 1951, getting ready for the second trial. The Ku Klux Klan put a bomb under Harry T. Moore's house, killing both him and his wife. And nobody knows the name of Harry T. Moore. In fact, there's a monument to civil right martyrs in Alabama, and Harry T. Moore is not even listed on it. And I think it was just because it was Florida, number one, and it was also so early in the pre-civil rights era that people weren't thinking that these kind of things were even happening. So I'm shocked by it that Harry T. Moore should be a household name and really

nobody's ever heard of him. Yeah, I think some of it has to do, like you said, with the geography. Some of it has to do with the time period that we really tend to categorize. Well, the civil rights era began after the Brown versus Board decision in 1954, that's really when we see this momentum picking up. And this was several years prior to that. And so it kind of stands as this little aberration in time and space to the broader movement that was propelling forward. But yet, I'm always fascinated by those kinds of stories because it is those stories upon which everything else is built. Oh, you're absolutely right. And you look at Florida and this continues, like even after Brown versus Board, that remarkably, there's a reaction to Brown versus Board. So in history, you'd have these cycles. Well, Brown versus Board, probably the most impactful civil rights case of the 20th century. And what do you have in the

immediate aftermath of that? You have the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. You have these white citizens councils popping up everywhere, opposed to desegregation. Thurgood Marshall called them the Uptown Klan Clan because these were like doctors, lawyers, politicians, reputable people in society who were just absolutely opposed to the desegregation of the public schools. All of a sudden you have bombings, you have all this racial terror that starts in the 1950s as a reaction to this. And Florida was no stranger to this, had more than their share of church bombings, synagogues, black churches, all sorts of violence that occurred in the aftermath of Brown v. Board. I want to go back to Harry and Harriet Moore.

Harriet was his wife. They were very active in the NAACP in Florida. They were very active in the Progressive Voters League. They were very active in the Progressive Voters League. They, as a couple, have some of the biggest impact, direct impact on civil rights in the state of Florida. As you mentioned, after Thurgood Marshall won a victory at the Supreme Court where they were able to eliminate race-based primary election voting, that you had to be, they were white only primaries. Once that barrier was broken, the Moors took it upon themselves to teach people how to vote, to teach them how to be registered to vote, and built this entire NAACP network in the state of Florida. Just so many chapters, so many members, so many people registered to vote,

taught how to vote. And then almost within very short order after Willis McCall shot the two men that he was supposed to be transporting, I want to say, didn't that happen in November of 51, say, didn't that happen in November of 51, the shooting, the Willis-McCaul shooting? And then Christmas Day of 1951, Harry and Harriet Moore's house exploded. Right. And, you know, there were investigations into this and it was definitely the Klan. There was no doubt it was the Klan. I think this is like one of the shocking things about this is like Sheriff Willis McCall was, the reason we know this, there were FBI informants in the Klan. And they said Sheriff Willis McCall was going into these Klan meetings and, you know, they're filled with law enforcement.

And so he's basically telling them when the FBI comes, you don't say this. Here's what you say. Prepared statements. And he was telling them basically how to beat these civil rights investigations. Harry T. Moore, he was very focused on Willis McCall. And there was no doubt that he was the most hated man in Florida at this point for what he was doing politically and bringing all the voters into the system. And so he was hated for that. But once he started going after Willis McCall, I think that was the final straw. And there was never any proof that could connect Willis McCall

to this death. But it was very clear that the Apopka clan was involved. And sure, Willis McCall was the head of that. So, you know, we don't know if there were any meetings and whatever. We're never able to prove it. The men who that the FBI believed were responsible all died fairly quickly afterwards, and they could never really get the investigation off the ground. One of the FBI agents wrote something in a report that I found really disturbing. You know, it turned out his investigation got quashed. He felt they were close to identifying the right men, and it got quashed by the U.S. attorney, who was himself a segregationist and probably a white supremacist as well. But one of the phrases that comes in his report, he said, why is this being quashed? Four words, tranquility of the South.

In other words, if people really knew what was happening, they might riot in the streets. And so this phrase of just tranquility of the South, let's just keep this undercover. All of this stuff, these investigations never saw the light of day. The shootings, when Sheriff McCall shot the defendants on the side of the road, that investigation was locked away. I filed the Freedom of Information Act. I was the first person to open those envelopes. They had not been seen before. Thurgood Marshall lawyers never saw these reports, these damning reports saying these guys were responsible for murder. And so that's probably

the most shocking part of the story is that this is not some rogue law enforcement person. At every step of the way, someone had his back, whether it was a prosecutor, the judge, the U.S. attorney, way, someone had his back, whether it was a prosecutor, the judge, the U.S. attorney, even the governor himself. And so that's how this white supremacy in law enforcement could exist. Everyone had his back. Some of the facts of this case are so mind-blowing, but it also perfectly illustrates my point that white Americans listening to this, whatever your impression of what the South was like for many Black Americans in the 1950s, it was worse. It was worse than you can imagine. It was not just some people calling somebody a racial slur occasionally on a street corner. No. Thousands and thousands

and thousands of people were killed for absolutely no reason. And Sharon, that was like the most important point I think I've heard in a long time. When I was working on this story, I would look back and I would see those, you know, iconic images from the Jim Crow South, like the separate water fountains or the separate entrances. Yes. And I remember after all the research I'd done, seeing those pictures again, the ones you see in your textbooks when you're learning about what is Jim Crow South? What is that about? I believe these photographs actually are a disservice to American history. I think they whitewash American history because you come away with the thought like, well, that's really rude and impolite to have separate water fountains. Rude and impolite are not the words I would use to find what I was describing. It was,

you know, terrorism. And I think it's because as Americans, we're not really comfortable with this narrative. We like the narrative of like, all right, well, there was the original sin of slavery, but, you know, then Abe Lincoln came along and with the Emancipation Proclamation, we cleaned that up. And then there was a hundred years of Jim Crow and, you know, not such great things.

But then Martin Luther King came along and we have the Civil Rights Movement. Well, what about that hundred years in between? To me, like, we don't even know about that. And we don't want to know about it because it's so violent and disgraceful. So it's just something that doesn't sit well with us as a narrative to acknowledge this. So we see the pictures of the water fountain, like, okay, it was unfair. We're not talking about murder and racial terrorism. That's what we should be talking about. We have these stories that, you know, of lynchings, of just law enforcement. You know, I can't even begin to calculate how destructive it is. I went to the Equal Justice Initiative

and looked at the legacy, the slavery museum, and you see that the number of lynchings represented by those black slabs of granite from each county and the name just building up. It has sort of the effect of walking through the Vietnam War Memorial, you know, the memorial where it just sort of hits you. And you realize Lake County, I think, had three lynchings documented. I mean, we know for a fact that Sheriff Willis McCall has killed dozens of people. They don't show up as lynchings. They show up as police resisting arrest. And we're not even talking about people who disappeared. I mean, even in Lake County, when I was going through the records, you know, you would find like uncles and aunts, like, where's our nephew? He just disappeared.

The last thing we know, he was trying to start a union in the orange groves and we have, we don't know where he is. And the response is, oh, he probably just went up north and got a new job. Don't worry, you'll hear from him. You know, there was a common phrase that the citrus groves in Lake County were fertilized with the bodies of black men. That was a common phrase. And so, you know, for someone to disappear and just be dumped in the swamp, those don't count in the lynching statistics. So the level of terror is so underplayed, in my opinion. Yeah, I totally agree. If you look up the statistics, the statistics will shock you and then take whatever that statistic is and probably multiply it by many, many fold.

I absolutely agree with that. So after Willis McCall shoots these two men, one of them dies, one of them lives. What happens next? Well, that's the strange part. Now you're really down to one defendant because two of them have been killed. The third one is serving life in prison because he was 16 and he's got mercy. So what does the state do? They give Walter Irvin three weeks for his wounds to heal, and then they bring him back to trial. And the beginning of the trial is a little bit interesting because at this point, this story has started to get a little bit bigger now. Harry T. Moore is

dead. It's gotten a lot of attention. The governor at the time sort of sends an emissary down there to talk to Thurgood Marshall and say, listen, we don't want this in the press anymore. There's a citrus boycott. There's a tourism boycott. It's starting to affect Florida financially. And they don't want this Wild West mentality to scare away northerners from coming down or this money that's starting to be invested. And so the governor wants to make this case go away. And he says, just tell Walter Irvin to plead guilty. We'll spare him from the electric chair. And then once things die down, we'll work on getting him out. And, you know, what does Marshall hear when he gets a plea like this, an offer? Like, I was thinking, well, of course, he's never going to take that. He's going to fight

that in court. That's like movie star stuff. That's not what really happens. In this case, Thurgood Marshall's like, that's the best deal I've ever heard. They're not going to kill you. Take it. And he tries to persuade Irvin to just say that he's guilty because Marshall has spent so much of these years in the 40s and 50s standing with the mothers outside of these prisons where their kids are electrocuted and killed. And it's just, anytime Marshall has an opportunity to save somebody, he's trying to do

it. He tells Walter Irvin about this deal, and Irvin refuses to take it. He says, I'm not going to lie on myself. And he basically says, I have the great Thurgood Marshall representing me anyway. We've already won in the Supreme Court. We can win this. And Marshall is just shaking his head and like, you don't understand. Florida is going to kill you. And that's exactly what happens. They go through the next trial. It's the same kind of trial. And this time Irvin is convicted and sentenced to death once again. And so this is what Marshall was trying to avoid. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Was he ever executed? No. What's really interesting is that the prosecutor in this case, Jesse Hunter, begins to have second thoughts about this case.

He's sick. I believe he has cancer. And he feels like he's dying. And he actually ends up writing a letter to Governor Leroy Collins saying, I don't believe we got this case right. And he calls for the commuting of Irvin's sentence. And so Governor Leroy Collins does his own investigation and basically says, I think these guys were railroaded. I'm commuting the sentence of Walter Irvin. So Walter Irvin still had to serve 20 years in prison. He was released in like 1968, went back to Lake County for a funeral of an uncle.

And the day he gets back to Lake County, he's found dead in his car. Were they ever able to determine what his cause of death was? At the time, they said it was natural causes. I looked into it. I talked to the family. I ended up meeting some of the family who were there when Walter Irvin died. And they said this, which I thought was so, just really capsized everything that I was thinking. They said his natural causes was that he had two bullets still in his body. He had liver failure from the wounds. He died of his gunshot wounds from 20 years earlier when Sheriff McCollall shot him. He ended up dying at the age of 40 instead of the age of 20.

But they said he was dead from those gunshot wounds. Willis McCall killed him, but he died from those wounds in the car. Somebody did not get to him while he was back. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It is my girl in the studio. studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Whatever happened to Willis McCall after he shot one of the defendants, the other one was

re-sentenced to death. Harry Moore was out there drawing attention to himself by trying to draw attention to Willis McCall. Harry Moore and his wife end up dying, leaving behind two young daughters. Whatever happened to Willis McCall? You know, nothing that you'd like to see happen. You know, he ended up just serving seven more terms as sheriff. He didn't leave office until 1972. And the reason for that was he had kicked to death a black mentally disabled prisoner in his cell for over some kind of like parking infraction and killed him. And there were

witnesses. So he was indicted and brought to trial in Orange County. And then after about 45 minutes, the jury actually acquitted him. And, you know, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement did an investigation because they thought they had an airtight case here. And they talked to some of the jurors afterwards. And this was a case where two witnesses disappeared that were supposed to testify against Willis McCall. One of them disappeared. One of them was shot dead in a Lake County parking lot. So I think the people on the jury knew what the deal was.

And they told the FDLE in their interviews that, you know, they said, we thought he was guilty, but we got to live down here. And that was sort of a remnant from the 40s and 50s, the same kind of poisoning of juries. And that was in the 1970s. Exactly. I mean, the first thing he did after his acquittal, he filed for re-election and went down and ended up losing by a couple hundred votes. And I think his basic line was like, well, if I didn't have that damn murder trial, I could have been out campaigning. Like he had blamed it on this nuisance of being, you know,

accused of murder. But, you know, his son ends up coming in office and the McCall name still lives and still has the power in Lake County. And everybody knew who the real person in power, the most powerful person was still Sheriff Willis McCall, even out of office. I would love to hear more about the investigation into who bombed Harry and Harriet Moore's home. Because this was a case that the FBI looked into multiple times. The state of Florida looked into multiple times. This was not a like, oh, well, that happened and it's over forever. They tried multiple times to find who did it. They really did. And I do have to say, like, when you look at the FBI, whatever their stance on civil rights is, they actually did send

investigators down and they did do really valuable reports to me. To me, they laid out the entire story. They were interviewing other cops and other cops were like, this is something that's hard to believe. But, you know, I'll give you an example. So after the Groveland boys are beaten in the basement below the jail, the FBI investigates. These guys got welts and bruises and blood all over them. The FBI agents are going around asking law enforcement about this. And the law enforcement, they have these prepared statements. They're basically saying, oh, yes, I arrested Walter Irvin on such and such a day. He had welts and bruises all over his body. He must have just gotten in a fight before I met him.

You know, and that was their official statement. And then beneath that, it says off the record, the officer told the agent that it was he and the milkman that did the beatings themselves. And so I remember reading this going, who thinks they're going off the record with the FBI? But the truth of the matter is they kind of were because these reports were just buried. And so the whole story is laid out in these FBI reports. They're naming names, everyone who's doing everything. And so they did a really good job on it. I think when they started investigating the bombing of Harry T. Moore and Harriet Moore's

house, they started to identify, I think there was four sort of rogue Klansmen that they believed were responsible. And they'd already got them in a lie where they lied about their whereabouts. They were at a Klan meeting and the FBI could document that through informants. So they lied about it. And they were just in the process of saying, look, we have this perjury against you now. Let's talk about the bombing. But then these guys started getting killed, the Klansmen.

And then the FBI investigation just sort of shut down. So they believe, the FBI believed that they never were able to finish it because it was quashed from the U.S. attorney level. But later on, decades later, Attorney General Charlie Crist, who later became governor, he reopened the case. And they did a very thorough investigation, and they basically concluded that, from what they could tell, it was these four Klansmen, now deceased, who were responsible for this. But they could never really find any definitive proof or anything linking Sheriff McCall. But I can tell you that Harriet Moore, some of her last words was basically, we know who did this. Read the

newspaper. See what's going on in Lake County. And Walter White, head of the NAACP, he felt the same way. He said, this is because of Willis McCall. He's behind this. And again, because people have never heard of Harry T. Moore and Harriet Moore, Harry was killed very quickly after the bombings. He experienced something similar to the defendant that Willis McCall shot in that ambulances would not transport Black patients. And that is something that, again, it should shock Americans. That somebody can be shot or their home can be bombed. And we will not put you in our ambulance. So Harry T. Moore had to be, you know, driven by other people to the hospital a long distance far and waiting a long time for medical care. This is not any kind

of quick response. But then Harriet lived for nine days after the bombings. And so she did have some level of cognition after the injuries before she passed away. And so she was able to talk about what had happened to a certain extent. Beautiful. It's their wedding anniversary, the 25th wedding anniversary. You know, and the night, you know, just minutes before they're killed, they're actually cutting a cake and recreating their wedding picture in front of their family. And, you know, after the bomb goes off, Harry T. Moore's mother's in the house and she's on the other side of the house. So she's

not hurt. So when they drive Harry to the hospital, he's basically dying in his mother's arms in the back seat. And, and then, you know, Harriet just lingering for another week and just saying, you know, I just hope that the others can pick up where we've left off because I'm going to die too. It just, just breaks your heart. And you just realize like the level of hatred and, and, and, you know, the, the disrespect for humanity is just, just so chilling when you read these kinds of personal stories. There was a more recent development with the Groveland Four in 2019. And I wonder if you could fill us in about that.

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story because, you know, after my book came out, more and more people started reading it. And, you know, I get approached at book talks and people were always telling me about things. We got to do something about this. And all of a sudden, these Democratic legislatures had a book club and they were reading Devil in the Grove in the book club. And they said, we got to do a claims bill. This is an abomination of justice. We have to do something about this.

And so they started a claims bill on the Democratic side. And then it turns out the Republicans were also reading the book in their book club. And they challenged their fellow legislators to a contest to see who could get more co-sponsors. And it was really picking up. And I got a call saying, you know, I think this claims bill is going to pass. You should come down here. So we got all the families together, and we were in the balcony of the state legislature. And it's really beautiful.

Like the speaker, Richard Corcoran, said, I understand there's been some kind of contest. We don't know about who won the contest or how many co-sponsors. Let's just do it right now. And every single member of the legislature, 117 of them, voted to co-sponsor the bill for some kind of relief for the Groland boys. put their hands on their heart and turned to the family members up in the balcony and said, on behalf of the state of Florida, we apologize for this gross injustice, and we are recommending to the governor that they be pardoned. And so that became the next step. Governor DeSantis was only in office for a couple days, and he actually held a clemency board meeting. We thought it was just going to be to put it on the agenda so he could say he's staying true to his word. But they decided to have a hearing right then. And so I was there. The families were there. Believe it or not, sometimes you think about this case as being so ancient history, right? Well, Norma Padgett is still alive. She showed up at the pardon hearing and she actually said that, you know, she stuck to her story and said, I do not want these men pardoned. And then it got a little bit testy in there. There was sort of kind of a he said, she said thing going on among the family members. And I remember I was asked to go up there and testify and basically wanted to bring it back to what had happened in that courtroom as the reason that we're here. year, the proven manufacturing of evidence and all of the prosecutorial misconduct.

I said, what happened in court is the reason we're here. And fortunately, they voted right then. And it was, again, unanimous for nothing. They voted to pardon the Groland boys. But I have to say, the family members said, that's great, but you can pardon guilty people. We want exonerations. And so the Florida Department of Law Enforcement decided from the Attorney General's office to reopen the case. And they did a two-year investigation and it landed on the state attorney's desk in Lake County. And he was tasked with looking at this

report and basically found that there was no path towards exoneration in posthumous cases, that there was no path towards exoneration in posthumous cases, mainly because they didn't have any new evidence. And so the state attorney and I started talking about this and I went down there. We would talk about the case and we would drive around in trucks and he was determined to find new evidence. And I tried to find the trial evidence. I could never find it. It was misplaced. I was told for years I looked, but I don't have subpoena power and I don't have the power of a state attorney. He showed up in these actual courtrooms and actually located, it was in a completely different courtroom, he located the trial evidence. on the night that he was convicted for sexually assaulting Norma Padgett. And those pants were presented by the state attorney at the time as having a stain there that he told the jury was from a semen stain, that it was tested and it linked to Walter Irvin. Well, this state attorney, Bill Gladson, actually had that stain tested again for DNA. And it was found to be a non-human stain.

And so at this point, the state attorney said, that's new evidence. This proves that the prosecutor was using faulty manufactured evidence to railroad the defendants. And so he put together this brilliant motion, presented it in court in November of 2021. presented in court in November of 2021. And the judge dismissed all charges, formally exonerating the Groland boys after 72 years. What was your sense from the families that you spoke to about this? What is your sense of the legacy of being the family members of people who were murdered or passed away for other reasons, because they were in prison, et cetera. What's your sense of what the legacy of that has been

for their families? You know, I think it's one of the interesting things I learned in the research of this book was they brought in like an economist from London to look at this case. And he said he was writing for like these communist, like leftist press in the day, which actually with them and the black newspapers, they covered this with a real sense of urgency, unlike what the white press was doing at the time. And these were real intellectuals. And they came in and they're like, this is not a case about sex. This is a case about economics. And they came in and they're like, this is not a case about sex. This is a case about economics.

And sure enough, that's what I think it was. The men who were framed for this were people who I believe were, you know, living the American dream. They were hardworking. They had served their country in the military. They owned real estate. They had cars. And there was a great deal of jealousy in the community that they had some of the best land because they drained the swamp and took the high part of the land. And so by doing that, by draining the swamp, it sort of made this forced desegregation where blacks and whites

were living together. But the blacks had the best land because they founded it. And so there's all sorts of jealousies and attacks on these families, you know, knocking down their fences, killing their cows, doing those kind of things. And Willis McCall would show up and they'd say, there's no black person that can file a charge against a white person. That's not happening. So this is how they lived. And they were, you know, prosperous and trying to live the American dream. And they were the ones that were targeted for this. And so that was what The Economist was looking at. He said, this is not a sex case.

This is about economics and jealousies. And that's a real common theme that you see in a lot of these. And I just felt, you know, the family's like, we don't have criminal records. None of our family, we're actually working in the communities. We have good reputations. We have clean houses. And why is this happening to us? And that was the thing that really was just frustrating. It's like you couldn't ask people to conform and assimilate into a society any more than these families did. And this was the price they paid.

and this was the price they paid. Your book is called Devil in the Grove, Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. And I wanted to ask you, before we close this out, what was the dawn of a new America? What does that mean to you? You know, I think that it's indicative of these stages that we go through as a country. And I think, you know, I think that it's indicative of these of these stages that we go through as a country. And I think, you know, following World War Two, we entered into this new era. And I think at this point you started to see more focus on equality, you know, leading to Brown versus Board, but also in the criminal justice system as well. And I think Thurgood Marshall was like the architect of really fixing the things that were wrong with the Constitution. It's a living, breathing document, he believed, and it could be improved. And Marshall was a great patriot.

He believed in America. And he says, we're not living up to our promise. We need to have equality throughout. And so I think the dawn of a new America is really, I believe, these lawyers who are out front of the civil rights movement. Before this got passed over to Martin Luther King and protest in the street, all the gains in civil rights were done in the courts. And this, I believe, was Thurgood Marshall and his lawyers, and they were the best and the brightest. Any case that involved 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment law, you wanted Thurgood Marshall's legal defense

fund. Those were the best and the brightest. Their record before the Supreme Court was phenomenal. And so I believe that just the lawyers that were ushering in these civil rights changes, we call it sometimes the pre-civil rights movement. But I think this part of America was just so important because they had to sue for the rights to protest. And that's where you could pass the baton from the legal sphere over to the protesting and civil rights activism. I couldn't agree more that there's so much that we still need to learn. There's so much that we still need to uncover. There's so much that we still need to uncover that Americans need to get their arms around. And it really begins the momentum during this time period. These are the things upon what other things are built on. Without this foundational element, the March on Washington can't happen. The Civil Rights Act can't happen.

The Voting Rights Act can't happen. These things were necessary. They had to come before. And this is a time period that fascinates me so much. This is a time period that I am just passionate about learning about. And I wanted to just give you a hearty commendation on this book. Won a Pulitzer Prize. You obviously don't need my commendation, but not only is it so thoroughly researched, it's beautifully written and absolutely compelling, very compelling. In

many ways, it reads like a novel and it's just an incredibly important read so thank you so much for your work that's so kind of you you know it's funny i have some novelist friends and they're like you know if i put a sheriff like that in one of my novels no one would believe it nope you know you couldn't believe it no you wouldn't if they were like um a thousand men chased him into the swamp that would that's not real you know what i mean like it wouldn't make it in a novel because it you could not suspend your disbelief right i know it's true and that's you know truth of strangers and fiction as they say but yes especially in this in this era in the south that's for sure very true well i am extremely grateful for your time today thank you so much for both your book and for your time. I know that listeners are going to,

first of all, they're going to buy your book and read it because it is truly, there's so much that we didn't even get to talk about today that I would absolutely encourage everybody to do that. But I know people are going to really value hearing from you. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sharon. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. so much, Sharon. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Likewise. When I say that I had my mind blown so many times reading this book, researching this story, talking to Gilbert King, I mean, I feel like I have read a lot of things and learned a lot of things. Certainly would never say that I'm like the world's biggest expert in any topic. Certainly would never say that I'm like the world's biggest expert in any topic.

The amount of things I did not know in this story, I just could not get over. That is why I had to call Gilbert King and be like, can you please come talk to me? He was so generous with his time. I just think so highly of him. And I also wanted to point out what you heard him talk about at the end of the episode, where his work was able to provide the momentum for the entire Florida state legislature, for the governor of Florida, for the Florida attorney general, his work was able to provide the momentum. He's not a powerful politician. He's just a writer. And it was his work that in many ways was able to get the type of exoneration that these men deserved, that their families deserved. I also want to highlight

Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriet. These people's names need to be in the history books. These two individuals single-handedly changed the demographics of the voting population in the state of Florida. These two people made incredible strides in gaining the civil rights of people who lived in Florida. I just cannot overstate the contributions of enrolling 100,000 voters who could not previously vote and then teaching them how to vote. I cannot overstate the incredible contribution that both of them made and sacrificed their lives for. These truly are some of the first martyrs of the civil rights movement. And their names need to be repeated. We now need to

teach others about Harry T. and Harriet Moore. So spread the word, my friends, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder,

and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.