 All right, so I think we'll get started, everyone. Thanks for being here, and I think this is a special treat and a really exciting way to continue our discussions about taking on issues of bias, discrimination, racism. I know the Senate has been doing considerable work over the last few years, trying to make sure that our institutions are as colorblind and equitable as possible. We had a very good training with the Human Rights Commission back a couple months ago. That was, you don't do one-offs when you're trying to make sure that we have systems that work properly and fairly for everybody. And it was sometime earlier this year when I read a story in The Washington Post, and Gilbert's name came up, and it was because it brought some completion or closure to a book that I had been lent actually by Peter Sterling. And so I reached out to Gilbert and said, hey, is there any way we could ever get you up to Vermont to talk about some of these themes? And it's just worked out perfectly, and I want to thank University of Vermont, also the ASIL, and to be with Vermont who have both helped support getting Gilbert here to talk about his work, which I think is, it will be an interesting angle to help us think about some of the challenges we have in Vermont to be a fair and equitable state and society. And so Gilbert's book, Devil and the Grove, some of you have gotten chapters of the book last week, some of you have already read the whole thing. I've told Gilbert his popularity rating in the Grove is much higher than probably the average audience in America right now. And he's got a number of other books and almost all of which focus on themes of criminal justice system, racial justice in the criminal justice system. One logistical issue, I think Gilbert will probably talk for a bit and then we'll open it up for questions, which I hope will be as interesting as I think they will be. And because this is our normal lunch break, I have warned Gilbert that if we are going much past, say, 115, there may be rumblings in the gallery, so we'll probably wrap up sometime around 115, so we can plan on that so we have time before we come back to the Senate floor. So with that, Gilbert King, thank you for being here. Thank you, Senator. Take it away. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Ash. It's actually an honor to be here. This is a really special moment for me. I really enjoy doing these talks and already I can tell I got some questions standing here that I know I need to be on my A game because people are big readers here and they have really interesting questions. So what I'm gonna basically do, and I have to say, I feel pretty safe here today. It's not always the case when I go out and speak. Usually I'm touring the Deep South, especially Florida. And I remember the very first book talk that I did was 2012 when the book first came out. And I decided to go back into Lake County to do a talk, right into Groveland. And I thought this was a good idea at the time, but I also knew that nerves were pretty raw in this part of Lake County, that many of the people who involved in the story still live there, their families live there. And as I was walking towards the community center in Groveland, I started to feel a little bit nervous, like I don't normally feel. And I thought, you know, this would be one of those talks. I don't mind if nobody shows up tonight. I'll be okay with that. But as I got closer, I saw one of those newspaper boxes. And my photograph was on the front page and said, author here tonight. I thought, oh, there are a couple people here. And so I started walking towards, I saw more and more people in the parking lot. They were all milling about, and now I knew it was gonna be packed. And as I'm walking to the building, this woman comes running out and she says, Mr. King, Mr. King, I just feel it's only fair to warn you that we had two death threats called in about your appearance this evening. And I just remember my heart just sunk. This is my first book talk. And she goes, but you have nothing to worry about. I'm sure County Sheriff's Department, they're on their way over. I was like, did you read the book? Like, man. For the last department I wanted to. But it turned out that there was an armed deputy who stood behind me the whole night. And there was actually no problems. And it was one of the most interesting book talks I've ever done because two hours after I finished, people just wouldn't leave. They were talking with each other. There was a young African American who's not young now, but he was a seven-year-old boy at the time. And he said, I remember sitting on the lap of the National Guard, a National Guardsman, who had a machine gun. And he was protecting my neighborhood. And I'll just never forget that. That was part of my growing up. And other people were just bringing up these very visceral experiences about people they knew in the story, their own experiences with them. And so it was a very powerful talk, despite the fact that I was terrified right before I got there. So I'm gonna walk you through that story a little bit and just sort of talk about the relevance of it today and things that have happened in the news recently regarding a case that's 70 years old. And what I generally like to do when I start out with these kind of talks is just sort of provide some kind of historical context as to what was going on, not just in Florida, but the country at the time. Because I think that's a really important part to really understand. And one of the things I like to talk about is images that we've all seen in textbooks. When we talk about the Jim Crow South, those iconic images of the separate water fountains, colored white water fountains. And you see that the separate entrances and the movie theaters and the Jim Crow balconies. And I remember seeing those photographs all my life, but seeing them after I was researching this book, it hit me a little bit differently. And one of the things that struck me was that these photographs, I think whitewash American history. I think they really do not tell the true tale of what was happening. Those water fountain pictures make it look like it was rude or impolite to African Americans at the time. The two words I would use to describe what I was seeing in my research at the time was not rude and impolite. It would be brutality and terrorism. And so when I saw those images, I thought this is really the images of what we're seeing of the Jim Crow South and it's not accurate. And I think sometimes we like to think of America in terms of we had the original sin of slavery, but then Abe Lincoln came along and the Emancipation Proclamation. And then a hundred years went by, we still had some civil rights trouble, but then Martin Luther King came along in the 60s and we fixed all that. And there was a hundred years between slavery and the civil rights movement that was pretty brutal. And I think some of these stories are so uncomfortable and so painful that sometimes we don't like to talk about them. And I think if you go down to Montgomery, Alabama, there's a museum that's sort of opening the dialogue on this because this nation has really never had what South Africa had after apartheid, which is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If you go to Germany and you can't run into a place that doesn't have monuments, there's people are educated about the past so that you don't repeat the past. In the United States, we've just kind of swept those stories under and they're not easy to deal with, so we don't deal with them. And so because we're doing that, I think we continue to have problems rooted in the past because we've never fully addressed them. And so that was one of the things that really made it stand out. Those textbook images of those water fountains, that's the image we're gonna be taking away, that's not gonna help anybody. We need to know the truth and we really need to really know what it was like back then so that we can understand how to move forward. So another thing I like to talk about is Thurgood Marshall especially, and I'll talk about him a little bit today. But if you remember, there's a photograph in the book where Marshall is sitting next to Joe Lewis, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, and Benjamin O. Davis who commands the Tuskegee Airmen. And here they are, three African Americans in the prime of their lives, 1946. And they're in Cincinnati, Ohio and Thurgood Marshall's about to get this award, the Spingard Medal, the most important contribution to the African American community. And he's the second youngest person to get it, I think next to Richard Wright, the author. And if you look at that photograph of Marshall, you'll see that he's very thin looking. There's not another single picture of him like that. He was a pretty rotund man. In this particular picture, he's very thin, he's got a nice pinstripe suit, really dapper spectator shoes. And I remember looking at that picture saying, why was it just that one picture, that one moment in his life? And if you read the book, you'll see it begins at the first chapter in 1946 in Columbia, Tennessee. And there was a reason Marshall was looking so thin in that photograph. It's because he was involved in such an explosive case that after he won against all odds, the acquittal of 23 African Americans who were accused of attempted murder on police, technically what they were doing was they were World War II veterans who were being attacked by the Klan and law enforcement and they fired back to defend their homes because there had been lynchings in this neighborhood. Marshall went in and against all odds, won acquittal in that case. And after that case, he gets in his car with some other African American lawyers and journalists and they're heading back to Nashville, Tennessee because they didn't dare stay in Columbia. And they got pulled over by police, they dragged him out of the car, threw him in the car and took him down to Duck River. And everyone in that car that saw Marshall leave was absolutely convinced Marshall was about to be lynched that night. And they took him down to the river and Marshall said I could see all these white men gathered under a tree by the river. And he said he thought he was done. Fortunately, that other car that he was in made a U-turn and circled back and the white supremacists who were there just felt there were too many witnesses, they didn't want another race case exploding. And so they tried to arrest him on drunk driving which was totally fabricated and he was let loose. But think about that. This is the first African American Supreme Court justice and he's nearly lynched on the side of a river from practicing law. And so I tried to start the book out with that kind of context to show what was happening because in the summer of 1946, there was a wave of soldier lynchings across the South. African Americans would be turned from duty and now they were being lynched in their uniform. Why were they being lynched? Because they were wearing their uniforms as a form of subtle protest. Because you couldn't protest, it would be broken up in two seconds with arrests. Back then the only way to really protest, Jim Crow, was to wear your uniform and remind people in your community that you were willing to fight and die for your country. And that was seen as uppity in the South. And so in the summer of 1946, there was this wave of soldier lynchings across the South. And it just sort of put things into context for many African Americans who felt, you know, I was willing to fight and die for this country and now I come back and I'm being forced into second class citizenship. I had more freedom and respect in Europe when I was serving overseas. And so that gentle reminder of, well it wasn't really a gentle reminder, it was a reminder that where your place was. And so that was the context that I sort of began the story. And I'll start Devlin the Grove story and just give you a brief, you know, recount of it just to get to the other issues that we're gonna be talking about today. But the story begins in July of 1949. Norman Padgett, 17 year old farm girl. She's married to a 22 year old man by the name of Willie Padgett. Within a few months of marriage, they're already separated. There's rumors that Willie has been beating his wife and that the families didn't want them together. But by July of 1949, they tried to rekindle their relationship. And so they went out, picked up a pint of whiskey, went out drinking and dancing. And then something happens on the side of the road in Lake County, about one o'clock in the morning of July. We don't know exactly what. But what we do know is that Norman, suddenly by the next morning makes the accusation that she has been abducted and raped by four African Americans. Quick reaction, within hours, the Ku Klux Klan rolls into Groven, Florida and starts burning down the black community homes. It's an intense manhunt out for these four African Americans. Norma says, I don't know how to describe it, she says in their initial thing, she couldn't recognize any of them. She'd never seen them before. But now after talking to Sheriff Willis McCall, she knows exactly who the men are. So Sheriff Willis McCall rounds up three African Americans, throws them in the jail, throws them in the basement and him and his deputies start beating them mercilessly to two of them confess to this crime. The fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, sees what's happening. He doesn't want to be any part of this. He sees the black homes are burned down. He knows that the Groven boys are being beaten in the basement. He gets out of town. Sheriff McCall puts together a posse of more than a thousand armed men. They hunt him down and shoot him dead. Coroner reports that there was more than 400 slugs pulled from his body. There was no way Ernest Thomas was being brought back alive. So now you're down to the Groven three, the three Groven boys. I won't get into the trial too much. The trial is basically a travesty of justice. If you read it, read the transcripts, it's very obvious what was happening. What happened was, as soon as Norma Padgett did her job and stood up in that witness box and pointed to the three African Americans who were left and said, those are the men. The trial was over. They didn't need any evidence. Everybody in the courtroom knew that that was the end right there. Those accusations were so powerful. And so all the other supporting evidence, which was perjury, manufactured evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, it was rampant throughout this case, but none of it really mattered because Norma Padgett's word at that time meant everything. And so that was enough to see that the Groven boys were sentenced to death. Thurgood Marshall and his lawyers really get involved at this point. They know they're not gonna win in a Southern courtroom. They've been down this road too many times. Marshall once said, you know, they were really just trying to get mercy from the jury. There's a famous moment, and if you've read To Kill a Mockingbird or seen the movie, you see this moment where Atticus Finch is cross-examining Mayella Ewell. And it's a very powerful moment where the truth comes out. The truth of the matter is, in the Jim Crow South, Thurgood Marshall as an African American lawyer is never gonna be able to get the chance to cross-examine Norma Padgett. They were told that that was the easiest way to get their client sent to the electric chair was to cross-examine and question the word of a white woman about that evening. And so their defense today would seem quite lame. All they did was say, we're not questioning what happened to you. We're just saying that you identified the men incorrectly and they had to hire a white lawyer for the purpose of cross-examining Norma Padgett because it would have been seen as too explosive. So they lose the trial, which they knew they were gonna do. Marshall's plan was always to get the case to a higher level, preferably the Supreme Court, if he could. Because he knew that in those cases, when they were doing death penalty cases in the South, he said, sometimes you get mercy from the jury, which they did for the 16-year-old, Charles Greenlee, in this case. And Marshall said, that's a complete victory. He says, anytime the jury gives your client a life sentence, that means they know he was innocent. And so that was the way they operate, just to get it to that level playing field with the Supreme Court. They bring it to the Supreme Court, and what's really amazing about this is you can see, there's a photograph of them standing outside the Supreme Court, have it in the book you can look at, but Marshall and his lawyers are just laughing and as loose as can be. And the reason is, they know they're gonna win the Supreme Court. They've been down this road. They're no longer in that Southern antebellum courtroom with a racist prosecutor, a racist judge, and 12 members of the jury who are basically going to do whatever the judge and the prosecution indicate that they want done. Now they're appearing before the great legal minds of the entire nation. And Marshall knows that there's precedents that have already been set on the way grand juries are selected and change of venue. And so they appeal on those two issues alone. And it's a unanimous decision. Justice Robert Jackson writes the opinion, but what's amazing is Jackson goes a little bit further than the grand jury and the change of venue. He takes it to another level. He says, this case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. On those grounds I would reverse. In other words, he was saying, I see it all. You're going with this grand jury. It's almost like a technicality. What happened in Lake County was an abomination and he wanted to make it clear that that's why they were reversing. And so all of a sudden now there's a new trial. A new trial is gonna be had because they threw out this verdict. Lake County moves right on it and they're already setting a date for the retrial. What's remarkable in this moment is that Sheriff Willis McCall made this implicit bargain with the people of Lake County. And that bargain was on the night that the Groven Boys were arrested, a very large and armed mob showed up at the jail and they were looking to lynch the Groven Boys. They were gonna handle this themselves. And Willis McCall stood out on the steps of the courthouse and basically said, there's not gonna be a lynching in my county. We're not gonna have it. He says, these boys are gonna get a fair trial and then we'll put them in the electric chair. That's how it works. And he managed to hold off that mob and he was a hero in the next day of newspapers. Even the New York Times was crediting and was being a fast talking Florida sheriff to prevent some mob. So he was seen as a hero but there was that implicit bargain with his electorate because the sheriff's basically the most powerful person in the county throughout the South. Once they're elected, they're only accountable really to their electorate. And the electorate was largely a group in this rural section of white supremacists who wanted these Groven Boys lynched. And so after the Supreme Court overturned the verdict, Willis McCall said these were a bunch of communists in the North who were interfering with our Southern way of life but that was basically a statement. But what he did that was even more ominous was he said, all right, there's gonna be a retrial. I'll go up and pick up the prisoners and bring them back down for the retrial myself. Which he does. He arrives the evening of the retrial at Rayford State Prison handcuffs of two Groven Boys who were appealing because 16 year old Charles Greenlee is gonna wait this one out because what's remarkable about this at the time was that if you were 16 and you were basically given life sentence instead of a death penalty on a retrial you could actually be sentenced to death. And Marshall said to Charles Greenlee, don't take any chances, you were a 16 year old charming kid on that witness stand but two years later the jury might not see you that way. And so wait on the sidelines, we'll take care of the other two Groven Boys and come back to you later. So Willis McCall throws the two Groven Boys in the car and starts driving back to Lake County. And then he claims he's having a little trouble with the steering wheel. Maybe there's a flat tire. He pulls over on a very deserted side of road and basically opens fire on the two handcuffs Groven Boys. They are laying there in the ditch. And what's remarkable about this, and you'll see it's on the cover of the book as well as inside, this photograph is one of the, I think one of the most iconic images because everything in that image is about a lie. You see Willis McCall standing outside with his clothes are all rumbled, his hat is all rumbled, it's sitting on the hood of his car. He's got a little blood trickling down and they called photographers and media back and they're taking these photographs and the flash fires and one of those moments, someone in the witnesses right there says, one of those boys just moved and sure enough Walter Irvin, who's handcuffed to his best friend, Samuel Shepard, was still alive. And so now they don't know quite what to do. They uncuff them. They take Willis McCall because of those severe injuries you can see, a little blood trickling on the side of his face. They put him in an ambulance and take him to a local hospital in Waterman Hospital in Lake County. African-Americans are not allowed to ride in ambulances so they have to wait another 45 minutes. They take a hearse. They put the body of Sam Shepard and Walter Irvin who's still alive in a hearse and take first stop at the morgue and then go to the hospital and drop Walter Irvin off. And news around the hospital as Walter Irvin begins to regain his composure is that Walter Irvin is telling an entirely different story than the one Willis McCall told. Willis McCall told that it was an escape attempt. These guys jumped me. They went for my gun. I had no choice but to defend myself and as they charged me, I backed up and emptied my revolver. And so the FBI was there at the moment in the hospital taking this into account. Willis McCall refused to sign a statement. He just gave a statement to the FBI. Walter Irvin regains consciousness and now he's telling there was no escape attempt. Why would I escape? I just wanted the Supreme Court and I have Thurgood Marshall representing me at the retrial. Nothing to worry about. Why would I escape at this moment? Handcuffed to Samuel Shepard. And he goes on to tell an even more ominous story that he was, after the car pulled over, Sheriff McCall opened the door, opened fire, shot Sam Shepard three times, killing him instantly. Irvin, who's handcuffed to his best friend, can only fall out of the car with Sam. McCall takes his gun and fires twice, once in the chest and one on the side. Irvin said, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't run. I was still alive. So I pretended to be dead, dead. He says, that's when Willis McCall got on the radio and said, I got him. I got these sons of bitches good. Get back here. And he called his deputy, James Yates, back to the scene. Deputy James Yates arrives at the scene. Irvin, bleeding but still conscious, is just handcuffed to his best friend. And he hears the deputy coming over. And he's just trying to say as still as he can, not breathe. And then he hears, he feels a flashlight flashing across his face. And then he hears Yates say, this one ain't dead yet. And he pulls his own gun and fires one more shot straight through the neck of Walter Irvin. Remarkably Irvin survives. I couldn't have wrote this book if Irvin had passed away on the side of that ditch. Nothing would exist. But because we have Irvin's record of his story, he tells a story that it was deputy James Yates who came back and fired the last shot. Still alive. And so he says, after that, the deputy says, we got to make it look like an escape. Tear my clothes. And they start tearing out his clothes. They pull hair out of the sheriff's head, put it in Sam Shepard's hand. And then they say, call witnesses back to the scene. We got to document this. And that's when that famous photograph was taken with Walter Irvin, still alive. FBI is in that hospital room, and they're listening to this story. And they say, well, if Sheriff McCall is telling the truth, we're never going to find that sixth bullet because they found five bullets in the bodies of Irvin and Shepard. The sixth bullet went clean through Irvin's neck. So they know they're never going to find that if Sheriff McCall's version is true and that he was being attacked at the time. But they say, if Walter Irvin was telling the truth, we have an idea where that sixth bullet might be. And so they actually rush back to the crime scene from the night before. And they find the blood spot where Walter Irvin was laying the night before. And they take out a little shovel and they start digging. And 10 inches below the surface of that blood spot, they find a 38-calibre bullet that matches the kind of gun that James Hates had fired. So now the FBI has pure proof, forensic proof, that the sheriff had perjured himself and that this was a murder and attempted murder. Probably the most disturbing thing in this entire story was that this died right there, this investigation. The judge, who was also the trial judge in the Groveland case, said that the coroner's jury, which came in and acquitted Willis McCall, said that he had acted in self-defense that night. By the way, the coroner's jury in the South and in this particular case was appointed by Sheriff Willis McCall. They were friends of Willis McCall. They were businessmen who had contracts with the sheriff's department. What do you think they're going to do, except he's honoring the great Sheriff McCall? So the judge says the coroner's jury was so thorough, there's no need to impanel a grand jury in this case. And the FBI is livid. For whatever you think about the FBI at the time and their interests and civil rights, they did a really thorough investigation. And they implored the US attorney of Florida, who was himself a white supremacist, who ran on segregation platforms for years afterwards. They implored the US attorney to do an investigation, to continue this investigation. And the US attorney quashed it. And he did this time and time again. And one of the things I like to think and remind people when you look back at cases like this, it's not just the act of one rogue lawman who's taking the law into his own hands. At every single level of the story, people had those McCalls back, from the jury to the prosecutor to the judge to the US attorney and to the governor himself. And so that is the real abomination of this. This investigation died in the FBI. Thurgood Marshall's lawyers never saw any of this forensic evidence, never could go any further, because the FBI said that this was still under investigation. And that's because of US attorney quashing. That was probably the most disturbing thing. When I filed the Freedom of Information Act request, I finally got my hands on the files. I was the first person to open these files. They had not been seen by anybody. All these envelopes were sealed. Bullets, the FBI reports, which document the layers and layers of perjury. And how this case changed from when the FBI initially investigated everybody to what was said in trial. The perjury was right there to see. So we weren't gonna really go forward with the trial. Now it's just Walter Irvin's left, because Sam Shepard is dead. Charles Greenlee's just waiting in jail. Ernest Thomas is dead. It's all gonna come down to Walter Irvin's trial. I won't go too much into it, because there's some really interesting things that happen in the case. But I just wanna make sure that you understand. Thurgood Marshall, many, many times people think his reputation was just that he followed the law, and that he was content to bring about civil rights changes through the law. And it really wasn't the case. What I was seeing when I was reading and doing this research, Marshall needed to go outside the law, which he did many times. In this particular case, he knew he might not get justice in the courtroom. So what did he do? He helped form a citrus boycott in the state of Florida. He reached out to all the religious leaders to put pressure on political leaders. He did a lot of things outside that courtroom that really made a difference in this case. The great thing that I think he did, which he doesn't really get enough credit for, was the way he conducted himself in court. Now think about Marshall showing up in these courtrooms. Many times, nobody in a courtroom had ever seen an African-American man in a suit, and hadn't seen an African-American man in a courtroom who was not the defendant. And so Marshall knew he was gonna lose these cases many times, but he said it was an important thing to do because up in those Jim Crow balconies where 100 African-Americans would come from miles and miles around to see this event, to see a black man arguing law in court, that made a difference. That provided hope for what could be in the future. And Marshall said that that was one of the main reasons that he was inspired, even though he knew he was headed towards certain defeat, was about the influence he had of the community that would show up in their jalopy cars just to see lawyer Marshall argue a case with a white prosecutor and a white judge. And it made a difference. I can tell you, I've talked to people that I've met around the country who say, I was a little kid who showed up at one of those courtrooms and saw Marshall, and I'm a lawyer because of that. And so it did have ripple-out effects. And I think what Marshall was really trying to do by the way he conducted himself in courtroom, some of his opponents, even within the NAACP, said he was too jovial. He was too accommodating for some of these old racists who were determined to destroy his clients. And Marshall saw it in a greater picture. And in this particular case, I won't give away too much, but the old racist prosecutor in this case, Jesse Hunter, makes a remarkable turnaround towards the end of his life when he begins to question the guilt of the Groveland boys. And publicly, he writes a letter to the governor urging a pardon for Walter Irvin, a commuted sentence, as Irvin was about to go to the chair. And it was through hearts and minds that Marshall was really effective. And later on, that same prosecutor, Jesse Hunter, attributed his change of heart because he talked about going up against this great mind, Thurgood Marshall, and he lamented the fact that he could never have lunch with him because there was no place in Lake County that would accommodate African-Americans of whites sitting together. And so all his interactions with him were in the courtroom. But he came away, he said, so impressed that it made me question things. And later on, he was the one that wrote that letter that really saved the life of Walter Irvin. I can tell you that since, in the last few months, I got a letter from one of the family members of Jesse Hunter. And I should really do an afterward in this book for what he told me. He said, it was common knowledge within my household and within the judge's household, both men knew that the Groven Boys were innocent and still went ahead with the second trial because that was the mask they had to wear for political survival in that county. Basically saying that they knew these guys were innocent but there was no political price to pay for advocating for civil rights. So I'll just cut forward to the recent events because I don't want to spoil there's some twists at the end, if you haven't read it. Happy to answer questions about it. But about after the book came out, there was some Geraldine Thompson who was a legislator in Florida. And she was so moved by this story because she'd been in Florida all her life. She ordered boxes of books and had them distributed among the legislature. And the Democratic legislature formed a book club and started reading it. And two of the senators or legislators, Bobby DeBose and the Senator Gary Farmer got together and co-sponsored the bill. And then something kind of remarkable happened in Florida. The Republicans had their own book club, they're reading the same book. And they said, we're gonna have a contest with the Democrats to see who has more co-sponsors to this bill because we're gonna act on this. And suddenly there was all this competition and I got a call out of the blue about two years ago saying, you know, there's a chance this claims bill might actually pass and you should come down. So I went down to Tallahassee and I met with the family members. We sat up in the balcony and the speaker of the Florida House got on the floor and he said, I understand there's been a contest. We have no idea where this vote stands. So let's just take the vote now for co-sponsors of this bill. And every single member of the legislature decided to co-sponsor the bill. They went straight to the vote. It was 117 to nothing. The next week in the Senate, it was 36 to nothing. All of a sudden Florida had apologized to the Groveland families for this injustice and they recommended posthumous exonerations. That, those posthumous exonerations lingered for about a year and a half with the governor and the clemency board. I think that was just sort of a throwback to the days where there was no political advantage to pursuing these particular civil rights issues. And so it just lingered there for a long time. But cut to this past November, all of a sudden there's a new election. And all of a sudden people are starting to say, to me, when I do these book talks, people would come up to me while I'm signing books and say things like, we're gonna be watching out for this case and we're gonna make something happen. And I said, that's great, thank you. And I remember this one gentleman says, I'm Marco Rubio's chief of staff. I said, okay, that's great. Several months later, I get an email from him out of the blue, watch the news tonight. Sure enough, Marco Rubio stood up on the Senate floor and said, now is the time to pardon the Groven Boys. And it started to get some momentum. One of the aspiring clemency board members was the Department of Agriculture, Nikki Freed. And she said, one of the first things she's gonna do when she gets in the office is gonna address this Groven case. Then you had the incoming governor, Ron DeSantis, who had run a pretty conservative campaign. He said, this is gonna be one of his first orders of business when he gets in there too. And sure enough, two days after they took office, they had an agenda meeting in Tallahassee and they were gonna discuss the Groven case. We thought this was just going to be an agenda meeting where they were just gonna put it on the agenda and we'll come back in March and maybe they'll have a vote, whatever. But we got word out of the blue that Norma Padgett, the alleged victim, was going to show up and she wanted to testify. I got a text like the night before in Tallahassee and I was actually chilled because I tried to interview Norma Padgett. One of my great regrets is that she did not sit down and talk to me about this. And I understand her point of view, but I really wanted to, I felt like I could have a much more sympathetic portrayal of her because I always felt that there's no way a 17 year old girl on her own is capable of initiating this much violence. This case was taken from her the moment she agreed to go along with the story. And then it became the sheriff's story, her prosecutor's story, her husband's story, her father's story, and it was taken from her. I saw her as very much a victim in this case too, but she just didn't wanna have anything to do with it and her message to me was let sleeping dogs lie. So now, 70 years later, she's brought into that clemency board hearing in Tallahassee and basically she stuck to her story. She said that she was against issuing pardons to the growing boys. And one of the things I thought was most remarkable was that a lot of time had passed in 70 years. And the word of normal pageant, as she did 70 years ago when she pointed out the growing boys in the courtroom, that was enough that ended the entire case right there. But 70 years later, all of this evidence had been made public that had been hidden from the defense. The medical report where the doctor claimed there was no evidence of this kind of assault, all the fabricated evidence, all the perjury between the witness testimony and it. And I think Governor DeSantis, after listening to normal pageant, he said, let's move to a vote. And they voted and it was for nothing to pardon and exonerate the growing boys. And I try to remind people because sometimes it gets caught up in this he said, she said version of story. It never was that. To me, it was like what happened in that courtroom was why these men deserved exonerations. Most of the evidence, physical evidence was manufactured. They could prove that. There was perjury throughout, prosecutorial misconduct. How about when a prosecutor leans on the, where the jury is sitting and leans on the box and says, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, gentlemen of the jury basically, I have been stricken with a fatal disease and I would not like to go out with a loss. Basically imploring the jury to convict when he knows at this point he knows that they're innocent. This was the kind of, Marshall and his lawyers didn't even object to this kind of stuff. It was so rampant. And so that was really what the pardon was based on. It wasn't about rejecting the word of normal pageant. What whatever happened to her that night. But what happened in that courtroom was why they deserve these pardons and these exonerations. I can tell you the pardons went through. The exonerations are next. I'm working with the attorney general's office and the Florida department of law enforcement because apparently sources in a book are not evidence. They need to see the original report. So I'm digging all those up for them and I'm very confident that everybody in that clemency board wants to see justice done and they want to move forward to this exoneration. So I think to me this was one of the great moments in government. Many people told me this will never happen, especially in a case like Florida. I can see it happening in this state very easily but in Florida it was a very different kind of legislature and these kind of things were handled in a very political way for many, many years. And I also I can tell you one of the things that people ask me a lot is really posthumous pardons, what are those really good for? These men are all dead, what is a pardon? I can just tell you what it meant to the family. Many of these family members continued to live in Lake County and they said their names were mud because the official version that lingered was always the convictions that their relatives were rapists and that two of their relatives attempted to kill the fine sheriff of Lake County and the sheriff had to defend himself and that's why they were shot. And for decades this lingered, it affected their livelihood, they stayed in this county and just experienced this kind of racial hatred for something that they knew was not true. And so it meant the world for them to just have their names cleared. They weren't seeking any kind of reparations or any kind of compensation, they really just wanted to see their names cleared. And when somebody, their motive for pursuing this kind of justice is that clear, there's no reason to not support that. And so I think it was truly a great moment in government and one of the things I'll close with by saying is, I think I learned a great lesson in writing this book following the lesson of Thurgood Marshall which it just became really apparent to me as I was doing all this research. It was the way Marshall conducted himself, he never tried to politicize things, he never tried to do battles of left versus right. They were always wrong versus right. He believed in the Constitution, he believed in the law and he pursued it under those grounds. And I think when you look at his career and his record before the US Supreme Court, you see a remarkable string of nine nothing decisions which I don't even know would be possible today. But that's what you saw and one of the clerks I interviewed said I would go into the court and watch Marshall argue some of these cases and you just had no doubt who was right in these cases. And so that was the legacy of Thurgood Marshall. And I tried to use that lesson in the way I wrote this book and not make it a political cudgel. Just present the facts, the way they happened and let the public decide. There's no need to sensationalize or take a point of view. Just describe the case the way Marshall used to argue cases in law. And I think like those unanimous decisions, those bipartisan decisions in the Florida legislature and the clemency board, I think those are the legacy of Thurgood Marshall. So I'll close with that and answer any questions that you might have. I think that's pretty good I'm talking about. That is right. Yes, sir. So I have two questions actually. I'm actually terrified after your first question. It was really good. I haven't asked the official first question. Marshall's strategy very clearly with this case as well as many others that he had was to understand he would lose at the trial level but set it up in such a way that he could win it on appeal. Right. The first case of these boys, clearly he had that down path. I'm a trial attorney. The second trial clearly presented a ton of evidence to have that overturned on appeal. My first question is what's your theory as to why the Supreme Court denied certiori for that? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's a great example that Marshall could not always count on the Supreme Court. And he had a record of I think 28 and three before the US Supreme Court. And I remember reading summaries of the 28 that he won but I was really curious about the ones that he lost. And the ones that he lost, he should not have lost. There were cases of like coerced confession which the Supreme Court had already ruled on several times. This was a clear case of that. But it turned out at the time that Douglas might have been considered a vice presidential candidate and so they didn't wanna beat up on the South with another one of these verdicts. And so they believe that Douglas in this particular instance voted a different way than he normally did on coerced confessions and Marshall lost that one. And so there's a couple of weird cases but I think the main point is you could never count on the Supreme Court for taking these cases. Sometimes I think Marshall thought in this particular case was they'd already ruled on it and they did make some corrections in the way the grand jury was selected and the change of venue which they did. There's no further reason to keep going back to this. But you could imagine how that would feel to Walter Irvin whose life is on the line and this arbitrary decision to just not take the case. And that's why Marshall really had to go outside the court, outside the law to get justice in this particular case. So my second question, you kind of left us hanging at the end of the book when Walter Irvin goes back to Lake County after being freed for a while and he ends up dead in his car. Right. Any theories as to what happened? Well I know what happened now, I'll tell you. So I'll just tell you what happened. So Walter Irvin was released after 20 years of prison and he's working down in Miami for about a year and he has to get permission from Lake County to return for the funeral of his uncle. And so he returns for the funeral and that night he's found dead in his car. Mabel Norris-Reese, the reporter in this case was absolutely convinced that they had gotten to him because they knew he was coming back to Lake County and this was the way Sheriff McCall and his men worked. And so they were absolutely convinced and when she tried to investigate it, they hung up on her, the coroner said natural causes. About a year after I wrote this book I ran to the relatives of Walter Irvin who were with Walter that night. And they said to me, you got it right but you didn't get the whole story. He died in that car that night but we're absolutely convinced nobody had gotten to him. That he died of organ failure. His organs were shutting down. He was in bad condition while he was in prison, continually deteriorating. And they said, we're positive McCall and nobody got to him. He just died in that car. But he did say to me, he said, make sure people understand that he died of the injuries that he suffered on that night in 1951. He was a 40 year old man. He did not die of natural causes. His organs were shutting down because of the bullet wounds. He said, Willis McCall killed him. He just took 20 years to die. So, yes. Why do you think Norma didn't come clean when she went to for the clemency building? I don't know. Why did Norma not come clean? I think it's just a matter of pride. Who knows if she maybe believes the story. She's told it so much. There was a really powerful moment in the clemency board, Teres DeMond. And I'll tell you that story because I thought it was quite powerful to see. A woman showed up to testify. Her name was Beverly Robinson, Dr. Beverly Robinson. And I had never met her before and I'd been dealing with many members of the family but she was new to me. And she had gone up to testify and she said, welcome to the family to the hearing. And she said, I wanna tell a story about the first job I had was at Lake County Sumter Community College in Lake County. It was 1997. And I was assigned to this incoming class and I was to teach about diversity and race. And she gave an assignment for everyone in the class to write about their first experience with racism in Lake County. And she said, I'll never forget the date. It was September 18th, 1997. And I was reading this paper and it said the truth about Groveland. And she said, it perked me up because I knew that my nephew Sam Shepard or my uncle Sam Shepard had been killed in that. And she went on to read and she read that the whole story about Norma Padgett was a lie and that the families were sworn to secrecy to never mention this but that they all knew it was a lie and that they were told never to speak out out about it ever. And then Dr. Robinson turned and Norma Padgett was sitting about right where he is and said, Norma Padgett, do you know who wrote that essay? That was your niece. You're all liars. All of you are liars. And it was just a very powerful moment. She said she had this report. She showed it to the president of the college and a couple of reporters who all vouched for it and they said it was true. I've had people come up to me in the family themselves who have mentioned that they knew that this was not true and that that was the case that they were not supposed to speak about it. She didn't have to testify, right? She didn't have to testify. So she actually went there to continue the lie instead of just not saying anything. Right, right. And I think what makes it really more puzzling is that in 1998, Sam Shepard's brother, James, who was the one who owned the car, he was still living in Lake County, still a neighbor of the Padgets. And he had been in the hospital, he had cancer and he was taken home to sort of have hospice in his own home. And all the family members and neighbors were coming to pay their last respects. And this was told to me by James Shepard's daughter. And she said, one day we were in the house and this old white woman shows up at the door and said she wanted to speak with James. And so James let her in, they went back outside and talked for about five minutes and then she left. And his wife said, James, what was that all about? Who was that? And James says, that was Norma Padgett and she apologized for everything. There's no reason for the Shepard family to make that story up. I talked to several witnesses who knew about it. I don't think they had any incentive. They told me this many years after I'd known them. And so I had to call to get a quote because I was writing this for the Atlantic after the apology and the editor said, well, you're gonna have to get a quote from Norma Padgett on this. And I said, well, I've tried doing this. I had to try again. Called around and the quote I got was, next time you're in Florida there's going to be rope and a bullet waiting for you. And I said, okay, that'll be a no comment. But I don't know why she stuck to the story. I'm still kind of hopeful that it will, the truth will come out. There's enough people within her family who know the truth. And maybe we have seen this. We've seen this in the Emmett Till case where the woman who had made these accusations now came forward and said she lied about it. And you see it with also Klan members who are dying sometimes confess to things later on. I had the same thing happen in my next book. An old deputy who was unbeknownst to me was dying. And he admitted to me that he was in the Klan and he explained exactly how law enforcement in the Klan worked together, same people. And so that was a really eye-opening moment for me because I knew that they worked together but this was a man who was both and he explained both his roles. And so I think that I hold out hope that maybe something will come just to give the family a little more relief. And actually I think it would be a tremendous relief within that family to not have to hold on to this story, but yes, sir. The county that this occurred in, this is a very old crime that I was committed and then all the injustices in the courtroom fast forwarded today in the events of a pardon and hopefully exoneration which I think that's a complete conclusion for the families in terms of the legal process. Has the county itself gone through any exploration of how to think about what its history includes and how to reconcile or bring closure? Yeah, that's a great question because it is ongoing and I'm still dealing with it like as late as yesterday. They are putting a monument up outside the courthouse. They're struggling a little bit with the language. They didn't want to put Sheriff Willis McCall's name in the story at all and because of a lot of McCall's around that area and they're also in the process of bringing a Confederate monument to the same museum which has no applicability to the state of Florida that's just a collector who collects this. In fact, I had a politician who basically said not too long ago that all these monuments being torn down around the country will be happy to take them and display them proudly in Lake County. So it's still a very rural county and they are still grappling with it but on the very positive side, I've gone down there since that one terrifying moment in 2012, I've probably gone back down there a steep 20 something times. I've met with sheriffs, legislators, commissioners, everybody from Lake County. They all know this story now and they know the evidence and so I think one of the most powerful moments in that clemency board member was that two city commissioners showed up to testify saying that a pardon and exonerations were the right thing to do and there was also a letter from the sitting sheriff who said I support the pardons and exonerations in this. I think what that support did, I assumed it but I was glad to hear it later because when Governor DeSantis did the vote and talked about the need for pardons and exonerations, he said one of the most persuasive moments was the commissioners from Lake County and the sheriff's words who showed up to say that they support pardons. That tells me that the community is aware of this story and so I think what it also did is it gave him this ground to say if Lake County doesn't feel like they're gonna pay a political price for this kind of support, then the governor won't either. So I thought that was a really powerful moment in the entire hearing was to see those two Lake County commissioners speak out in favor of this. And again, it was one of those things with Norma Padgett tried to make it less about her word and her version because we don't know what happened to her that night. We just know that the evidence and what happened in that courtroom had nothing to do with the defendants in this case. So, yeah. Yes. Thank you. That was terrific. And the bit we read ahead was really strong. I guess as we go forward, I mean, part of what you're being here today is to help us go forward. And as a state and as a country, deal with the systemic racism that is so embedded in our culture. Do you actually recommend, I mean, you say that so many other countries have done truth and reconciliation commissions. We're at a point in this country where I'm not sure that would be supported necessarily, but do you recommend that we consider actually in some way doing a truth and reconciliation commission? Yeah, I mean, in some ways, that question is sort of above my pay grade, but I'll try to address it in a way that is something that I believe in. And I looked to someone who's a personal hero of mine, Brian Stevenson, who's the head of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery as the legacy to the Slavery Museum. And I'm heading down there next week because they're gonna do a monument for the Groven Boys and Harry T. Moore, who was president of the NAACP in Florida. Tremendous impact that he made got more than 100,000 African-Americans onto the voting rolls in Florida. And in the middle of this trial, he's working with Marshall. The Ku Klux Klan puts a bomb under his house killing both him and his wife. He became really the first martyrs to the modern civil rights movement. So my message when I talk about this, sort of echoing what Brian's message really is, is that we need to just have a greater understanding of the, here's an example. In the New York Times, David Brooks just recently wrote a column in favor of some kind of reparations. So I think this discussion actually, I could not imagine that happening maybe two or three years ago. But I think sometimes there's a change in the air. I definitely saw it in Florida, where the previous efforts to get something off the ground with the Groeland Boys were defeated easily. It never even got to a vote. And so they couldn't even get a second co-sponsor actually. And so I think sometimes you just see greater understanding and greater awareness of these kind of stories and a recognition that, all right, maybe we can't do this grand form of reparations, but maybe it can be done in some form of program. Maybe there's other ways to look at this instead of just writing out all these checks that the country can't afford. And that's the perception of what reparations look like. Maybe there's something else that can be done. What Brian Stevenson is doing, and at first when I heard this, I wasn't really sure what it meant, but they're going around to all parts of the country and putting monuments up where people were lynched. So there's more than 5,000 of these monuments that are going up. Then they're taking dirt from these sites and bringing it back to Montgomery to form this really powerful museum to the legacy of slavery and civil rights and human rights in this country. And I think just the way that nation is sort of learning more about race lately than it has been maybe in the last 70 years, focusing and looking at these things a little bit differently that maybe it's, we may not ever get a government program to go along, but we do have writers and lawyers who are taking steps to make sure that these stories are not forgotten and to, because of the Freedom of Information Act, a request, a lot of these files were never available before, so we never really knew the truth. And now you're starting to see more and more of the truth come out that's been buried in these files. And so I think when people see these and they recognize the cruel, cruel injustices that were happening in the past that weren't just about these water fountains, it was more about how law enforcement, how the criminal justice system incarceration was used as a press of tool of white supremacy. People start to recognize it. I think that's why you see these unanimous votes is like it's undeniable. It's there for us to see. And so it may not be as aggressive as the kind of truth and reconciliation you see in South Africa or Germany, but I'm hopeful and that's about all I can say. Yes. Oh, you can find it out there. So listening to the other questions about kind of reconsidering the historical narrative and Senator Krupp's question about reconciliation, I'm curious for you as you were researching and talking to people and thinking about how to write this book, how you consider sort of your own positionality as a person in telling this. Yeah, I can tell you that the answer for me is pretty simple. I would say New York is kind of a white suburban bubble. So these kind of things just didn't resonate with me. I hardly knew anyone who was African-American and I think that it just, I was at a turn of blind eye towards it but I didn't have any frame of reference to really become involved. It wasn't until I started reading more and more and started seeing that the sense of injustice just became appalling in a way to me. It just motivated me. I mean, I would read stories like this when I was younger like Count of Monte Cristo patting on these false roots. I grew up watching roots and that didn't move me in a way. I said, this is a different kind of America that I've been learning about. And so I was sort of just inspired to find these lost stories and to just dig in because a lot of them had not been told yet. A lot of them were just buried in the archives. And so sometimes going back in, I couldn't believe what I was finding. The amount of injustice legally sanctioned white supremacy that existed at every single level of government kind of appalled me and so I felt like these are stories I was drawn to tell. It probably wasn't a fun place to be at my dinner table every night for the last 19 years because these are the stories I would have to tell. What did you do today? You wouldn't believe the sheriff didn't listen to me. It wears you down. But people ask how hard is it to write these things? The only thing I can really compare it to is if you're about to go in for an open heart surgery, you don't really want an emotional surgeon who really cares about humans working on you that day. He wants someone who just does his job. And so I thought my job was learning all this stuff but putting it in an narrative, putting it in a story that was readable to people. But I won't deny there are moments that really impacted me researching this. Really dark, dark moments that I didn't really even want to believe myself. Gilbert, I think we have time for probably two more. Okay, sure. Yes. Okay, so we're kind of building off of her question. I am just very curious about how you actually decided on the Brodlin Boys story over as we, you kind of referenced how many lynching stories and how many racial injustice stories were occurring in Florida specifically. How did you settle on choosing the Brodlin story to kind of bring to the forefront of people's minds? Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the main things was that I really wasn't aware of this side of Thurgood Marshall. I knew that he was involved in landmark civil rights cases like voting rights, housing rights, desegregation of schools. And I knew he was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. I didn't know that he was going down South by himself and taking on these death penalty cases where he would be threatened, thrown in jail, almost lynched. And I just remember thinking this Brodlin story to me was much more dramatic than the Scotsboro Boys, which everyone's heard of, 1931 in Alabama. But because this case happened in Florida, I write about Florida as kind of being South of the South. It was really off the radar. People didn't know what to think of Florida. It was land of sunshine, Miami. It didn't seem like a Southern state, not like the Cotton Belt states in the South. And so there were these atrocities that were happening in Florida that never went anywhere. One of the ones I write about in Devil and Row is this 14-year-old boy who's working in a drug store and writes a Christmas card to a white clerk. And basically she tells her father, her father and a couple of friends, mentioned, basically take him to the side of the Suwani River and say, choose between a gun and jumping in the river and drowning. And this case went absolutely nowhere. This was 10 years before Emmett Till. I like to think if people really knew about this particular case, that it would make the national headlines. And it could have sped things up in terms of civil rights. But because it happened in Florida, it just died. And that was what I was finding a lot in Florida. These stories, tremendously dramatic stories. People don't realize that Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in any other state. It was the most dangerous state to be black in, but nobody knew that. And so I think it was just because it was off the radar. And so Florida is like this rich treasure trove of these forgotten stories. I could, if I was younger, I could spend the rest of my life doing this. I figure at my age, I can only probably do a couple more. But I tell you, there's a rich, rich load of Florida. When I go around speaking in Florida, there's attorneys and judges who tell these stories that you think that's bad, you should know about this. And they're right. These are all, they could all be books or magazine articles because of the depravity involved in these cases and the injustice. So that's the main reason why. Third and more. Yes, sir. Well, bringing it back to today, is there any reason to believe it couldn't happen again down the road? I think. And given the, we've seen the voting rights issues. Yes. We've seen other issues going on. Even in Vermont, we've seen a rise in hate literature, things like that as a result. You know, things like chance to a film. Is there any reason that it isn't repeating itself? No, I don't think so. And one of the things I'll say, even though I strongly believe that the climate is much better, but here's a great example of why. A lot of times you see these atrocities happen and they're captured on cell phones and it's still not enough to get an indictment. It's still not enough to get a conviction. And sometimes the way the law is constructed, well, you don't know the whole context of that video that you just saw where the man is shooting someone in the back. I mean, he was not charged in South Carolina in that particular case. It took the feds to come in and get the conviction. So those are still challenges that we face. When Devon the Grove came out, same month, that was the month that Trayvon Martin was shot in the same part of Central Florida. And so a lot of times I would go around and talk about this, but what's different? Many people were saying nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. And I agree with the sentiment of that, but I will say this. What happened in Florida with the shooting of Trayvon Martin is that after George Zimmerman was released that night and his own reconnaissance sent home without charges, protest began. Protest never would have happened in the 1940s or early 50s. It just would not have happened. Protest began. NAACP rallied in the streets. Then you saw the police chief in Sanford, Florida resign under a mounting pressure. That would never have happened 50, 60 years ago. Then you saw feds come in, file charges, indictments. That case went to trial. Never would have happened 40 or 50 years ago in a case like this. Whether you agree with this, the jury is not even relevant. This case would never have gone down the way the Trayvon Martin case went down today. So I think because of people like Thurgood Marshall and these lawyers have made the criminal justice system really unrecognizable to what you read about in Devil on the Grove in the 40s and 50s in terms of prosecutorial misconduct, hiding of evidence. I think it's a much different criminal justice system. But with that said, and I do wanna pay respect to their accomplishments in the criminal justice system, there's still so much that needs to be done and we see it every day. Not only in just criminal cases, but mass incarceration. This was something that didn't really exist in the 40s and 50s. Now it's just spiraled out of control. And it's a form of white supremacy. Make no mistake about it. It's a way to control a certain population in a different kind of way. Well, Gilbert, I wanna thank you. I think it's been really a powerful way for us to explore the themes that we've been taking up over the last few years, while we're renewed emphasis this year. I think anybody who has an additional question with Gilbert can stick around here as we wrap up. But I just wanna thank you for such a great. My pleasure, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.