Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Collins indicated that he had sent investigators to Lake County and was “fully conscious of an unsatisfactory atmosphere surrounding law enforcement” there, but he refrained from suspending the sheriff. Mabel, however, did not hesitate to take aim. “Disgrace before the rest of the state, before the nation, and before the world, continues to be the lot for Lake County,” she wrote in an editorial. Ridiculing the excuses offered by the sheriff’s department, who complained that local blacks would not “cooperate” with them in their investigation, she observed pointedly, “They were speaking of the frightened Negroes who were the targets of the shotgun pellets, and who know what kind of law enforcement, what kind of justice there is in Lake County.” Assuring her readers that the good people of Lake County—“the grove owner, the banker, the hotel owner, the merchant . . . cannot want the county to maintain its reputation for lawlessness and violence,” she voiced the hope that “the bloody pages of recent Lake County history will be closed emphatically by the citizens in next year’s election.”

  The racially charged atmosphere in the state ensured that Collins would face a bitter political battle. The Supreme Court of Florida determined that, given the circumstances in which he had come into office, he was eligible to seek reelection in 1956. (Florida’s Constitution precluded sitting governors from running for consecutive four-year terms.) Most formidable among Collins’s primary opponents was Sumter Lowry, a veteran of both world wars who had served as lieutenant general of the Florida National Guard. As the avowed “white supremacy candidate,” Lowry saw integration as a policy enmeshed in the “International Communist conspiracy . . . to destroy our Christian Church through infiltration; and to destroy our race by mixing it with the blood of the Negro race.” He knew how to command attention with scare tactics that played to the electorate’s greatest fear. In his campaign speeches and print ads, he constantly invoked Walter Irvin’s name and face and he barely acknowledged questions regarding his plans or positions on any other issue besides race.

  Collins kicked off his reelection campaign at a joint ladies-night banquet for the Mount Dora and Tavares Kiwanis and Lions Clubs on February 21, 1956. Days before, Judge Futch had ordered a grand jury investigation into the actions of the governor and the state pardon board regarding the Walter Irvin commutation. In a statement to the press, Collins had maintained there was nothing to investigate other than his conscience, which was “beyond control or coercion of a grand jury,” and declared his decision to be subject only to review “by God and the people of Florida.” Still, he had no choice but to attempt to make his case politically in his speech at the banquet. “I have serious questions about the guilt of Walter Lee Irvin,” he said. “I cannot take his life.” The Ocala Star-Banner observed that Collins’s explanation garnered merely “scant applause” from the two hundred fifty ladies in his audience.

  Mabel was among them. In addition to giving public support to his “calm approach to the integration problem,” she had been offering private support in correspondence with the governor throughout the Platts’ troubles and the Irvin case. Collins, in turn, had written to express his gratitude for her ongoing support of his commitment to racial decency and justice, and she had published his letters in the Topic. Now she lingered at the end of the evening banquet, hoping for a brief conversation with the governor before her five-mile drive back to Sylvan Shores.

  Mabel’s neighbor Herbert K. Beiser was home watching television that night, but he was not too absorbed in his program to notice when the noisy, light-colored sedan turned down Morningside Drive. The automobile slowed, and had barely passed the Reese home when it came to a stop. Its engine idled. Then a loud “whistling sound” brought more of Mabel’s neighbors to attention. Seconds later, a bright flash of light and a tremendous explosion rocked the tranquillity of Sylvan Shores. The blast echoed across Lake Gertrude and reverberated for miles in every direction. Beiser’s television “blanked out.” He called the sheriff’s office. Other neighbors lost telephone service. Alarmed, they rushed out to the street and toward the Reese house. Frantically they called for Mabel and Paul, but neither one answered, and the house was dark. Another neighbor, a Mrs. Charles Hener, would later report that she had spoken to a “strange” man who’d asked if she’d heard the explosion and then run back to his car. He’d driven hastily away, she said, and was dressed in attire “akin to riding clothes or some manner of uniform.”

  The neighbors felt helpless. Afraid to approach the Reese house for fear of another blast, they stood about on the street, waiting. Where were the police?

  This was the scenario that greeted Mabel when she arrived home from the banquet at about 9:30 p.m. Paul arrived around the same time; he’d been at the office. Patricia was staying overnight with a friend. Fortunately for the Reeses, the bomb had exploded in the front yard, far enough away from the house not to cause significant structural damage. Still, Mabel was distraught, especially as no officer of the law materialized. Two nights later, Paul Reese returned home from the office a little after nine at night to discover that “a load of fish heads, whole dead fish and other garbage” had been dumped on the lawn in front of the house. He’d just carted the debris to the rear of the house when he noticed a light-colored car approaching. The explosion this time was only about a quarter as strong as the first. Mabel, who had been inside the house with Patricia, immediately telephoned Futch, who was scheduled to hear testimony the next morning in the grand jury investigation of Walter Irvin’s commutation. Futch invited Mabel to relate her story to the grand jury.

  She arrived in Tavares with a paper sack full of bomb fragments she’d recovered on her property. She complained of Sheriff McCall’s failure to investigate the bombings, thereby denying the people of Sylvan Shores their rightful protection. State attorney A. P. Buie also called to the stand Herbert Beiser, who affirmed that he had received “no satisfaction” upon calling the sheriff’s department. As Beiser was leaving the courthouse, McCall summoned him into his office. “The only thing wrong with your neighborhood is the Reeses,” he said. At Futch’s urging, though, McCall did eventually dispatch two deputies, one of them his son Malcolm, to Mount Dora to investigate the incident. Malcolm McCall concluded that the devices were Army-issue simulated bombs, which “would cause damage and possible injury if thrown into a home or near a person.”

  While in Lake County, LeRoy Collins had been scheduled to ride in the annual George Washington’s Day parade in nearby Eustis, a county event second only to the Leesburg Watermelon Festival and the perfect setting for a ceremonial campaign appearance. McCall, however, had for the past decade fancied himself to be the star of the parade, leading the floats and marching bands from atop his Palomino, Pretty Boy, and sporting his trademark white Stetson. And this year McCall was running for reelection. He enjoyed the advantages that incumbency afforded him, like posting himself at the head of a well-attended parade. What he did not enjoy was Collins’s encroachment on his territory, or remarks like those the governor had recently made about the “unsatisfactory atmosphere surrounding law enforcement” in Lake County.

  In view of the bombings at the Reese house, Collins’s staff had made arrangements for additional security in Eustis as well as back home in Tallahassee, where a highway patrolman was stationed at the Collins home. So he was caught off guard when, just as he prepared to position himself in the backseat of a parade car, Norma Padgett herself stepped forward from the crowd of people lining the street. Defiantly she jeered, “You’re the one who let out the nigger that raped me. Suppose I was your sister, would you have done that?” Collins mumbled something to the effect that he’d come to Lake County not for political reasons but to “be with the community,” and Norma was led away, but the confrontation was duly noted by the press, with one paper expressing outrage that “Sheriff Willis V. McCall’s deputies served as escorts . . . and assisted her in approaching Gov. Collins on a crowded street.” Unsurprisingly, the sheriff denied any involveme
nt on the part of his department. Collins, however, had no doubts. “McCall had set her up for that,” he said later.

  Concerns about Willis McCall and Lake County were by now circulating far beyond the state borders. Adlai Stevenson, then the Democratic presidential aspirant, was touring the state. When Mabel inquired of a Chamber of Commerce officer about the possibility of arranging for him to make a campaign stop in the Mount Dora area, he replied that Stevenson wanted to steer clear of Lake County because of its “reputation for lawlessness.” The candidate had said, “That’s one part of the state of Florida I’d rather not visit.”

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  WHILE MABEL CONTINUED her efforts at “vanquishing the threat of a dictatorship in Lake County,” she had to acknowledge that the town had hardly rallied behind her. Despite the region’s robust population growth, circulation of the Mount Dora Topic had been steadily declining since Bryant Bowles of the National Association for the Advancement of White People had declared that he’d “get even” with Mabel for her unflattering articles.

  Get even he did, with help from powerful quarters. In May 1955, Thomas P. Dwyer of LaGrange, Illinois, the former Midwest advertising and sales director for Conover-Mast Publications in Chicago, had decided to establish a second local newspaper, the Mount Dora Herald, on Mabel’s turf. Why was not clear, the Orlando Sentinel noted, as the town was barely big enough to support a single newspaper, although it went on, insinuatingly, “There are those who believe the new paper was not started . . . principally because the town is such a flourishing one that its merchants need a second advertising medium.”

  The paper set up its office directly across the street from the Topic. Mabel soon discovered that its backers had funded her rival with enough advertising to support the Herald’s publishing efforts for a full year. The first issue of the Herald made its mission clear. “We wish to state unequivocally that we are heartily in accord with the South’s deeply grooved traditions,” stated its editors, and that “we here in the South will not be bullied easily into a way of life alien to us.” Over the next few months, the paper’s political objectives became obvious. First and foremost, it strove to delay or stall desegregation by promoting states’ rights. It published a letter to the editor that provided contact information for the establishment of a Florida “Citizens’ Council” like those already working in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to provide a “unified front in opposition to public school integration.” It regularly afforded guest-column space to blacks who were opposed to desegregation, and ran news stories with headlines like “Negroes Do Not Want Integration.” Second among the Herald’s objectives was its resolve to defend any actions taken by Willis McCall. He was routinely praised for his commitment to law and order in Lake County. His local speeches received full coverage, especially when they targeted a certain newspaper as a “propaganda machine” run by “the kind of people” who “cram their way of life down the throats of the American people.” Third, the Herald set its sights on “that other newspaper” as a target and seized any opportunity to embarrass and harass its co-owner and editor with veiled threats and accusations of communist leanings.

  Mabel watched from the Topic offices as McCall went in and out of the Herald’s offices to confer with the new publisher. And she watched as she lost previously steady advertisers to the competition. She and Paul were feeling the pinch, and Mabel began to question the wisdom of the choices she had made in a career that had focused on journalism less as a business than as a means of seeking social justice—a course that had certainly “interfered with the cash register.” Those with more savvy in media and business had advised her to heed the economic pitfalls of taking stands on controversial issues. “I refused to listen,” Mabel admitted, “and so I am badly bruised by all the plunges I have taken.”

  She had expected that she would somehow triumph. “I blasted the sheriff to the next county,” Mabel wrote later of her coverage of the Platt case. “It looked as if I had him. It looked as if he was finally impaled upon my editorial pen. I went out on my next advertising rounds fully expecting the powers that be to say—‘Well, I guess you had him pegged all along.’ Instead, the shoulders were much colder; the advertisers were all so very busy; the customers were all well stocked with printing.” Nevertheless, she and Paul “tightened [their] belts and waded deeper into the fight.” She made her usual advertising rounds and “picked up the crumbs” here and there, while Paul printed “scratch pads and tablets in lieu of the printing orders we no longer had.”

  Mabel Norris Reese at her Mount Dora Topic office

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Make Tracks

  BY THE EARLY EVENING of December 18, 1957, many of Okahumpka’s black residents had gathered in the small, concrete-block Mount Olive Baptist Church on North Quarters Road. Most of their men and boys had been released, but some were still being held in police custody as possible suspects in the rape of Blanche Knowles. The community was on edge. Those who’d made their way to the church turned to Brother Melvin Hawkins Sr. for comfort and guidance. The Quarters residents at the gathering had barely begun to share the worry and distress they were experiencing when about ten lawmen led by Deputy Yates barged into the church. Yates said that they would be taking names—that a number of the young men present had already been questioned by the police didn’t seem to matter.

  A tall, athletic-looking teen caught the deputies’ attention. One of them asked his name. The boy answered, “Bubba Hawkins.” His given name was Melvin Jr., and he was Brother Hawkins’s son.

  Immediately the reverend stepped forward, but a deputy grabbed Bubba’s arm. “You’re coming with us,” he said, and he began leading the boy out toward his car. His father protested: Bubba had been at home with the family all night. That Melvin Jr. was a good boy, a quiet, churchgoing boy; that he attended all-black Carver Heights High School in Leesburg, because his father “wanted his kids to focus on school” rather than work in the groves and melon patches like most other eighteen-year-olds; that he was a star football player; that he was funny and well liked; that he sang regularly in the church choir—none of that would have mattered to the deputies. They were set on their purpose.

  The deputies escorted Bubba back to his family’s small house, where they ordered him to produce the shoes he’d been wearing the night before. The boy complied. The deputies then informed the elder Hawkins that they’d be taking his son to Tavares for questioning. Helplessly, in the oak-canopied darkness of Okahumpka, Bubba’s parents watched as a convoy of green-and-white Plymouth Belvederes retreated into the night. Inside one of them was their frightened son.

  A few minutes outside Okahumpka, somewhere around Yalaha, the convoy stopped. The deputies yanked Bubba Hawkins from the car transporting him. They walked him into a dark grove. With pistols holstered butt-forward on their belts, they formed a semicircle around him. They accused him of the rape; roughly they prodded him to confess. Intimidated, terrified, Hawkins denied any involvement. The victim had “scratched the nigger who raped her,” one deputy snarled, and he ordered Hawkins to take off all his clothes. Meekly, shivering in a sea of leafless trees, the soil littered with split orange rinds reeking of rot, the boy obeyed. When he had dropped his undershorts, several deputies brandishing long-handled flashlights stepped forward. Beams of light darted back and forth across Hawkins’s face, his arms, his legs, illuminating a popular, funny, churchgoing eighteen-year-old boy’s naked fear but no scratches. The deputies ordered him to turn around; nothing on his back or rear. Still, they aimed to menace him into a confession. Terrified though he was, Hawkins repeated his denial. One of the deputies ordered him to get dressed. Then they shuffled him off to the jail above the Lake County Courthouse.

  Hawkins spent the night in jail with a few other boys from the Quarters who were still being held by the sheriff’s department for questioning in the Okahumpka rape case. One of them was Sam Wiley Odom—or Wiley Sam Odo
m, as he was known in the Quarters—who’d been seized in the initial sweep.

  The next morning, Deputy Yates awakened Hawkins. They were going for a little ride, he said, and he told the boy to put on the shoes he’d been wearing on the night of the rape. The road was familiar. Yates and his partner Leroy Campbell were driving him to Okahumpka, but they weren’t taking him home. The squad car stopped at the Knowles place. Yates had Hawkins “walk around and make tracks” in the soil outside the house. The deputy told the boy that he “wanted to check his shoe prints.” That done, Campbell drove Hawkins back to Tavares. Yates stayed behind to examine the prints. The deputy’s preoccupation with this sort of evidence had earned him some measure of notoriety around the county. The efforts that had won the initial convictions of the three black defendants in the Groveland case had included his plaster casts of footprints—never mind that a leading forensic expert for the FBI had testified that Yates had faked them.

  Meanwhile, anxiety in the Hawkins family ran high. They’d had not a word from the sheriff’s department, and could only conclude that Bubba was spending a second night in jail. Melvin Sr. turned to his brother Virgil in Daytona for guidance.

  It was Virgil, not Melvin Sr., who’d seemed destined for a life in the church. Their father, Virgil W. Hawkins, had settled in Okahumpka at the turn of the twentieth century, when the region still resembled the “vast, untamed wilderness, plentifully stocked with wild cattle” that government reports had described back in 1821, when the United States took possession of Florida from Spain. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had allowed cattlemen to enlarge their holdings as the Seminoles were pushed out of North Florida and down into the “thick, impenetrable flat woods and deep bogs” around Okahumpka. In that refuge, or what was designated their “zone of confinement,” they harbored Africans who had been freed by Spain as well as fugitive slaves who were fleeing their white masters in cotton-belt states. While some of the fugitive blacks indentured themselves as servants or labored as slaves to the Seminoles, others allied themselves with the Native Americans and took up arms beside them in their wars against the United States, thus to be known as Black Seminoles. Though they maintained separate cultures, the Seminoles, native and black, coexisted as allies in Okahumpka, more particularly in Bugg Spring, an area that Florida governor William P. DuVal considered “the poorest and most miserable region I ever beheld.”