Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  The Hawkins family was terrified. They knew all too well what might be the fate of an eighteen-year-old black boy not only under suspicion of raping a white woman but also in the custody of Willis McCall. They feared that the sheriff’s imposition of a news blackout might be a delaying tactic; that perhaps his department’s interrogation of Bubba had turned violent, and they needed time for the boy’s injuries to heal. Four days after Bubba was locked up, Virgil Hawkins notified the FBI office in Ocala of the situation and set up a meeting for his brother with Robert Saunders, an attorney with the NAACP in Tampa. Melvin Sr. told Saunders that someone he knew had overheard Sheriff Willis McCall order his deputies to arrest “young nigger Hawkins,” because he was the nephew of “that nigger who was trying to get into the University of Florida.”

  A black man who grew up in Tampa, Saunders didn’t need to be briefed on the reputation of the sheriff of Lake County. Six years earlier, on Christmas night, 1951, shortly before the second Groveland trial was set to begin, a bomb had exploded beneath the home of Harry T. Moore, executive secretary of the NAACP in Florida, killing him and his wife, Harriette. As the bombing bore all the earmarks of a Ku Klux Klan assassination, and because Moore had been relentless in his public denunciations of Willis McCall, the NAACP and the FBI suspected that the Lake County sheriff must have been involved, at least tangentially. Moore’s killing had left the NAACP in Florida rudderless. Saunders, who had volunteered with the NAACP while attending college in Detroit, suddenly found himself being interviewed for the job by the top brass, including Thurgood Marshall himself. He accepted on the spot. “I did not think about the danger at all,” he recalled. “I just could not believe that these fine and courageous men had entrusted me with so precious a mission.” As Saunders was leaving, one of the leaders had tendered him a few parting words of advice: “Stay out of the little towns.”

  When Saunders returned to Tampa to set up his office, he was dismayed to learn not only that the Florida organization was verging on bankruptcy but also that blacks in the state were still terrified by the fact of the bombing. In the years since, Saunders had grown keenly aware of the personal terror that Virgil Hawkins had been living with every day since he’d filed his 1949 suit. So when Melvin Hawkins arrived with his daughter Gloria at Saunders’s Tampa home for their initial meeting, the NAACP executive took their fears seriously. “We needed to move fast,” Saunders remembered, “and only the governor possessed enough power in the state to restrain McCall.”

  LeRoy Collins was living in the Grove—an antebellum plantation house in Tallahassee, owned by his wife, Mary Call—while waiting for the construction of the new Florida Governor’s Mansion to be completed. Largely due to overwhelming support from black voters, Collins had managed to hold off Sumter Lowry and the rest of the field in the highly contentious Democratic primary of 1956. He had then cruised to victory over his Republican opponent and become the first Florida governor to serve two consecutive terms. It was close to midnight when Saunders telephoned Collins. Mary Call answered the phone. Informed that the governor was asleep, Saunders requested that she wake him for an urgent matter. Once Saunders had briefed him, the governor—alarmed but hardly surprised, given his own history with McCall—spoke for nearly an hour with the elder Hawkins. The governor gave Hawkins his word that young Bubba would be located and protected.

  On December 23, true to his word, Collins wired McCall, ordering the “inhumane roundup” to cease. He then contacted Gordon Oldham, who assured the governor that “the Negro youth was being held lawfully at this stage of the investigation of the crime and being treated properly” at a jail in Tampa. The governor asked Oldham to pass on the information to the Hawkins family. “I assume this has been done,” Collins told a reporter, and deemed that no further intervention in the case by his office was necessary.

  “We’re still in the middle of the investigation,” McCall responded to a reporter’s questioning, reserving further comment. As for the news that the NAACP had contacted Collins and was seriously considering taking Hawkins’s case, the sheriff said, “They’ve blasted me before, and I’ve still got nothing to say.”

  Was it the news blackout and the fact that a rape suspect was being held incommunicado without being charged that made the case feel so strange?

  It certainly struck Mabel as odd that McCall and Oldham weren’t moving more aggressively to charge Hawkins in front of a courtroom full of reporters, if only to reassure the public that a rapist wasn’t running loose. Perhaps another sheriff might have seen silence as a means of allaying racial tensions, but not McCall. In fact, nothing was more likely to infuriate the notoriously short-fused and rabble-rousing McCall than the idea, let alone the practice, of interracial sex, consensual or otherwise, as he’d evidenced the previous year in a case that had made headlines across the state.

  Evvie Griffin had been on the job for about a year on October 3, 1956, when Willis McCall informed him that he’d be needed on a stakeout in the Big Scrub of Ocala National Forest. “Bring a camera,” the sheriff told him.

  On the ride up to the Scrub, Eustis police chief Andy Groves briefed Griffin more fully on the case. Emily “Apache” Brown, a rail-thin, petite white nineteen-year-old from Lake County, had been regularly attending dances at the American Legion Hall in Orlando, where one evening she became friendly with a white girl her age, a tall bleached blonde named Marlene Taylor. After the dance, when the two of them stopped at a drive-in, Marlene had waved genially to a carload of black men whom she apparently knew. Apache was curious. “I’m dating a Negro,” Marlene confided.

  Originally from Miami, Marlene Taylor had married and given birth to a daughter by the time she was sixteen. At eighteen, after her divorce, she’d moved with her baby to her father’s home in Orlando. There, she’d met an airman stationed at Pinecastle Air Force Base. They’d married in March 1956, but within a few months her husband had been transferred to a base in Europe. By September, Marlene had quietly begun a sexual relationship with Maxie Thomas Deckard, a twenty-one-year-old black airman from Palestine, Texas. Marlene shared these bits of her history with Apache, and then, to Apache’s surprise, asked her if she might like to go out on a “sex thrill date” with a Negro. Laughing, playing along with what she assumed was a joke, Apache said yes.

  Later that night, after she’d left her new friend and driven back to her parents’ home in Lake County, Apache made a telephone call to Chief Groves.

  Apache was in “some kind of trouble,” Griffin recalled, and he surmised that she might have been using the information she passed on to the Eustis Police Department to help extricate herself from her own legal predicament. In any case, Chief Groves knew exactly whom he should talk to next. He met with Sheriff McCall, and together they put into place a plan to lure Marlene Taylor and her “thrill date” into a setting and situation where they could be arrested under a Florida miscegenation statute prohibiting “interracial cohabitation and fornication.” Groves argued that McCall’s cabin in the Scrub provided the perfect site for the entrapment, but the prospect of Negroes fornicating with white girls inside his own four walls did not appeal to McCall. Groves persisted, and eventually, if unenthusiastically, McCall yielded.

  The night before they staged the entrapment, they rehearsed. Groves, McCall, and Lake County deputy Doug Sewell drove Apache to the sheriff’s camp to familiarize her with the layout of the cabin and to outline for her the plan of attack. The following day, Apache called Marlene to tell her that she’d been thinking about what Marlene had suggested and, yes, she really would like to get together with a Negro—she even knew where they could do it. Her father was away on vacation, she said, so they could all go up to his place, a secluded cabin tucked deep in the pines.

  Marlene did not need much convincing. She called Maxie Deckard, shared her excitement, asked him to find a date for Apache, and arranged to meet up with them at a gas station.

  Deckard showed up around
nine p.m. with a friend, twenty-six-year-old Staff Sergeant Conley Gipson Jr., from Navasota, Texas, at the wheel of his 1956 Pontiac convertible. They were waiting, cautious, the Pontiac idling, when Apache’s blue Chevrolet pulled into the service station. Apache did not need to explain why it was necessary for the two black men to follow her and Marlene in a separate car; in Lake County that was obvious.

  They were approaching the Scrub, Gipson and Deckard trailing at a safe distance, when Apache suddenly pulled the Chevy off the road by a phone booth and stopped to make a call. A few miles farther on, she stopped at another pay phone. Deckard, already nervous about the rendezvous, didn’t like what he was seeing. “It doesn’t look right,” he told Gipson, noting that they had already passed one Lake County squad car, and another, he thought, might be following them. While they waited for Apache to complete her call, Gipson peered in the rearview mirror. Slowly a green 1956 Oldsmobile from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department was approaching; slowly it passed them and then, gaining speed, disappeared into the night. Probably they were looking for someone else, Gipson conjectured. His friend, though, was sufficiently spooked that he persuaded Gipson to pull off alongside a cluster of pines because he simply did not want to go any farther into the forest. Noticing that the Pontiac was no longer behind them, Apache circled back to the parked car. Flirtatiously, she assured the two men that everything was fine and they’d be able to spend the whole night together undetected in the cabin.

  Marlene, too, had spotted a patrol car, and she thought that they should turn around, but Apache allayed her concerns as well.

  Within minutes of each other, the Chevy and then the Pontiac pulled up to the cabin. Apache leapt from her car, and with Marlene on her heels, she rushed into the cabin and turned on all the lights. The Air Force men watched from the front seat of the convertible until the girls called them into the cabin.

  Once inside, Gipson promptly produced a fifth of vodka while Apache pulled four Cokes from the refrigerator. Deckard downed a shot of the vodka and was contemplating another, but Marlene was coaxing him into the bedroom. She shut and locked the bedroom door behind them. They kissed, and the airman began peeling off her clothes. One of them turned out the light.

  Gipson and Apache proceeded more awkwardly. They had barely met, and by his own admission, Gipson wasn’t “very good socially.” So, alone with Apache in a remote cabin deep in the Scrub, he sat opposite her at the kitchenette table and waited for her to “make the first move.”

  Only they weren’t alone. Just after eleven p.m., in Gipson’s words, “all hell broke loose.” The door of the cabin burst open, and Andy Groves burst in, with Eustis police officer David Shelley behind him.

  “Run!” Apache yelled to Gipson.

  Rushing into the cabin behind the two policemen, Sheriff McCall and Deputy Griffin paid no heed to Apache or the alarmed Gipson. With his pistol drawn, McCall lowered his shoulder and busted through the bedroom door. Marlene Taylor screamed. Trying to cover herself, she’d managed to sit up in the bed when McCall smashed her over the head with his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. Then, turning to Deckard, he bashed the airman across the right side of his forehead. He didn’t stop there. With Deckard, like Marlene, bleeding profusely from the head wound, McCall pistol-whipped the black man repeatedly with the butt of his gun until Deckard blacked out.

  Gipson, who’d watched the assault from the kitchen, would later say, “This was a real beating.” Griffin, too, would recall McCall’s blind rage. “Something in Willis snapped when he saw those two in his bed,” he said.

  By Griffin’s account, McCall continued to batter Deckard even after he’d fallen unconscious. Marlene, screaming and crying, was begging the sheriff to stop. Griffin, himself frightened, reached out to grab McCall’s arm. “You’re going to kill him,” he shouted.

  McCall straightened up, but he’d not finished with the fornicators. He ordered Marlene to lie down beside Deckard so that Griffin could get some photographs. “We were clean as a white fish,” Deckard said. “We did not have on a stitch.” The officers kept their guns trained on the couple. Deputy Sewell handed Griffin some flashbulbs, and McCall struck Deckard’s head a few more times to turn the airman’s face toward the camera. Griffin snapped the photos. Her head resting back against the wall, her blond hair and pale face dripping with blood, her eyes dazed, Marlene had intertwined her legs with Deckard’s, while he lay flat on his back, out cold. The flashbulbs popped; the lawmen leered.

  When Deckard regained consciousness, McCall ordered the two lovers—both of them “a bloody mess”—to get dressed and then marched them into the kitchen. There they joined Apache and Gipson, who had been searched and had readily assured the officers, “I’m not going anywhere.” Nonetheless, Groves and Shelley, their guns drawn, hovered over him and Apache.

  Marlene put her head under the kitchen faucet and turned on the cold water to wash the blood from her hair. Then, with a dishcloth, she attempted to stop the bleeding on Deckard’s head. McCall rasped, “Look at that nigger lover helping the nigger.”

  At a signal from McCall, Shelley, with Gipson in tow, followed the sheriff outside the cabin, where Sewell was waiting. Inside the cabin, Deckard and the others could hear Gipson pleading helplessly with the three lawmen. “Don’t . . . Please don’t,” he begged, but his words fell on ears deaf to the cries of a black man.

  “Don’t you know any better than to go out with white women?” McCall shouted. Gipson tried to answer, tried to explain that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he hadn’t broken any laws, as Shelley struck him with his long-handled flashlight, and McCall—all the while growling, “Don’t try to hit me, nigger!”—started swinging his gun at Gipson’s head with such abandon that he lost his grip and it went flying with enough force to dent the cabin. Gipson lay sprawled in the dirt and pine needles while Shelley, merciless with his flashlight, continued to bludgeon him.

  “Don’t kill him!” Apache begged them. “He did not do anything!”

  McCall did not reply but he paused, first to catch his breath and then to retrieve his gun. He ordered Deckard, who had regained consciousness, out of the cabin.

  “Let’s kill these niggers and throw them to the alligators,” McCall suggested.

  “No,” one officer objected, figuring it wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause, and asked McCall if they should handcuff the men.

  After waving the officers away, the sheriff moved in close to Deckard. “Run, nigger. Run,” he dared the battered airman. “I want to get in some target practice.”

  Despite the numerous blows to his head, Deckard was clear-minded enough to sense the danger. “I believe the Big Man was trying to give us a chance to run so he could shoot us,” he later asserted.

  Bloodied and beaten, the two men were cuffed and shoved into the backseat of Gipson’s Pontiac. With Evvie Griffin at the wheel and Andy Groves riding shotgun, they headed back to the Lake County jail, where Deckard and Gipson were to be arraigned on moral charges, fornication, and whatever else McCall decided they might be guilty of. Groves, though, had an idea of his own. A few minutes into the drive, he pointed to a cut on the road up ahead. Leaning in toward Griffin, he whispered, “If you run up there on that cut, I’ll kill ’em.”

  Not in this car, you ain’t goin’ to, Griffin said to himself, and ignoring the police chief, he drove past the cut.

  In Tavares, the court charged Maxie Deckard with illegal cohabitation and Gipson with vagrancy. Both were also charged with resisting arrest. They were confined in the Lake County jail, with bail set at a thousand dollars. They received no medical treatment for their wounds.

  Only with the intervention of the Air Force were the accused airmen able to arrange bond. Escorted by the Air Police, who were armed with machine guns, as well as by troopers from the Florida Highway Patrol, they exited the Lake County Courthouse, where a crowd of angry whites was quickly gathering. The charg
es had been reduced to “obstructing justice,” and the airmen were banned from the state.

  Apache Brown escaped both injury and charges, but Marlene Taylor was charged with illegal cohabitation and denied the right to counsel. The following week the Daily Commercial published a closely cropped photo of her bloodied face. The accompanying article accused the Lake County sheriff’s office of not only failing to safeguard pertinent crime-related evidence but also allowing nude photos to be widely circulated around Lake County for “pornographic purposes.” Mabel Norris Reese joined the Leesburg paper in calling for Governor Collins to suspend McCall from office, pending a full investigation of the cabin arrests and the photographs. When McCall learned that Apache had become something of a local “celebrity” and was talking freely about the incident around Lake County, he tracked her down, handed her one hundred dollars, and personally delivered a warning: “Keep your mouth shut.”

  Evvie Griffin knew who was responsible for circulating the photos. “I took the damned pictures,” he’d later admit, but it was Deputy James Yates who had “borrowed” the prints from him and distributed them countywide. Except Yates had not done it solely for the pornographic purposes that the Daily Commercial decried. “It was a message to white women,” Griffin said, and the message was, “Don’t fool around with niggers in Lake County.”

  By then the ACLU was calling for an investigation, and within days the FBI had dispatched agents to Lake County—Willis McCall was, by the fall of 1956, no stranger to J. Edgar Hoover. It was time for the sheriff to pay Marlene Taylor a visit. He needed her to corroborate a version—his version, and the version that policemen and deputies would relate to FBI agents—of what had happened at the cabin in the Big Scrub on the night of October 4. He told Marlene he was sorry that she’d been hit on the head, but it was of course an accident. And it was all because Deckard had “attacked him upon entering the bedroom” and so he’d been forced to hit him with his gun and unfortunately “the blow [had] glanced off Deckard” and had inadvertently struck, and bloodied, Marlene. McCall also persuaded her to voluntarily sign a statement that “she did not want to see any newspaper people or reporters while she was in jail as she did not want to cause any embarrassment to her family.”