Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  McCall professed to Peters that blacks in America had evolved in the past hundred years, but only by virtue of the influence of whites, whom, as a race, they would never equal. “They’ve come a far way in just a hundred years from darkest Africa,” he affirmed. “Why, they’re still eating each other in some places over there. I think our niggers have advanced more than any race in the same amount of time. You can attribute this advancement to the influence of the white man. I don’t think you’ll ever make the nigger the equal of a white man. That’s why desegregation will never work. It lowers the white children’s standards and morals to mix with a syphilitic, immoral, diseased race. Their brains can’t compare with a white man’s. They don’t have the same sense of achievement. They even smell different. Why, the only way I can tell a nigger is to look at him or smell him. You’ll find exceptions to some of these things, but I’m talking about generally speaking. White people advance faster, grasp things easier. You’ve got to have separate schools or hold the whites back, that’s all.”

  Mabel suspected that Collins would not be pleased to see the sheriff’s comments. Nor did she think McCall was doing himself any favors, but that thought seemed never to have entered the sheriff’s head. “You know,” he summed up to the reporter, “I used to say that America was a great country: if you liked segregation, you could live in the South; if you liked integration, you could live in the North. Now they’re trying to force this thing on all of us. It won’t work. It just won’t work.”

  * * *

  —

  GOING DOOR-TO-DOOR in Okahumpka and Leesburg with her petition attesting to her son’s good character, Pearl was slowly collecting more than just signatures, which soon totaled more than two hundred fifty. She was also picking up interesting bits of information. Some of it was gossip, and much of it was rumor, but a lot of it concerned Joe Knowles. “Heard in Leesburg—also Fruitland Park that Joe promised the Negro boy $500 to commit that act, & to kill her if he wanted to, & if anything went wrong, he’d pay McCall $500 to squash the confession,” she wrote to Mabel. “Probably that’s true & reason Joe wanted his wife to not say attacker was Negro for fear Negro boy would tattle on Joe to someone other than McCall.” Pearl’s sister-in-law, who lived near the Bosanquets in Fruitland Park, had also told her that Blanche’s father and brother were aware of Knowles’s deal with the “Negro boy” and were “about to get up a lynching party for Joe.” Pearl was hoping to get confirmation. “Oh how we need proof of these things!” she wrote, in exasperation and hope.

  Mabel had assured Pearl that she would handle the news coverage and deal with the legal side of Jesse’s case, but now she also advised Pearl to contact the FBI and plead for an official investigation. The handwritten letter, dated November 17, landed on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover himself. Along with clippings of Mabel’s stories from the Topic, Pearl provided both an extensive summary of the facts in her son’s case and the “many gossip tales that many people believe have truth in them.” For one, a man she knew claimed he had seen Blanche Knowles “being loaded into her station wagon the night of Dec. 17th drunk. If she was that drunk, one of the men must have driven her home, the other came in the car to pick up the driver, therefore it could have been one of those men. There’s the thread for you to unravel.” For another, “the husband, Joe Knowles made a bragg [sic] to an old man, a friend of ours that he (Joe) put up a big bunch of money to get our boy convicted. Why? When the boy was gentle, mannerly, shy . . . Never been in juvenile trouble, never sassed a teacher, or fought as most boys.”

  Pearl closed her letter not with rumor or gossip but with what she believed was a fact: Sam Wiley Odom, a recently convicted rapist, had never been questioned about his possible involvement in the Knowles rape, despite there being a “great many features of the Knowles, Howard, and Coker crimes alike.” And from that she drew her conclusion: “We truely feel the 18 yr. old negro did this one too; knowing full well our son sat at our feet playing with a toy till 1:20 A.M. 18th of Dec. Please in the name of God, and kindness of your heart, and justice will you please help us clear our son through the F.B.I.??”

  Within a week, Hoover replied. The FBI “is not able to be of help to you in the matter involving your son,” he informed Pearl, and he suggested that she contact a local bar association or legal aid society, which might “possibly offer aid without charge.”

  Pearl wrote back immediately with another handwritten letter. “The Bar Association is out Honorable Sir, since the Prosecuting Attorney, and Judge that my son would have to go up before belong to it, and both are too closely knit with the Sheriff. They would farther frame the boy.” She again begged Hoover for help. “Christmas is almost here, and our one and only child has been shut away eleven months, so you can imagine how we feel. No joyous preparations for us. Could you please help change that Sir?”

  Pearl’s persistence was rewarded. Hoover wrote again, informing her that he had passed on her letters to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice “for consideration and appropriate action.” There, Assistant Attorney General W. Wilson White reviewed her correspondence along with all the previous complaints and reports on investigations appertaining to Lake County and its sheriff, Willis McCall. White did not hesitate. On December 22, 1958, he ordered an investigation into the Jesse Daniels case, “to be instituted immediately.”

  Sam Wiley Odom

  CHAPTER NINE

  So Much Race Pride

  BY THE END OF 1958, the economic impact of the previous winter’s devastating freeze had been offset by the higher prices that oranges and grapefruits had commanded throughout the year, and Lake County’s citrus business had made a strong recovery. The watermelon business remained in peril, but Knowles and Company nonetheless managed to prosper, as it had diversified its crops, operated its own citrus packing plant, and maintained healthy cattle holdings.

  With plenty of picking to be done for the Herlongs, the Oldhams, the Knowleses, and other citrus families, the young men of North Quarters were back in the trees. No one wanted for work in harvesting season, and the boys skipped school for it. Prepared for a long day’s work, the pickers would show up with coffee cans full of raccoon or possum meat for lunch, along with corn bread and the butter beans that they called “baby ears.” And every crew had a gopher hook—a long pole with a stiff wire hook at its end—in case they came upon a hole burrowed by a Florida gopher tortoise in the sandy soil. Butchered, a tortoise could provide enough meat for dinner, with a leg or two left over for the next day’s coffee can.

  In these prosperous times, the Reese family was struggling with a different sort of freeze. Ever since Bryant Bowles of the National Association for the Advancement of White People had come bounding into the Topic’s office announcing that he’d get even with her, Mabel had been feeling the chill from the rival Mount Dora Herald. This year she’d finally been obliged to take a second job, as an editorial writer for the Daytona Beach News-Journal, which entailed a fifty-mile commute from Mount Dora at least twice a week. The Reeses managed to scrape by and to keep the Topic in print and intact, “still aiming our sights on the word ‘justice.’”

  Pearl Daniels, meanwhile, continued working in the fields, making her little baskets of pine straw, collecting signatures on her petition, and writing letters—letters to Jesse, to doctors at Chattahoochee, to the FBI and the Department of Justice. She continued gathering whatever information might be relevant to Jesse’s case as well. It was not by accident, therefore, that one day, carrying her petition, she crossed County Road 470 into North Quarters, where she knocked on the door of Laura Cope, Sam Wiley Odom’s mother.

  Like Pearl, Cope had a son locked away in North Florida, and like Pearl, she had endured a year of distressing setbacks at the hands of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. In December, after the rape of Blanche Knowles, her son, Sam, had been dragged to jail in the deputies’ early-morning roundup. He’d been held there, without explanat
ion, after most of the other suspects had been released—even after Willis McCall’s announcement that he was holding Bubba Hawkins, Odom’s friend and neighbor, as the likely culprit. Through it all, Cope, like Pearl, had not been allowed to visit her son. Like Pearl, too, Cope knew something was rotten in Lake County.

  The information Pearl gleaned from her was even more startling—and more confounding—than anything Pearl and Mabel had yet suspected. Cope told Pearl that her son had in fact confessed to the rape of Blanche Knowles. Despite that, Sam had told his mother, McCall had offered him a deal—his freedom in exchange for his “sworn statement that Melvin Hawkins raped Blanche Knowles.” But her son, Cope said, had refused to finger the Hawkins boy.

  Pearl learned further that, although Sam had continued to be held by the sheriff’s department—beyond when not only Bubba Hawkins but Jesse as well had been taken into custody—Sheriff McCall had told Cope that the rape of Blanche Knowles would not be put on her son: “He’d see to that.” And when Jesse was “finished in Chattahoochee, he’d be put somewhere else.”

  Even so, like Hawkins, Odom had had a brush with vigilante justice, just as Pearl had heard rumored in the watermelon fields. When Cope had visited her son on death row at Raiford, he told her that, after his arrest for the rape of Kate Coker, Willis McCall had driven him to “an isolated spot at the airport between Leesburg and Tavares,” where the sheriff “threw a pocket knife to the ground and said, ‘Nigger that is your knife, pick it up.’” Fearing that, had he done so, the sheriff would shoot him, Odom had refused.

  Why? Pearl asked herself. Why had a convicted rapist not been prosecuted for a rape to which he had reportedly confessed? And why was her son being punished for a crime that he did not commit—could not have committed? Other questions might have disturbed her as well, such as the odd timing and sequence of events leading up to Jesse’s arrest. But she was a mother; it was her son’s fate that concerned her most.

  “Why?” she beseeched J. Edgar Hoover, recounting these new details. “Will you Please in the name of God and Mercy use your Powers invested in you through the F.B.I. and the trust of the People, to see this is investigated and let us hear from you right away that it is being done.”

  Hoover, in his response, indicated that he had forwarded Pearl’s letters to Assistant Attorney General W. Wilson White at the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, where the investigation was already under way. Pearl promptly shifted her attention to White. In a letter to him, she characterized her son as an “obedient, shy boy” who had been forced to sign a confession he was incapable of reading, and explained that “the boy is not capable of inventing lies or plans for his own convenience since he is retarded, and thinks much slower than his age group.” She related, too, the results of the investigation into Jesse’s case by NAACP officials after Sam Wiley Odom had been arrested for the rape of Kate Coker; they “were convinced,” Pearl averred, that “it was ODOM (the colored boy) and not Daniels who committed both crimes.” Two weeks later, in a follow-up letter, she inquired if White had yet “made a decision in either direction” about entering the case. She wrote, “We have had no justice shown in this boy’s case at all. No arrest, no trial, no witnesses,” and no effectual defense, because “we were given an ex-prosecuting attorney for our son and he did not attempt to help the boy, only secretly fixed it for our boy to be sent off afterwards [and] had the nerve to tell us that is the best thing for him.” But, Pearl concluded, the doctors “aren’t treating the boy now that he is up there, and the Dr’s told me he is not insane, just slow in thinking and acting.”

  Mabel’s own outreach had been encouraging. She was surprised to learn that Robert Saunders in Tampa was looking into Sam Wiley Odom’s case in order to decide whether or not to involve the NAACP in his appeal, particularly as some at the organization, Mabel learned, “are convinced it was Odom, and not Daniels, who committed both crimes.” Contrary to its supposed policy of automatically coming to the defense of any black person accused or convicted of a serious crime, the organization was said to be considering legal steps to reopen Jesse’s case.

  In January 1959, FBI agents descended on Leesburg and Tavares to determine if the civil rights of Jesse Daniels had indeed been violated by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. One of those agents was Ted Tucker, who traveled to Chattahoochee to interview Jesse Daniels. Jesse told the agent he was “being kept at the hospital unjustly as a result of a confession he signed admitting the rape of Mrs. Knowles of Okahumpka, Florida.” The agent talked to Jesse about his sexual thoughts and experiences, then interviewed the assistant supervisor of Chattahoochee’s white male department. The assistant supervisor claimed that Jesse had been transferred between wards in the department because he was “a close associate of other known sexual perverts and deviates.” There was no record of such an accusation or transfer noted in Jesse’s extensive medical records at Chattahoochee, yet the assistant supervisor felt that “for the protection of the victim and society,” Jesse should continue to be confined to the mental institution, where he could be “closely supervised.”

  Next, Tucker visited Pearl, who had recently moved with Charles from Okahumpka to an even smaller home in nearby Yalaha. She told him, “Both my husband and I are aware of the gamble involved, if my son is declared mentally competent and able to stand trial for the rape charge. We know that our son, on the night of the rape, was in our residence, and never left the house on that particular night.”

  In Tavares, Tucker interviewed James Yates and Leroy Campbell. He reported that both deputies denied violating any civil rights in the Daniels case. Both also refused to furnish Tucker with a signed statement. But the agents did include in their report a signed statement from the polygrapher Bill Donaldson, whom Yates had persuaded McCall to bring in from the sheriff’s department in Tampa to aid in the initial questioning of suspects. The statement indicated that Donaldson had interviewed Blanche Knowles in the sheriff’s office five days after the rape, and also that he’d been present when Yates had brought Jesse Daniels in for questioning later that night. It noted that Donaldson had spoken with Jesse’s parents and conversed with Jesse himself about hunting and knives before he’d administered the lie detector test. Ten minutes into the test, the statement claimed, Jesse “admitted to me he was the person who raped Mrs. Knowles,” and Donaldson had advised McCall of the results. Joe Knowles, who was noted as also being present, had asked Donaldson if he thought the boy was guilty. Donaldson, the statement reported, had responded, “He [is] either guilty or crazy.”

  Sheriff Willis McCall played his recording of Jesse’s confession for Tucker and another agent, and then proceeded to blame Mabel Norris Reese for the investigation itself, her latest attempt “to publicly discredit and embarrass him in an apparent attempt to get him out of office” by giving “the impression that Daniels is innocent of the rape charge, and that a Negro, Sam Wiley Odom, . . . is the one who committed the Knowles rape.”

  McCall did furnish the FBI with a signed statement, which read like a manifesto against Mabel. It accused her of having joined forces with various communist and pro-communist labor movement officials, both locally and nationally, as well as members of the NAACP in her misguided battles for justice. It also asserted that she had coopted the Danielses in her crusade by getting them to “hatch up a bunch of lies” each time they visited their son in jail, which was why, the sheriff claimed, he’d denied them further access to their son. Yet, he pointed out, he’d always allowed the boy’s counsel to visit. As for the allegation of coercion, the sheriff denied that he’d fired his pistol at the floor near Jesse’s feet, or that he’d given a belt to Joe Knowles so that he could beat the boy—for “Mr. Knowles being a gentleman of high standing in his community, would never have participated in any such action.”

  McCall’s own notoriety, he asserted, put a check on his behavior as well. “There are [as] many people chasing after me as there are some be
autiful movie actresses. It just happens to be for a different purpose. I am convinced at this time that my mother did not raise any completely crazy children, and if I were so inclined to violate a person’s Civil Rights, which I definitely am not, and stand a defender of Constitutional Government, and a protector of people’s rights, knowing that I am in the lime light and am being watched by such vultures that would cut my throat at the drop of your hat. I give myself credit for having too much sense to be trapped into a position where I might be prosecuted, thrown out of office, or disgraced.” Indeed, he hoped “to see the day that the Justice Department will wake up to what is going on and quit being influenced by such individuals as is spending time and taxpayers money investigating such trumped up lies, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the other law enforcement officers could be busy doing their necessary jobs, without being harassed by such unjust and uncalled for problems as I have been subjected to, many times in the past.” In the meantime, he would not give in to the efforts of “these left-winged elements” who were attempting “to harass and worry me to the extent that I will get mad or give up in despair.” He affirmed that “as long as God lets me live . . . I will never be a quitter and . . . I will always be on the job when it comes to defending our American Way of Life.”

  On February 4, W. Wilson White informed the United States attorney in Miami that after reviewing the FBI reports on Willis V. McCall, the Civil Rights Division had “concluded that further action is not warranted.” He wrote to Pearl Daniels as well, to inform her that the investigation of McCall had been completed. “It does not disclose that any violation of a federal criminal statute was committed in connection with the arrest, detention, and commitment of your son, Jesse Daniels,” he wrote. “Therefore, this Department will take no further action.”