Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Mabel Norris Reese was not surprised by the decision. She’d seen McCall survive many such investigations. In case after case, from the Groveland Boys to the Platt family to Jesse Daniels, she’d spent hours upon hours sharing details with FBI agents like Ted Tucker, only to have her efforts come to naught after they had interviewed McCall. “What are you doing believing that Communist?” was evidently all he needed to say to them, and “the investigations would stop.”

  Certain that a death warrant would soon be issued in the case of State of Florida v. Sam Wiley Odom, W. M. Kennedy filed an appeal in Futch’s circuit court. In the motion, Kennedy argued that the court had erred in permitting state attorney Gordon Oldham “to comment before the jury and the Court on the failure of the accused to testify in his own behalf.” Kennedy also cited the jury’s failure to adequately “deliberate or consider the verdict which they returned,” since they had been out of the courtroom for barely more than six minutes. By the end of the summer, Odom’s case had reached the Supreme Court of Florida; oral arguments were scheduled for January 14, 1959. On Mabel’s recommendation, Kennedy enlisted the assistance of Tavares attorney Walton B. Hunter, the son of Mabel’s late friend and former state attorney Jesse Hunter. Together the two lawyers argued the case before the Tallahassee court, with Attorney General Richard W. Ervin representing the State.

  One month later, the court upheld the circuit court verdict. In rejecting Kennedy’s argument, the justices cited the fact that during the trial, Kennedy had called Odom to the witness stand and asked him his name, his age, and what grade he had reached in school. Therefore, the court ruled, Odom had appeared as a witness in the case for the defense and could not be considered a “silent defendant whose silence must be ignored.”

  In June, Kennedy petitioned the Florida pardon board to spare Odom’s life on the grounds that the “near illiterate” boy “never had a chance before the all-white jury which condemned him” after barely deliberating. Even as he prepared his argument, he did not believe his client would stand much of a chance before the pardon board. But a few weeks earlier, a Tallahassee case had exploded into national headlines that dramatically brought before the state the issue of racial bias in the dispensation of justice.

  On May 2, Betty Jean Owens, a black coed at Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University, was on her way home from the school’s annual Green and Orange Ball with her date and another student couple. They had pulled off the road by a dark, wooded park when, at about one a.m., four young white men snuck up on the unsuspecting couples. One shoved a sixteen-gauge shotgun into the driver’s face and ordered the black youths out of the car. The two males, tuxedoed, were forced to kneel at the roadside, while their dates in formal gowns were held at knifepoint. The white man with the shotgun ordered the two young black men to get back in their car and leave. As they started to pull away, Owens began to cry. One of the men slapped her; if she wanted to get back home herself, he warned her, she had best remain quiet. The distraction, quick though it was, lent the other young woman a chance to make it to the safety of the car before it left. Owens alone faced the four armed men. They pushed her into the backseat of their car and drove her to the outskirts of town, where they raped her multiple times.

  Owens’s companions, meanwhile, drove to a local police precinct and reported the incident. Joe Cooke Jr., a nineteen-year-old police intern and student at all-white Florida State, sprang into action. In a police car, he led the students on a search for their friend. Around four a.m., they spotted the assaulters’ blue Chevrolet. A high-speed chase ensued until Cooke managed to pull the Chevy over. Jumping from the police car with shotgun in hand, he ordered the four young men out of their vehicle. Betty Jean Owens, in her rumpled gold-and-white ball gown, lay bound and gagged on the floor of the backseat.

  A deputy arrived to assist with the arrests. The four intoxicated white men, “laughing and joking on the way to the police station,” apparently figured their actions amounted to no more than horseplay. Confessions came readily. “They all admitted it,” the arresting deputy said.

  News of the arrests leapt onto the headlines of local newspapers and quickly spread nationwide, sowing panic, outrage, and protest. Reportedly, one white woman had to send her black maid home for the day when she showed up at the house “on the verge of hysteria” and armed with a knife “in case any white men come after me.” White women in Tallahassee swore they’d never again dare to dally in a parked car “in the country moonlight lest some Negroes should be out hunting in a retaliatory mood.” More productively, student protesters, encouraged by their recent victory in the 1957 Tallahassee bus boycott, urged the nation to pay attention to the case. A just decision would demonstrate that “white men could no longer attack black women without consequence.” A Florida A&M student exhorted a crowd of fellow protesters, “Remember it wasn’t just one Negro girl that was raped—it was all of Negro womanhood in the South.” The students, though, would protest nonviolently, “unlike white men who historically used the protection of white womanhood to inspire mob violence against black men.”

  On May 6, hundreds of spectators crammed the Jim Crow balcony of the Leon County Courthouse while, in a secret hearing room, Betty Jean Owens and her four attackers attended grand jury proceedings. Indictments followed, and the four men were led back into the courtroom. One by one, each of the four defendants pleaded not guilty to the charge of rape. The trial date was set for June 11.

  In advance of the trial, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP wrote to Governor Collins, noting pointedly that in recent lynching cases such as that of Emmett Till, the victim’s race had stood in the way of justice. “Full punishment has been certain and swift in cases involving a white victim and a Negro accused,” Wilkins wrote, “but the penalty has neither been very certain nor heavy in cases involving a Negro victim and a white accused.” Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at Bethel Baptist Church in Tallahassee, praised the student protesters for having brought the case to national attention. It represented “a clear-cut opportunity for the South to demonstrate to the world that there are people who believe in justice,” but “if the court fails now, Florida will be condemned in the eyes of the nation.” Ella Baker, director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, put her faith in the case itself; it was so solid, she believed, that “not even an all white Florida jury could fail to convict.”

  On June 11, Betty Jean Owens took the stand. Speaking softly, she recounted how one of her attackers, eighteen-year-old David Beagles, held “a wicked looking foot long knife” to her neck as he forced her to the ground. The men then tugged at her dress and pulled off her underwear, slapping her repeatedly because she was crying and begging them to stop. “I couldn’t do anything but what they said,” Owens testified, and for several hours in the woods, the four of them took turns raping her—seven times in all, she said. When they were done, two of the men blindfolded her and pushed her back into the car. After Cooke spotted the car and initiated the chase, one of the rapists suggested “dumping the nigger.” But they were forced to pull over and surrender before they did any dumping.

  The defense attorneys took advantage of cross-examination to paint “the Negress” Owens as a “stereotypical black jezebel.” They questioned her virginity and attempted to wrest from her an admission that she had engaged in consensual—and pleasurable—sex with the four white men. “Didn’t you derive any pleasure from that? Didn’t you?” the attorneys pressed.

  The defense called friends and family of the four young men as character witnesses, who invariably described the defendants as “good boys.” The phrase was an ill fit for twenty-four-year-old William Collinsworth, the oldest of the attackers, who’d held the shotgun on Owens during the rapes, except when he himself was perpetrating them. After his arrest he’d been sent to Chattahoochee “for tests of his sanity,” as he had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but he’d returned for the trial. Testifying on his behalf, his wife,
Pearlie, allowed that her husband was “not himself when he was drunk,” but when he was sober, she told the courtroom, “you couldn’t ask for a better husband.”

  The defense attorneys were not short of explanations to excuse the behavior of the accused. The presence of alcohol in Collinsworth’s “Indian blood,” combined with his “moronic mentality,” caused him to act “primitively.” Sixteen-year-old Ollie Stoutamire was merely in “the wrong place at the wrong time,” according to his attorney, who claimed that the prosecution of his client was the work of “outside agitators” and in his closing argument urged the jury, “Don’t become hysterical like the northern press did.”

  When word spread that the jury, after three hours of deliberation, had reached a verdict, spectators filed back into the courtroom, while hundreds of black protesters held a vigil outside. Those watching from the Jim Crow balcony could not see the white faces below, but if they had, they would have seen most looking stunned and relieved: The jury found all four defendants “guilty with a recommendation of mercy” because they had found “no evidence of brutality.” The judge set sentencing for two weeks hence, and the defendants were packed off to Raiford in the meantime. One of the defense lawyers, asked if he’d appeal the verdict, said, “You don’t appeal a victory.”

  After the trial, Betty Jean Owens told a reporter, “I’m grateful that twelve white men finally believed the truth. But they also recommended mercy, and I wonder what they would have done if one of our boys had done it to a white girl.” The verdict brought Betty Jean’s grandmother to tears. “I’ve lived to see the day when white men would be really brought to account for what they did to Negroes,” she said. Betty Jean’s mother spoke more strongly. After praising the jury for “upholding my daughter’s womanhood,” she let it be known that “I did my best to bring my children up right. They have race pride. They have so much race pride that they wouldn’t fool with no white man, trash or not. The only way they could have gotten Betty was the way they did. Take her.”

  Editorials in many national newspapers framed the verdict as a victory for race relations. “What happened in Tallahassee was a triumph for law and order,” the New York Times declared. “The defendants were tried fairly and convicted. And all this happened in a Southern city. Beside those facts the recommendation for mercy is essentially a detail.” Black newspapers were decidedly less commendatory. The Baltimore Afro-American wrote, “True-to-tradition white men made it inescapably clear at 12:35 Sunday morning that death for rape is only for colored men accused by white women.” As to the jury’s failure to find “evidence of brutality,” the editorialist asked, “What did this jury want in the way of evidence?” The Pittsburgh Courier called attention to the fact that since 1924, thirty-seven black men, many of them teens, had been executed for the rapes of white women in Florida, whereas only one white man had been sentenced to death for the same crime—he’d confessed to the 1925 rape of a four-year-old girl on Thanksgiving Day. The Chicago Defender mocked the adulatory tone with which the “white press” greeted the jury’s recommendation for mercy. “Meanwhile the wailing cries of four Negroes awaiting execution in the death row of Florida’s state penitentiary—for raping white women—are drowned out by the din and hoopla over the verdict which has spared the lives of four white rapists.”

  With racial tensions already running high and more than a dozen segregation bills before the state legislature, the Owens case, as one Tallahasseean observed, “couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” It also presented Kennedy with an opportunity to buttress his legal argument for clemency for Sam Wiley Odom. Yet when he appeared before the Florida pardon board to argue for clemency, he chose not to exploit the verdict that had been issued in the Tallahassee rape. “I saw in the papers that I would use the case up here as an argument,” he noted, but then announced, “I have no intention of doing that. I plead only for fairness to this boy. Each case must be considered on its own merit. All cases are different.” As in the court trial, Kennedy did not question Odom’s guilt; instead, he cited the convicted youth’s age and limited schooling as mitigating factors. “He didn’t seem to realize the severity of what he had done,” Kennedy explained to the board. “He had admitted his act readily, but didn’t think she would mind. He said he just wanted to try a white woman.” Stories “told him by his father and Negro boys in military service of white women going with Negro men” had “inflamed” the curiosity of an impressionable boy, he said.

  As for the six-minute deliberation that had convicted Odom with no recommendation for mercy, Gordon Oldham defended it and the jury, which “needed no time to decide Odom’s guilt because the case was open and shut.”

  Nor did Leesburg police chief Bill Fisher favor Kennedy’s appeal. Despite his negative feelings about Willis McCall, Fisher was unequivocal in his support of the death penalty for Odom. “I wish you could have seen the hysteria of this woman, and others,” Fisher told the pardon board. “I think this type of thing—if we law enforcement officers don’t do the best job we can—it will lead to lynchings.”

  In July, the Florida pardon board turned down Kennedy’s appeal, and on August 10, Governor LeRoy Collins signed Sam Wiley Odom’s death warrant. The Okahumpka youth would have just two weeks to live.

  Unwavering though he was in his certainty that justice had been served in Odom’s case, Fisher remained troubled by the pattern of the recent rape cases in Lake County and by the investigative work, or lack of it, done by the sheriff’s department, especially with regard to the case against Jesse Daniels. So while he was in Tallahassee for the pardon board hearing, the Leesburg police chief paid a visit to Attorney General Richard Ervin and shared with him his concerns. He not only told Ervin that he thought Daniels was being “framed” for the rape of Blanche Knowles, but also divulged to him the confidential information that he had gleaned from his visit with Alfred Bosanquet at Fair Oaks—that “it would not look good in newsprint” that his daughter had been raped by a black man.

  On his return to Lake County, Fisher received an irate phone call from Gordon Oldham, who delivered a stern warning: “Stay out of the case.”

  State attorney Gordon Oldham

  CHAPTER TEN

  Don’t Talk to Me About Conscience, Lady

  BY AUGUST 12, telegrams and letters from Odom’s family, local black churches, black community leaders, the NAACP, civil rights advocates, capital punishment opponents, and concerned citizens from across the nation were pouring into Governor Collins’s office, pleading for the boy’s life. Bettye Odom, Sam’s twenty-one-year-old sister, wrote, “If 4 white men can rape one colored of 16 and live, why can’t a colored boy live after the woman herself says he did not hurt me? . . . He is my only Bro and oldest. Please don’t let him die if you can help it please.” Laura Cope, who had not pleaded for her child earlier, now did. “Governor, I don’t ask you this favor because of those white boys,” she wrote, “because I feel like those boys would not have done what they did if they hadn’t been drinking”—and that, she believed, was also the case with her son.

  In his response to Cope a few days later, Collins wrote, “I understand your grief but I have no power as Governor to grant the relief you are seeking. You are doubtless a person of great faith and I deeply hope that in that faith you may find some help in bearing this cross which understandably is beyond reason to any mother.”

  The black churches of Leesburg and Okahumpka appealed to the governor’s “sense of righteousness,” which should allow Odom the clemency granted the defendants in the Owens case. Likewise, the Tallahassee branch of the NAACP, “praying for equality under the law,” urged the governor to “employ the power and full authority of your office to insure equality.” Letters from black bishops and other leaders across Florida, as well as concerned white citizens, poured in, making the same case.

  The flood of letters appeared to have some effect. Although the governor—despite his personal opposition to the d
eath penalty, or “Florida’s gutter of shame,” as he’d called it—insisted that he had “no power” to commute Odom’s death sentence to life imprisonment, he did ask his assistant to look into whether the case had been disposed of by unanimous decision of the Florida Supreme Court, “and what, if anything, was said which would indicate a consideration of leniency on Odom’s behalf.”

  Mabel Norris Reese remained focused on the information Odom held that could clear the charges against Jesse Daniels. “Rape Attacks Have Stopped in Lake County” ran the headline of one of the pieces she’d written for the Daytona Beach Evening News that had so incensed McCall. But the sheriff refused to answer reporters’ questions about the relevance of this fact to whatever evidence against Daniels, still largely undisclosed, his office had gathered. “It is in this evidence that the truth may be locked away from the public,” Mabel asserted, and added, “Truth also is locked away in one of two other places—either in the death cell at Raiford . . . within the mind of a young Negro or in a ward of the hospital for the insane at Chattahoochee.”

  After much “knocking on doors” throughout central Florida, Mabel managed to find a lawyer—Orlando criminal attorney John Lenninger—willing to assist with Jesse’s case, despite the near certainty he’d never get paid. She also managed to convince Lenninger to drive the hundred miles north to Raiford with her and Pearl Daniels, in the hope that the condemned youth would consent to a visit. If Chief Fisher was correct in his theory that Odom had been involved in the rape of Blanche Knowles, Mabel reasoned, the boy might want to clear his conscience before the State of Florida took his life—especially with the mother of Jesse Daniels sitting across the table from him.