Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Ten days after his disquieting ride with McCall, Griffin, along with Ledford and three other men, was arrested in Volusia County. The five of them had been caught hunting wild hogs in the St. Johns River area and were charged with theft. McCall fired Griffin on the spot and ordered him to turn in his uniforms. With similar efficiency, Mount Dora mayor Jesse Wilmott suspended Ledford indefinitely. Little did it matter that a Volusia County judge cleared the five men of the charges after a preliminary hearing established that a wildlife official had given them permission to hunt in the area. “Willis had it out for me,” said Griffin, who went back to work on the family ranch.

  More serious harassment of the former deputies soon followed, however. Both men began to receive anonymous, threatening phone calls at all hours of the night. When Griffin’s wife answered a call one afternoon, a voice warned, “If your husband goes hunting tomorrow he won’t come back.” Griffin took to strapping a sawed-off shotgun to the steering column of his pickup truck. “I was never more than three feet away from a gun,” he said.

  Griffin and Ledford decided they were not about to go down quietly. Together, they engaged in a campaign to expose fraud and corruption in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department and in the state attorney’s office. Although Griffin’s letters to the governor and the Florida Sheriffs Bureau elicited little response, his insider’s story won the full attention of Tom O’Connor, a reporter with the Tampa Tribune. It was O’Connor who’d advised Griffin to meet with the NAACP lawyers, as Shuler and Chatman stood only days away from execution.

  As Saunders and Rodriguez took action, O’Connor reported every explosive detail of the case in the Tribune. The Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation, and FBI agents once again descended on the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Judge Hall ordered that the controversial plaster casts be turned over to the FBI, and agents took soil samples from the backyard of Lucius Clark’s house as well as from the crime scene. Hall announced that he was referring “falsification of evidence” charges to a grand jury; however, as he believed it would be “impractical and inexpedient” to impanel a grand jury in Lake County “on account of undue excitement or prejudice among the people,” he was forwarding his order to the circuit court in Orlando. In effect, he was returning the favor Gordon Oldham had once done him and taking the case out of the state attorney’s hands.

  In early December, after comparing the soil outside the home of the victim with the soil in Lucius Clark’s backyard, the FBI presented the results of its report before an Orange County grand jury. The footprints, agents testified, “could not have been made at the crime scene.” Furthermore, the casts themselves had been constructed from footprints made by “empty shoes,” the same conclusion that had been drawn by a forensic expert regarding Yates’s plaster casts in the Groveland trial a decade before. The Orange County grand jury was persuaded by the testimony of the FBI agents, and on December 21, a sealed envelope was sent to Judge Hall in Tavares, who announced the indictments of James Yates and Lucius Clark on the grounds that they “did unlawfully conspire, combine and confederate to gather to commit a felony, punishable by imprisonment for life.” Hall ordered their immediate arrests. The two deputies were free on bond later that afternoon, but Sheriff Willis McCall, who had himself been granted a waiver of immunity in exchange for agreeing to testify, had no choice but to suspend both Yates and Clark from the department.

  News of the indictments spread quickly in the national press. “Fake Footprints Case Due . . . History Repeated in Florida,” read the headline to the article in the Pittsburgh Courier, which opened provocatively:

  Any time a white woman claims she was raped in Lake County, Fla., the safest thing for all Negro males between the ages of 13 and 82 to do is burn all their shoes.

  If they don’t, a deputy sheriff is mighty apt to come along, throw them into the clink, borrow their shoes, and turn up in court with plaster casts of footprints he says he found at the scene of the crime.

  In which case, the hapless victim of a frame-up is consigned to burn in the electric chair.

  It happened here before, and came awfully close to happening again.

  An editorial in the Tampa Tribune deplored the “cloud of doubt” that had arisen over the justice process in Lake County, given that two men had nearly been sent to the electric chair on the strength of evidence that, “in an important element, appears to have been deliberately faked.” This, the editors affirmed, “is the cloud that hangs over Lake County. No newspaper can remove it. Only the court and the people of Lake County can.”

  Asked by reporters if he had any comment, McCall said only, “It will all come out in the wash.” Evvie Griffin was disappointed that neither the sheriff nor Oldham had been indicted for their roles in the conspiracy. He struggled with the notion that his promising career in law enforcement had been curtailed while the sheriff carried on business as usual. Still, Griffin remained patiently convinced that one mistake too many would eventually bring McCall down.

  Ledford told the Tribune, “I now feel vindicated,” but the feeling did not last. “After Willis fired me, he hired my ex-wife,” Ledford recalled. The Lake County Sheriff’s Department began paying bonus checks of hundreds of dollars each to Ora Mae and other employees, which they quickly cashed and contributed to a fund for the legal defense of Yates and Clark.

  Added to that, McCall was sleeping with Ora Mae. When Ledford discovered this, he made up his mind: He was going to murder Willis McCall. “That’s the only man I set up to kill purposely,” he recalled. “He’d just done so damned much to me that I thought, life ain’t worth it if I got to put up with him.”

  After learning McCall was planning a trip to his cabin in Alexander Springs, Ledford grabbed his Browning, drove to the Scrub, and parked near the bridge at Spring Creek. His plan was to “bust a windshield” in McCall’s face with his shotgun and, when the car came to a stop in the woods, to finish the sheriff off with another blast, if necessary.

  But Willis McCall didn’t show up at the bridge. “I went there three or four nights,” Ledford recalled, insisting that had the sheriff driven up to the Scrub the way he’d planned, he’d have been as good as dead. “I done took all of him I was gonna take.” Evvie Griffin concurred: “Willis was a lucky man. Tom would have killed him.”

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  LAKE COUNTY HELD no further surprises for Mabel. She’d hoped against hope the indictment of Yates and Clark would expose the corruption in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department and finally bring down Willis McCall, and that authorities would be spurred into investigating some of the sheriff’s most suspect cases—especially that of Jesse Daniels. None of that happened. In fact, the two-year statute of limitations on perjury expired before the deputies even faced trial, whereupon McCall rehired both men at full pay. (In their absence, McCall had deputized the suspended officers’ brothers, at the same salaries.)

  Nor did the stay of execution bring to pass the hopes of the defendants in the Fruitland Park rape case. In early 1963, Florida Supreme Court chief justice B. K. Roberts, who had written the majority opinion denying Virgil Hawkins admission to the University of Florida College of Law, appointed retired Hillsborough County circuit judge L. L. Parks to review testimony in the case of Robert Shuler and Jerry Chatman in order to decide whether the two were entitled to a new trial. In his ruling against Shuler and Chatman, Parks stated that he was not persuaded by the testimony of Griffin and Ledford, nor did he accept as fact the conclusion of the FBI’s lab report, signed by J. Edgar Hoover, that the footprint evidence had been falsified.

  Neither did a letter written to Governor LeRoy Collins by the victim’s sister, Sally Wass, hold sway. In it, she asserted that Charlotte Wass “does not wish . . . to see these young men pay the supreme penalty.” More particularly and pertinently, she noted, “our sister is also troubled by doubts whether one of the men was guilty as charged. That is Ro
bert Shuler. His family had been known to her and kind to her, and she says she did not recognize him as one of her assailants.” Charlotte Wass herself wrote a letter to Sheriff McCall in which she stated, “Robert Shuler did not rape me and I wonder why he has been in the condemned row of men.” McCall simply filed the letter away.

  In spite of Francisco Rodriguez’s efforts to win a new trial for his clients, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Parks’s ruling. Willis McCall had again prevailed; with the assistance of an entrenched judiciary, Shuler and Chatman would remain on death row at Raiford, awaiting their execution. As usual in Lake County, the wash had come out dirty.

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  BY THE EARLY 1960S, the United States had narrowed the gap in its Space Race with the Soviet Union. NASA had launched astronaut Alan Shepard into space and John Glenn into orbit around the earth. President John F. Kennedy announced in a speech before Congress that America “should take a clearly leading role in space achievement,” and he challenged politicians, scientists, engineers, and civil servants to commit to “a new course of action” to accomplish a lofty goal by the end of the decade. “I believe we should go to the moon,” Kennedy said. Assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the thirty-fifth president of the United States did not live to see the achievements of the American space program that he had envisioned.

  On the day that Kennedy was killed, Walt Disney was flying above the swampland of central Florida, secretly scouting locations for an East Coast version of his Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. It was the Space Race, however, that thrust a new, modern Florida into record economic growth. In Brevard County, where Cape Canaveral was located, the unemployment rate in mid-1964 was an extraordinarily low 1.6 percent. By the end of the summer, though, economic optimism in the state would be eclipsed by an explosive racial conflict in America’s oldest city. St. Augustine would be the final battleground in the long fight for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  In the spring of 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson attended a dinner in St. Augustine announcing a commission to organize the city’s upcoming four-hundredth-anniversary celebration. “There was one flaw in plans for the dinner,” wrote Dan Warren, the state attorney in Daytona Beach at the time. “It failed to include blacks.” The “deliberate exclusion of a major segment of the city’s citizens,” he noted, “doomed the celebration from the start.”

  Mabel covered the developments in St. Augustine for the News-Journal. She reported assiduously on the activities of Dr. Robert Hayling, who would become known as the father of the St. Augustine Movement. One of the first black dentists in Florida, Hayling had founded the NAACP Youth Council, which organized a sit-in at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter. The sixteen young protesters were arrested and imprisoned—among them four teenagers, two boys and two girls, ages fifteen to seventeen, who were deemed delinquents by the court, sentenced to six-week stints in the county jail, and then dispatched to state reformatories for six months.

  Undeterred, Hayling and his followers continued to protest. As a result, he was continually receiving death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, which had a growing presence in St. Augustine. After his NAACP associate Medgar Evers was gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1963, Hayling made a statement that garnered headlines across the country. “Passive resistance is no good in the face of violence. I and others of the NAACP have armed ourselves, and we will shoot first and answer questions later. We are not going to die like Medgar Evers,” he announced.

  The militant threat from an NAACP official sparked a white backlash around St. Augustine. KKK night riders began terrorizing residents of the city’s black neighborhoods, and Hayling and his cohort at the NAACP answered by driving the Klansmen off with gunfire. By the end of the summer, the Klan’s membership had swelled, and KKK chapters were holding meetings throughout the city. When Hayling and three activists confronted the Klan at one of its gatherings, they were seized and severely beaten with clubs and fists. The Florida Highway Patrol rescued them and arrested four whites in connection with the beatings. The charges against the whites were dismissed; Hayling was convicted on charges of assault against the KKK.

  Because of her reportorial commitment to issues of race and justice, Mabel was asked to serve on the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Its 1963 report concluded that the city of St. Augustine was “too timid” in its support of civil rights and that it harbored conditions worse than any city in the state, as “Negroes are excluded entirely from the white power structure.” It described St. Augustine as “a segregated super-bomb aimed at the heart of Florida’s economy and political integrity,” warning direly, “the fuse is short.”

  The fuse was shorter by midsummer 1963. The heat had become so stifling during the day that black protesters, Hayling’s NAACP Youth Council among them, took to marching at night. Klansmen from the city and surrounding counties responded by attacking demonstrators from their cars or by driving through black neighborhoods and harassing residents, often shooting at them in their homes, as they did in Lincolnville that October. On one such occasion, blacks returned fire on a car driven by the son of Halstead “Hoss” Manucy, the local Klavern’s Exalted Cyclops, and killed twenty-five-year-old William Kinard, who was in the backseat. Kinard’s wake was teeming with Klansmen when state attorney Warren arrived at the funeral home to question the young men who had been riding with Kinard at the time of the shooting. The reason they were driving around the city with loaded guns that evening, they told Warren, was that it was “dove season.” Warren left the wake convinced that “trouble was in the offing and it would not be long in coming.”

  The circle of Klansmen descending on St. Augustine grew wider that fall. Connie Lynch, a fundamentalist preacher from California, teamed up with Hoss Manucy to hold Klan meetings in the city. Fond of misquoting the Bible to promote white supremacy, Lynch implored his white audiences to “remember the words of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘You can’t love two masters. You love one . . . and you HATE the other . . .’ Now it may be some niggers are gonna get killed in the process, but when war’s on, that’s what happens.”

  The NAACP stood by the three men who were charged with killing William Kinard; however, they also maintained that the organization “does not believe in violence as a course for achievement of our rights.” Robert Hayling, finding himself increasingly at odds with the nonviolent stance of the NAACP, resigned. The black protest movement in St. Augustine found both its focus and its forces divided. Its potency was not restored until the following spring, with the arrival of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

  King’s timing could not have been better. Lyndon Johnson, now president of the United States, was intent on passage of the Civil Rights Act. Mary Parkman Peabody, the seventy-two-year-old mother of Massachusetts governor Endicott Peabody and a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt, was an avid supporter. In March 1964, at the invitation of the SCLC, Peabody joined the protests in St. Augustine. The presence of “northern scalawags” at the SCLC demonstrations inspired mostly resentment among city authorities, and she, along with a dozen other white women, was arrested during a sit-in. Newspapers across the country ran images of the elderly doyenne being escorted by deputies to the county jail.

  When Mabel went to interview Peabody, she found her “undimmed” by two nights in the cell she’d shared with the other white female protesters. Despite making bond, Peabody told Mabel she wasn’t going anywhere: “I want to stay with them. We’re in it together now.” She also expressed to Mabel her shock at the depth of hatred and violence she’d observed in the city—a comment that caused St. Augustine’s mayor, Joseph Shelley, to charge that Peabody had done “irreparable harm to race relations” in the city. The Orlando Sentinel, angered by the efforts of northerners like Peabody to “blacken the South,” ran an editorial titled “She Should Have Stayed in Boston.” For,
indeed, Peabody’s arrest had “fueled the flames of civil disobedience that had been smoldering for more than a year in St. Augustine.” The racial crisis escalated; increasing numbers of protesters, as well as national news organizations, poured into the Ancient City. In early June, when King was scheduled to go back to Florida from California, he received an “explicit death threat” to the effect that night riders in St. Augustine were vowing to “hang a Negro.” Undeterred, King returned to St. Augustine, where he discovered that the Crescent Beach cottage in which he’d been planning to stay had been shot at “from all four sides” the night before. On the evening of June 4, at a black church in the city, King told the crowd of congregants and protesters that if the death threat had been successfully executed, “It would be the price I would have to pay to redeem my brothers from spiritual death—both White and Negro.” He vowed not to allow such threats to divert him and his followers from their purpose, and reasserted his determination to protest in St. Augustine until the battle was won. He praised the courage of blacks in recent demonstrations, telling them they showed “beauty and dignity” in the struggle for justice “You confronted the totality of the Klan,” King declaimed, “and you stood up to say eloquently you would not be turned around. You are the heroes of St. Augustine.”

  Mabel was sitting in the church audience that evening, and after the speech, while King was autographing paper fans and high school yearbooks for admirers, she managed to score an interview with him. “We want desegregation of all public facilities,” he asserted, then cited three other pressing demands: merit employment, a biracial committee to address segregation, and dismissal of all charges against peaceful demonstrators. As to how to achieve these ends, he told Mabel, “We will be negotiating, if they will meet with us. If not, we will have to continue in the streets so we can keep the issue before the conscience of the nation.”