Beneath a Ruthless Sun Page 6

  The “we” referred to the more than sixty fellow students Mardie had subsequently enlisted to sign the letter. After they had done so, however, Mardie began to question the wisdom of sending it to a national magazine. If published, it was bound to cause an uproar in Mount Dora, with unhappy consequences for the students she had involved. So she decided not to send it but to keep it, and to keep it a secret among herself and the students who’d signed it. “We weren’t supposed to tell our parents,” Mardie said, “but Pat Reese, the loudmouth, told her mother.”

  Acting on her daughter’s tip, Mabel called the Bardwell home and asked to speak with Mardie. “I’ve been doing this by myself,” the reporter said, in tears. “I’ve gotten no response, and this is the first time anyone’s supported me.” She pleaded with Mardie to let her publish the letter in the Topic. Finally the girl relented and, without consulting the others who had signed, granted Mabel permission.

  The impact of publication was immediate. Mabel’s headline—“We Care! Students Demand Reentry of Children in School”—affronted Mardie. “There was no demand in my letter,” she pointed out. “The letter was about due process, and a protest against the authority of one man. It had not been proved that the Platts were black.” Mabel admitted that her headline was “unfortunate,” but argued that it was “based upon the presumption that for the children to ‘remain’ in school, as the letter requested, they would first have to be readmitted.” She later defended her decision to publish “because it was Good News, and that Good News was needed in Mount Dora as much as it was in the offices of Time magazine.”

  The publication of the letter exposed the signers to their parents’ wrath. Some, like June Bowie’s father, claimed that their children hadn’t understood what they were signing, but June was grounded for two months nonetheless. No parent was more irate than Mardie’s father, Robert Bardwell. The president and manager of the Lake County Fuel Company as well as the president of the local Lions Club, Bardwell hunted on occasion with Willis McCall. Shortly after the letter’s publication, a cross was burned on the front lawn of the family home. “People canceled gas business with my father,” Mardie recalled. “It hit him where it hurt. I tried to do good, but I made a mess.”

  Mardie found herself ostracized by her friends. A chalk line appeared down the center of the sidewalk outside the school, one side marked for “White People,” the other for “Nigger Lovers.” One morning an angry crowd gathered at the school, and when Mardie attempted to enter someone threw a bottle at her. She was handed a paper bag bearing the inscription “For Nigger Lover Bardwell.” Inside was a black doll.

  Mardie’s parents decided it would be best that she leave town as soon as possible. Prestigious private Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, agreed to accept her even before she graduated from high school. And so, at sixteen, Mardie left Lake County for good.

  Not everyone was unhappy with Mabel, however. With Christmas approaching, a grateful Allen Platt wrote to thank her for all her support in the Topic as well as for the money and clothing her readers had been sending their way. “My wife and I and our children were very lost until our case was taken up by your newspaper,” Platt wrote. “We felt sure God would see us through, but we had no other place to turn but to prayer. We are beginning to think now that our prayers are being answered.”

  Increasingly frustrated in his attempts to gain justice for his children, Platt wrote an open letter to Governor Collins that Mabel published. “I have no other course than to appeal to you,” it read. “I have no money to hire a lawyer or pay the expenses of witnesses from South Carolina. Being thrown out of school is not the most important thing. To have my family branded as niggers is even worse.”

  The governor ordered an investigation into the case, but he responded to Platt only in general terms: “You are getting a look at prejudice, perhaps the most tenacious and blinding of all human emotions. Prejudice dethrones reason and justice and prospers in the atmosphere of the fear it spawns.”

  Frustrated that her reporting alone could not gain “reason and justice” for the Platts, Mabel decided to press Jesse Hunter into service. At her urging, he agreed to represent the Platts in a lawsuit against the Lake County School Board. He traveled to South Carolina at his own expense in order to acquire pertinent and necessary documentation—U.S. Army records, the Platts’ marriage and driver’s licenses—and to take depositions from various teachers and school officials. Hunter’s involvement in the Platt case seemed to many Lake County residents to be a remarkable about-face, given his firm anti-desegregation stance. To Willis McCall, it was a personal affront: Jesse Hunter, the state prosecutor with whom he had worked so closely to prosecute the Groveland Boys, was now working with Mabel Norris Reese in a suit to allow coloreds to attend school alongside whites. The school board countered by hiring one of McCall’s longtime allies—the former U.S. attorney and staunch segregationist Herbert S. Phillips, who, Mabel reported, attempted to drag out the case indefinitely by throwing up “one technical objection after another.”

  The Platts’ landlady informed them they would have to pack up and move out, since she’d been getting threats that the “house might catch fire” if the Platts didn’t leave. The family moved to Apopka, in neighboring Orange County, but the school board there would not admit the children until the Lake County case was settled. Teachers from Mount Dora’s Christian Home and Bible School visited to tutor them until admission could be arranged, but private schooling would cost money. The Topic took up the cause, and outraged citizens from around the country sent in contributions totaling more than twelve thousand dollars. Admission of the Platt children got chancy, however, when the president of the Bible school was visited one evening by a group of Klansmen with a message for him—that “there would be trouble if the Platt kids were taken into his school,” as Mabel reported. Willis McCall delivered his own message less subtly, and in person: “This school will be burnt down if those niggers attend another day.”

  In October 1955, in what the St. Petersburg Times described as “a surprise move,” Judge Futch, who had presided over both trials in the Groveland case, ruled in favor of the Platts on the grounds that the Lake County School Board had failed to prove that the children were of Negro descent. Jesse Hunter had forced Futch’s hand by requesting a bench trial, whereby a judge, rather than a jury, would determine the verdict. A jury, Hunter reasoned, would almost surely have felt compelled to maintain segregation in their community, taking into account the effect of Willis McCall’s intimidating presence. “Much as I hate it,” Futch declared, “it becomes my duty to determine the facts without a trial by jury.”

  “The Lord be praised,” said Allen Platt upon hearing the court’s decision. “I feel like I am living in America again.” Except it was Willis McCall’s America in Lake County, and Jesse Hunter, being entirely familiar with the sheriff’s history of meting out his own extrajudicial justice, was fearful of violence. The former state attorney, who had recently taken to keeping guns in his office, warned Mabel about protecting herself and her family. “I swore I would never have a gun in my house,” Mabel said, “but he scared me into having guns at my front door.” Hunter advised the Platt family to be exceedingly careful as well.

  McCall was as livid with Futch’s “disgraceful” ruling as he’d been with Hunter’s involvement in the case. Hunter in turn called McCall’s attack on Futch “outrageous.” When asked whether he, too, had been receiving threats, Hunter replied, “The only person who has threatened me has been Sheriff McCall.”

  Governor Collins had personally contacted Mabel to say how pleased he was with the outcome of the case, and to assure her that she and her family would have no more trouble with McCall. Still, Mabel had lived in Lake County long enough to know that on the rare occasions when a court ruled against the interests of Willis McCall, those cases were often resolved to his satisfaction by other means.

  A few days after Jesse Hu
nter’s courtroom victory, McCall spoke at a Lions Club dinner where he received a standing ovation for his efforts to keep the Platt children out of Lake County schools. Mabel covered the event for the Topic. Hesitant though McCall was, he said, to make a speech before the press, “especially one that handles the truth carelessly,” he proceeded, because he didn’t want to be called chicken. “I’ve been raised among Negroes and whites—I was raised on a farm,” McCall told his audience. “I can tell a stalk of yellow corn from white corn; rutabagas from turnips; sweet potatoes from Irish potatoes; a Hereford bull from a Black Angus bull. Only way to know is by looking at them. I’ve been called a racial expert, but you don’t have to be a racial expert to tell—unless you’re prejudiced and have some reason to look at it another way. I looked at these people, and I listened to people in business and with children in school. I looked at them and just fairly agreed that they have Negro blood. In my book they were mulattoes and they still are.”

  With the lawsuit resolved in their favor, the Platts rented a house back in Lake County so that their children could resume their education at the Mount Dora Christian Home and Bible School. They’d been attending classes only a few days when, at midnight on Friday, November 11, a band of nightriders descended on their house and tossed flaming jugs of gasoline at the windows. The sound of broken glass and the screams of the youngest children awakened Platt and his wife. One wall of the house was already on fire. Platt acted quickly; he got his wife and daughters safely out of the house and then attended to extinguishing the fire. His sons meanwhile grabbed their hunting rifles, leapt through flames, and started firing into the groves where the marauders had disappeared.

  Sheriff McCall himself arrived on the scene with deputies. He concluded that the footprints indicated that seven or eight “hoodlums” had been responsible. Even after Platt pointed out a crude cross drawn in the sand near one set of prints, the sheriff stuck to his story, positing that the Klan wasn’t likely involved, but rather some high school boys who might not “want to go to school with burrheads.” To the reporters on the scene, who included Mabel, McCall opined ominously, “I’m afraid the trouble is just starting.” Still, he was making no plans to guard the Platt home. “I haven’t got enough men,” he said, “and I can’t babysit with those people.” Then he berated Platt for telephoning Mabel before calling the sheriff’s office. “I’ve got more justice from Mrs. Reese than I have from you,” Platt replied.

  When McCall and his deputies departed, Platt showed Mabel the trail of footprints that led from the grove to the back of his house. Exasperated, he lamented his family’s situation: “My boy, Denzell, is due to register for the draft—to be ready to go and fight for freedom. My wife sometimes gets so upset about this she wants to pack up and run, and I tell her, we have sons that are ready to fight for the United States of America—why should they have to run in fear of their lives in America? They haven’t done anything. They haven’t hurt anyone.” But the family didn’t have “any way to run.” The struggle had drained their finances, and they had no money to start again somewhere else.

  The experiences of the past year had also altered Platt’s sympathies. If he had originally felt, as he had written in his letter to Governor Collins, that “having my family branded as niggers is even worse” than having his children thrown out of school, the indignities his family had endured had opened his eyes to the violence and injustice suffered by generations of blacks. Indeed, he had shared their plight; in effect, he’d been forced to live his life in Lake County as a black man. “I saw the suffering they all had to put up with,” Platt said. “We’ve just got to learn we’ve got to treat everybody alike.”

  * * *

  —

  CONVERSION EXPERIENCES LIKE PLATT’S—and Mabel’s—remained a rarity in Florida. Its newspapers, like most in the South, had responded to the 1954 Brown decision with venom and assurances that the state would refuse to comply with the Supreme Court’s directive. The press effectively declared war on desegregation, and blacks suffered the eventual violence. After more than a thousand cases in which black students applied for admission to all-white colleges or universities, the first concussive, campus-wide instance of violence related to the ruling occurred on February 6, 1956: riots broke out on the University of Alabama campus as its first black student, Autherine Lucy, began to attend classes there.

  The riots charged the racial atmosphere of the South, especially in Florida, which nearly two years after the Brown ruling still retained all the “Jim Crow aspects of the Deep South,” and remained one of only four states that had “no public school integration at any level.” Segregationists, capitalizing on their political momentum, sought to devise legislative methods that would circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina drafted a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” a congressional resolution condemning the Brown decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” that the South would “fight to the end.” The resolution, which became known as the Southern Manifesto, stepped up the pressure on politicians with more moderate positions on race to declare themselves for or against segregation. The few Southern congressmen who refused to sign became casualties in the 1956 elections. As one newspaper reporter observed at the time, “The middle ground is dwindling between the never and the now.”

  On the radical shift in race relations wrought by the Brown decision, historian C. Vann Woodward observed, “Something very much like panic seized many parts of the South toward the beginning of 1956, a panic bred of insecurity or fear. Race relations deteriorated in many areas, and as both races recoiled, old lines of communication between them snapped or weakened. On the white side, resistance hardened up and down the line, and in places stiffened into bristling defiance.”

  The Southern outcry against Brown gave birth to the White Citizens Council of America, which boasted some three hundred thousand members in eleven states—the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall tagged these politically mainstream councils “the uptown Klan.” The downtown Klan, meanwhile, throbbed with new life, especially in rural, agricultural central Florida, where the deterioration in race relations was palpable. A Gallup poll in 1956 indicated that four out of five whites in Florida opposed integration, and the Association of Florida Ku Klux Klan collected more than fifty thousand signatures on a petition condemning Brown, which it attempted to present to Governor Collins.

  Collins had come into office in 1955, in a special election after the sudden death of the previous governor. The son of a neighborhood grocer from Tallahassee, Collins was only twenty-five when he was elected state representative in 1932; in 1940, he was elected state senator. A gifted communicator, tall and handsome, with an equally attractive wife and four photogenic children, Collins was seen as a rising star in an increasingly cosmopolitan Florida. The state had prospered under his tenure, as both the population and the economy had boomed. Collins aligned himself with the state’s progressive forces on issues like education, women’s rights, and funding for the disabled. On the issue of segregation, he had attempted to maintain a relatively moderate stance—far too moderate to satisfy the Pork Chop Gang, the coterie of conservative lawmakers from North Florida who had succeeded in gaining dominance in the state legislature through malapportionment.

  Among Collins’s moderate stances was his opposition to the death penalty. When Jesse Hunter, despite having twice successfully prosecuted the Groveland Boys case, wrote to him to express serious doubts about Walter Irvin’s guilt, Collins appointed an independent investigator whose report convinced him that the state had failed to establish Irvin’s guilt “in an absolute and conclusive manner.” In his first year in office, swayed by Hunter’s urging, the investigator’s report, and pressure from the NAACP and religious leaders, Collins had commuted Walter Irvin’s death sentence to life in prison.

  The white citizenry of Lake County was outraged. One hundred twenty-one residents of Lake County, including the alleged
victim, Norma Padgett, signed a petition opposing the commutation. McCall was so incensed at the very possibility the governor was considering such a move that he sent him a furious letter, in which he charged that “irresponsible people” were “sticking their noses in our affairs” and that any leniency shown to a convicted rapist would only demonstrate that criminals can “ravish our fair womanhood without proper and severe punishment.” Two weeks later, four hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan fired shotguns into the Negro Masonic lodge in Umatilla, the sheriff’s hometown, where a union meeting of the United Packinghouse Workers was taking place. Twelve black men were wounded, one seriously. Sheriff McCall, who had left town earlier that afternoon with his wife, Doris, for a three-day boating trip to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, informed reporters that although he personally would investigate the shootings, his office didn’t have “any leads—not the first one.” Mabel reported that in the aftermath of the shooting, hundreds of Klansmen had gathered in Lake County, one of whom was overheard at a gun store in Leesburg promising that blacks shouldn’t expect merely buckshot in the future. “Next time, we’ll make it count,” he’d said.