Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  From the outset of her residence in Mount Dora, Mabel worked hard night and day at her career. Many were the occasions that her tired little daughter napped on the stacking table in the pressroom while Mabel attended to the business of getting out her weekly edition of the Mount Dora Topic. During the paper’s first few years, Mabel’s news stories and editorials had for the most part reflected an idyllic view of Lake County. She diligently reported city council votes and Little League baseball scores; she breezily profiled locals like Elmira Lodor, the city’s only “flying saucer expert,” and seasonal residents like Elwood Bancroft, who arrived from the Midwest each autumn to congregate with the other snowbirds on the bowling greens and shuffleboard courts of quiet downtown Mount Dora. All of that changed with the case of the Groveland Boys.

  In the summer of 1949, a seventeen-year-old white girl named Norma Padgett accused four young black men of kidnapping and raping her. One of the four was killed by a mob before he was even jailed. The other three were found guilty in a sham of a trial; one of them was sentenced to life in prison, while the other two—Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin—were sentenced to death. In November 1951, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdicts of Shepherd and Irvin. In his opinion, Justice Robert Jackson described their trial in the hostile atmosphere of Lake County as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

  On the eve of the retrial, Lake County sheriff Willis McCall, incensed by the Court’s decision, drove the hundred-plus miles north to Raiford State Prison, purportedly to transport the two defendants back to Lake County. Instead, McCall took a detour down a quiet clay road. Moments later, shots rang out, and two handcuffed men were lying in a roadside ditch next to the sheriff’s Oldsmobile. Samuel Shepherd had been killed instantly, but his best friend, Walter Irvin, had somehow survived three bullet wounds—two of them inflicted by the sheriff, the third by a deputy, James Yates—and played dead until witnesses arrived on the scene. The sheriff claimed that he’d shot the two men in an escape attempt. What Irvin described hours later, however, was the cold-blooded murder of one man and the attempted murder of another by two officers of the law.

  McCall was cleared by a coroner’s jury, which concluded that the sheriff had fired on the prisoners in self-defense. Judge Futch, who was known as “the whittling judge” for his custom of paring down hickory sticks while sitting on the bench through a long day’s testimony, declined to impanel a grand jury on the grounds that the investigation by the coroner’s jury had been so thorough as to obviate the need for further inquiry. No federal charges were brought against either McCall or Deputy Yates. Meanwhile, Irvin was retried and, to no one’s surprise, reconvicted.

  The shooting of the Groveland prisoners effected an awakening in Mabel and marked a turning point in her career. Until then, she and the Topic had sided unequivocally with McCall and the prosecution, publishing as fact virtually any notion or bias that the sheriff cared to convey to the public about the case. Like most of the county, she’d allowed herself to get swept up in the outrage over Padgett’s allegations, and even before the trial began, she’d called for the defendants’ execution by electric chair to avenge Padgett’s honor. When Justice Jackson, in his opinion, cited the “prejudicial influences” of newspaper stories published in Lake County, there was no doubt as to whose stories he meant. “I probably needed to be stepped on,” Mabel acknowledged later.

  Now convinced that McCall had decided to take the law into his own hands by executing the Groveland defendants before they could be retried, and regretful of her own role in facilitating the initial convictions and death sentences, Mabel resolved to do henceforth what few journalists in the county dared. She resolved unfailingly and aggressively to report on violations of civil rights, particularly the injustices suffered by blacks in Lake County at the hands of Willis McCall, and on any other action she believed to be an abuse of power on his part. “He hated me from then on,” Mabel noted. Indeed, McCall took to ridiculing her as “Red Mabel” and missed no opportunity to accuse her of dangerous “leftist leanings” in the press. But that was the least of it, as the events of the next few years would bear out.

  In May 1954, Mabel wrote an editorial defending the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by urging tolerance and a gradual move toward school desegregation in the South. She took issue with McCall’s public letter to the Ford Motor Company, in which he threatened to boycott its cars because the Ford Foundation had financially supported a study on the harms of segregation. In August, she again took to the press to deplore a spate of cross-burnings in Mount Dora, where the Klan had been mostly dormant for the previous six years.

  Not long after, one night when Paul was working late at the Topic’s office, Mabel had just kissed Patricia good night when she heard a car idling in front of a neighbor’s house. She peeked through the blinds of her bedroom window and saw several figures in white silhouetted in the glow of the taillights; one of them began moving toward her front gate. Cubby, the family’s large and aggressive Chow mix, snarled as Mabel headed into the living room. That was when the darkness outside exploded into hot yellow light.

  Flames whipped high above Mabel’s sight line as she stared out the window, paralyzed with fear that the fire would catch the Spanish moss hanging over the rooftop. She heard an engine roar as the car sped away. Cubby was barking loud enough now to wake Patricia, but it was another sound that captured Mabel’s attention: a rustling that seemed to be coming from the roof. At first she thought that the Spanish moss had indeed ignited—the roof would be next, and after that the entire house—but then she realized what she was hearing wasn’t the crackle of fire but the splash of rain, the kind farmers call heaven-sent. The flames from the gasoline-soaked cross in her front yard began to sputter and die out.

  Later, unable to sleep, Mabel lay in bed pondering how actions like these could be tolerated in a nation that “seeks to be the guiding light for freedom and against terrorism.” She turned to her bedside Bible and found a Psalm that afforded her some comfort: “Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.”

  The next morning Mabel sat down at her Royal typewriter to compose her weekly column. “I shall not take it as a signal that I must lapse into silence,” she wrote. “I will continue to speak as one who hopes to inject a small voice of reason and sanity into a situation which could divide our nation further in this, her most trying hour.” Her courage and resolve grew as she typed, and remembering the rain that had poured down from the skies and saved her house, she wrote, “See why I shall not become mute with fear?”

  Mabel’s story, with Patricia’s photo of the fiery cross accompanying it, garnered ample attention around Lake County, and newspapers across the country ran notices of the Florida editor who’d had a Klan cross burned in front of her home. Mabel and Paul took down the cross and put it in the garage to hold for the police, but the police never came. Two days later, when Mabel arrived at the Topic office, half a block from the Mount Dora police station, she discovered that a blood-red “KKK” had been crudely painted on the front windows as well as on the concrete sidewalk by the front door. Neither the police nor the Lake County Sheriff’s Department saw fit to investigate.

  On September 16, Mabel’s weekly column again commented on the attempts of the KKK to silence her and noted that her trusted watchdog would “make mincemeat of crossburners.” One night a month later, when the Reeses returned home from the office, they found Cubby lying motionless on the floor. The killing of the family pet “cut much deeper than did the ridiculous act of burning a cross in front of my home, or painting my office windows with red crosses and KKKs,” Mabel wrote in the Topic, hoping to address the man responsible so that he might “enjoy the full taste” of his deed. Cubby, she wrote, “died in agony—a death as lingering and painful as if you had nailed her to one of your crosses. I hope you are now thoroughly happy
.”

  An autopsy performed by a Lake County veterinarian concluded that the dog had consumed meat laced with strychnine, but Sheriff McCall refused to accept the finding and ordered the veterinarian to send the dog’s organs to the State Board of Health for further testing. A week later, McCall obtained the state’s toxicological analysis, which, he claimed, showed no traces of strychnine “or any form of poisoning.” The veterinarian, standing by his original report, pointed out that the dog’s organs had been sitting in a garbage can for nearly a week, and thus rendered useless for any analysis. That did not stop McCall from asserting, in a letter to the Topic, “I was glad to learn that the dog was not poisoned, as I despise dog poisoners almost as much as I do a communist.”

  Mabel had no doubt about who was behind the ongoing intimidation. “We had telephone calls day and night. No one identified themselves, but they would threaten.” One night she and Paul were awakened by the sound of a slamming door and footsteps. Someone had broken into the garage. “I guess they wanted their cross back,” Patricia recalled. The lack of interest on the part of law enforcement in such episodes reinforced Mabel’s conviction that the sheriff’s department and police essentially sanctioned the burgeoning presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Mount Dora.

  For Mabel and the Topic, official indifference was cause for community concern. Two months later, Bryant Bowles, a white supremacist from Tampa who’d founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown, accepted Sheriff McCall’s invitation to speak at the Lake County Courthouse in Tavares. At a recent rally, adamant that integration would lead to miscegenation, Bowles had held up his three-year-old daughter, shouting, “Do you think that my daughter will ever attend schools with Negroes? Not while there’s breath in my body and gunpowder will burn—and gunpowder will burn! If the Negroes go to your children’s school, let your conscience be your guide . . . I know what I would do!” At another rally, Bowles had charged, “The Negro will never be satisfied until he moves into the front bedroom of the white man’s home.” By this point the group’s rallies and intimidation tactics, under Bowles’s inflammatory direction, had succeeded in terrorizing and ostracizing school officials and districts that had begun the process of integration in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

  In a Topic editorial, Mabel rebuked Bowles for bringing his tour of “hate-mongering and rabble-rousing” to Lake County. She also implicated McCall’s son Malcolm, who had been photographed collecting new membership fees for the NAAWP at an event at the Lake County Courthouse. “By whatever name it is called,” Mabel wrote, “the Ku Klux Klan smells the same.” She lamented that “no public official protested the use of the taxpayers’ property as a soap box for increasing tension in an area where calm and reason is so desperately needed.”

  The sheriff, who had sponsored the event, declined to respond directly to Mabel’s attacks, beyond commenting that she was “just cussing me for being a white man.” He did affirm his support for the NAAWP, declaring, “If it goes down, I’ll go with it. Bowles is a Florida cracker and he’s on the level.” However, Bowles, who had boasted that the event had recruited a thousand new members to the NAAWP’s Lake County chapter, including “six county and three circuit judges,” marched into the Topic office brandishing Mabel’s column, with the word “LIE” scrawled across it. “I will get even by some means or other,” he told Paul, who was working there alone, “even if I have to stay in this county for two years.”

  A week later, Mabel began investigating a new story. She had learned that five children from a family named Platt had been expelled from school in Mount Dora because of complaints from white parents who suspected they might be Negroes. She visited Allen and Laura Platt at their simple three-room home on the outskirts of town in Pistolville, where clapboard shacks housed a small community of “poor Southern crackers” who had migrated to Lake County to work the citrus groves and melon fields. They explained to Mabel that they were not colored but Irish-Indian—a line of descent they could trace back to 1587, when Sir Walter Raleigh’s “lost colony” intermarried with Croatan Indians. They had recently moved from South Carolina, where they had lived in an Indian community and belonged to a white church; their children had attended schools that admitted both whites and Indians. They had marriage documentation and birth certificates to prove that they were white. Mabel spoke with the Platt children and found them to be exceedingly polite and curious, plainly “exhibiting the fruits of parental training.”

  The Platts recounted how Willis McCall, summoned by principal D. D. Roseborough to Mount Dora’s Fifth Avenue School, had had the children line up for examination. Tall, with a round face and thick, meaty hands that he liked to lay on a man’s shoulder to make a point, the sheriff was an intimidating presence. That evening, he’d arrived unannounced at the Platt family home along with a deputy, whom he instructed to photograph the children. “Denzell favors a nigger,” he’d proclaimed, pointing at the seventeen-year-old, and of thirteen-year-old Laura Belle, he commented, “I don’t like the shape of that one’s nose.”

  “He like to gave my wife a heart attack,” noted Allen, who had not been at home. “He made her cry with the things he said.” Once McCall had dispensed with the Platt children, one by one, in his crude “lesson in anthropology,” Principal Roseborough had no choice but to prohibit them from attending school “until the sheriff is satisfied.”

  On Thanksgiving Day, the Topic ran front-page photographs of Allen and Laura Platt and their school-aged children above the caption “These Children Were Evicted.” Mabel’s article described the family’s ordeal: After meeting with hard times in drought-plagued South Carolina, they had been forced to sell their small farm and relocate to Mount Dora, where their children were now being ostracized. “If you are a parent,” Mabel wrote, “look at your own child and think what it would mean to you if an adult said: ‘I do not like your child’s nose’ and thereby decreed that your child cannot associate with other children.”

  That morning, policemen and deputies appeared in front of the Topic’s office. Mabel spotted the bespectacled sheriff on the street, standing by his black Oldsmobile. Approaching cautiously, she asked what he and his deputies were doing outside her office. “I’m protecting this town from left-wingers,” McCall told her.

  “Well, you’re missing a lot of sleep, aren’t you, Sheriff?”

  “Yeah,” McCall grumbled, “and I’m missing a hunting trip.”

  “Isn’t that too bad,” Mabel replied.

  McCall kept up his attacks on the Platts. “There must have been a smoked Irishman in the woodpile,” he jeered at yet another NAAWP rally, ridiculing their claim of Indian-Irish ancestry. And Mabel continued to attack McCall, as a man who “deliberately pierces a soul with cruel words and with the arrows of blind hate.”

  By December, the feud between the “lady editor” and the sheriff had become a national story in itself, and Time and Life both dispatched reporters and photographers to Lake County to cover it. Mabel tried to keep the focus on the Platts, and criticized the Miami Herald, which was also covering the story, for shedding “not a tear about the . . . children who were not allowed to go to school.” She spoke at length to the Life reporters, with whom McCall then refused to meet. “I know what company you’ve been keeping, so I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. He turned away the reporter from Time as well.

  In mid-December, the case was attracting out-of-town television crews, and the social stresses were taking a toll on the Reeses. They could no longer attend the local yacht club’s lakeside gatherings. “Everyone would have a few drinks and first thing I know, someone would be blasting me for my editorials,” Mabel recalled. Soon the family stopped going out altogether. More seriously, the threats and anonymous phone calls continued. Mabel was already at the Topic office one day at four a.m. when Patricia telephoned from home. She’d just received a call sayi
ng that the Platts’ house was on fire and that Mabel was needed on the scene. Mabel, suspicious, in turn called her friend Jesse Hunter, the former state attorney in Lake County who had twice prosecuted the Groveland Boys case. Like Mabel, Hunter, though an avowed segregationist, had soured on the sheriff after the shootings of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. He’d also become one of Mabel’s most trusted sources. “Don’t you dare go out on that highway,” he told her now. “You’d be gotten sure as anything.” Instead, Mabel telephoned the Platts and awoke the entire household; they were fine.

  Despite Mabel’s efforts, Time’s story focused as much on the feud between her and McCall as on the Platt family’s dilemma. “The Platts,” the story concluded, “had moved into a cabin out of town, their children were out of school and as far as anyone could tell, no one besides Editor Reese seemed to care.” But to judge from the hundreds of letters that soon poured into the Topic offices, from all over the country and from abroad as well, people did care. With only two exceptions, Mabel claimed, all “expressed anger over the treatment of the Platt children.” It was a letter from a local girl, though, that particularly captured Mabel’s attention. It had been written by fifteen-year-old Mardie Bardwell, an honors student. “We would like to correct that statement,” it read, referring to the Time story’s conclusion. “WE CARE.”

  Mardie Bardwell had been present in the school hallway when Sheriff McCall examined the frightened Platt children, and she distinctly remembered him announcing, “I smell niggers.” Outraged by what she had witnessed, she had brought up the plight of the Platt family in her Sunday-school class at the Methodist church. It was after one such class that she’d sat down to pen her letter, and she set her sights on Willis McCall. “The Constitution says all persons are innocent until they are proven guilty,” she wrote, “and that a man is to be considered truthful until he is proved to be a liar. We feel the Platt children got a raw deal. Their right to an education has been taken away because of the opinion and prejudices of one man.” Drawing a distinction between such opinions and the law, she continued, “To be expelled for violation of Florida segregation laws is one thing: to be expelled because of an unfounded suspicion is another. Therefore, we believe the Platt children should be permitted to remain in school until the sheriff can prove they don’t belong here. That is our position and we want the world to know it.”