Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  By 1900, most of the Seminoles had been wiped out in battle, succumbed to disease or starvation, or been relocated to Indian territory west of the Mississippi. The population of Florida, at slightly more than half a million residents, was the smallest of any state in the South. In what was essentially still “pioneer country,” settlers dwelt largely in rural homesteads that stretched from the plantation belt in the Panhandle down to the swamps of the Everglades. In central Florida, cow hunters still roamed the swamps and prairies. Hardy men, they abided the swampy, mosquito-infested terrain and defied the frequent hurricanes, not to mention the indigenous bears, panthers, alligators, and wild boars. To protect themselves against the sun and rain, they wore thick, slouched wool hats and wide pants tucked into tall leather lace-up boots that shielded them from the razor-sharp leaves of saw grass and the plenteous rattlesnakes. What most notably identified them, though—and was said to give them and this rural “cracker country” their names—were the long, braided rawhide whips they cracked to drive cattle from the scrub to the trails and thence to the coastal markets that had been carved out over the past century.

  A day laborer in the grueling turpentine camps of Lake County, Virgil W. Hawkins worked alongside blacks who were being exploited by a convict-lease system that thrived in the decades following the Civil War and ensured cheap labor for the industry. Hawkins managed to avoid falling victim to debt slavery and saved enough money to purchase, for two hundred dollars, a ten-acre homestead in Okahumpka, on which he built a modest wood-frame house. He married Josephine Brown, and with her he joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Together they set out to build an independent family farm, while Virgil took seasonal work as a citrus picker or as a laborer in the nearby kaolin pits. They started a family.

  Their life together took some of the sting out of the oppression suffered by blacks in Florida, but they could not ignore it. Between 1882 and 1930, Florida had the highest per capita lynching rate of any state in the nation. Like many Southern political leaders of the time, Florida governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward considered his white voting constituency to be unconcerned with the economic plight of blacks, but the lynching did concern him, as a threat to “civilization and Christianization.” He therefore proposed that the United States purchase some “foreign territory” where blacks could be deported, in order “to protect the white man from his own temper.”

  To increase the opportunities for his children to advance in and beyond their community, as well as to elevate his own stature, Virgil W. Hawkins served for years as a deacon at Okahumpka’s Bethel AME Church. Bright and verbally adept, Virgil Jr. seemed the best suited of his sons to follow him into the clergy, once he’d finished his schooling. But it was law that interested Virgil Jr. Accompanying his father to the Lake County Courthouse, he observed the patent fear and helplessness of poor black defendants who were paraded before a judge without understanding the legal proceedings or their rights. “At that tender age,” Virgil Jr. would remember, “I didn’t know what a lawyer did, but I knew I had to do something.” He promised God he would someday defend “those who don’t even know what the word ‘guilty’ means.”

  When he let slip his ambitions, Virgil Sr. exclaimed, “This child is going to hell for lying. Says he’s going to be a lawyer!” The revelation afforded the family a good laugh, yet they and other relatives were soon turning to Virgil Jr. when legal matters arose. “Go get Virgil,” Josephine would say. “He’ll know what to do. He’s going to be a lawyer.” His father began referring to him as “my little lawyer.” When he finished tenth grade—the final year of public education for blacks in Lake County—Virgil Sr. and Josephine decided to send him on to complete a high school curriculum at the AME-run Edward Waters College in Jacksonville. Though heavy on Bible studies, the school’s rich curriculum included courses on the history of civil rights, which accounted for its reputation as a site for future “race leaders.” No less vital than the classroom experience were the freedoms Virgil Jr. enjoyed in being part of Jacksonville’s thriving black community.

  After graduating in 1930, Virgil headed north to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, whose alumni included Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes. But the Great Depression made it impossible for him to continue, and he returned to Lake County. There he met and married Ida Frazier, a schoolteacher from nearby Ocoee. They settled in Ocala, and for years Virgil commuted more than fifty miles a day from there to Groveland’s dilapidated black elementary school as he worked himself up from a lowly teaching position to principal.

  At the age of thirty-seven and still without even a baccalaureate degree, Virgil Hawkins Jr. chanced upon an opportunity to keep his dream of a legal career alive when he was offered a position as director of public relations at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. There, he was able to attend classes and continue his education. His engagement with the intellectual community reawakened his passion for the study of law, and he resolved to honor the promise he’d made to God. The University of Florida in Gainesville had the only public law school in the state; however, it admitted only whites. Relocation might have been an option, but he and Ida, both of them Florida-born-and-bred, neither wanted nor could afford to live up North.

  A Daytona Beach attorney, Horace Hill, knew the NAACP was looking for plaintiffs to challenge discriminatory policies in public education, and he believed Virgil Hawkins—married but without children, and with a good job at a respected black institution—would be an ideal candidate. So, in 1949, along with four other black aspiring law students, Hawkins applied to the University of Florida College of Law, and the NAACP started preparing their case. Predictably, the State of Florida denied them admission, and the Legal Defense Fund filed suit. No one in the plaintiff’s camp anticipated the fallout that followed.

  The Florida Board of Control, the government agency first in line to respond to the suit, did so by offering Hawkins a full scholarship—on the condition that he agree to attend an out-of-state law school. Bethune-Cookman College meanwhile received notice that the school’s business loans would not be renewed unless they fired Virgil Hawkins. Stores where Ida shopped in Daytona Beach refused to issue her any further credit, and banks called in their loans. Threatening letters arrived regularly in the Hawkinses’ mail. Their neighbors were harassed. The State of Florida moved to institute a law school at Florida A&M, the black college in Tallahassee.

  The measures being taken to keep blacks out of the University of Florida College of Law began to take their toll on Virgil and Ida both. They decided to publicly feign a marital separation in order to remove Ida from the malign eye of harassers. She returned to Lake County, where she taught at Carver High School and lodged with Virgil’s family in Okahumpka. To escape detection, Virgil would drive the seventy-plus miles to Okahumpka in the middle of the night and sneak into his parents’ house by crawling under the floorboards. “We’re older than you,” his brother Melvin would tease him. “Why is your hair whiter than ours?” Virgil had a quick reply: “While you’re in your beds sleeping at night, I’m running, ducking, dodging and hiding under houses.”

  In June 1950, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Sweatt v. Painter, another of Thurgood Marshall’s cases, that a black applicant, Heman Marion Sweatt, must be admitted to the University of Texas School of Law, a decision that would pave the way for the landmark segregation case Brown v. Board of Education four years later. The State of Florida had filed an amicus brief in support of the State of Texas in the case, so the ruling was in effect a rejection of Florida’s arguments. Except that Florida dug in; the state defied the Court’s order by writing an opinion that upheld its plan to establish, as the University of Texas had attempted to do, a law school for blacks at Florida A&M. The Florida Supreme Court, meanwhile, delayed issuing a final order in the Hawkins case. Thurgood Marshall lambasted Florida’s contempt for the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling as the Fort Sumter of “an undeclared second civil war.” Bu
t the Court itself was not disposed to consider Hawkins’s case, as Brown v. Board of Education was already in the pipeline. Virgil Hawkins had no choice but to wait.

  In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its unanimous ruling in Brown, thereby declaring racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. One week after the ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Hawkins’s writ of certiorari: In light of the Brown decision, the Florida Supreme Court’s judgment was vacated. Thurgood Marshall assigned the case to Constance Baker Motley, a thirty-four-year-old attorney who’d graduated from Columbia Law School and was working at the Legal Defense Fund in New York. On the drive down to Tallahassee, her toddler son was denied use of a bathroom because of the color of the family’s skin, a precursor to the racial antagonism the black female attorney from New York would encounter in Florida when arguing before “a group of stone-faced white male judges.” Of the Florida Supreme Court in the 1950s, one journalist later observed, “It is doubtful that any institution in the South was more resolutely racist. No Southern court fought desegregation longer or harder.” Baker Motley was nonetheless astounded when the Florida Supreme Court finally rendered its opinion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to clarify further the federal enforcement of school desegregation (in what became known as Brown II) allowed the University of Florida to defer admission to Hawkins for whatever length of time the State might require to “evaluate the potential harm to the public” that he might pose.

  Once again Hawkins was denied his dream of a legal education and career, but he drew strength from three significant women in his life—his wife, Ida; Constance Baker Motley; and Mary McLeod Bethune, a founder of Bethune-Cookman College, who urged him “to fight until it’s over. Never stop. If you stop now, it might be a generation before somebody else comes along to take up the fight. Why not this generation?” So once again, Hawkins had rooted in.

  It would be nearly two more years before the Supreme Court—on the same day that Strom Thurmond unveiled in the U.S. Senate his Southern Manifesto against public racial integration—handed down a per curiam (unanimous) decision in regard to Virgil Hawkins. The Court determined that Hawkins was within his rights to attend the University of Florida College of Law and was “entitled to prompt admission under the rules and regulations applicable to other qualified candidates.”

  The Supreme Court’s decision “horrified whites throughout Florida,” and it affected the 1956 Democratic primary election even more profoundly than had Governor Collins’s commutation of Walter Irvin’s sentence. With Sumter Lowry now calling all the more vehemently for the state to resist integration by any means necessary, Collins felt compelled to issue a statement. “Every legal recourse will be followed to avoid integration,” he promised. He offered to argue against Hawkins’s admission before the Supreme Court. In a hastily assembled “State Conference to Stop Integration,” he brought the issue before his cabinet, legislators, and state university presidents in Tallahassee. The conference produced a message to President Eisenhower that Collins himself drafted. It emphasized that the State of Florida was committed to the “tradition and customs of segregation, which are as rooted in this state as in any other Southern state,” even as it warned that Florida was “experiencing a serious deterioration of racial relations.” It pledged formally to “use every legal means to avoid integration in the schools.”

  Sumter Lowry’s campaign mocked the assembly as a “meeting of the integrationists” by which Collins strove to mask his true intention: to abide by a Supreme Court decision that would enable Virgil Hawkins to attend the University of Florida College of Law. As if to prove it, Lowry distributed brochures that featured photographs of the governor shaking hands with members of the Florida Negro Teachers’ Association. Another candidate, former governor Fuller Warren, depicted Collins as that “curly-haired boy up in Tallahassee—the friend of the N-double-A-Cee-P” and accused Hawkins of brutally beating two schoolchildren—one with an auto fan belt, the other with a palmetto stick—at the Lake County school in Yalaha, where he had taught in the early 1940s. The beatings, Warren contended, would “legally and morally” bar Hawkins from admittance to the University of Florida College of Law. Although two former school officials stated they had no recollection of any such incidents and Warren could point to no other substantiation, Hawkins was forced to respond. “It is regrettable,” he said, “that a man who has been so greatly honored by this state, as has Ex-Governor Fuller Warren, should be capable of descending to such depths as to falsely assail one of the state’s humblest citizens.”

  As the Florida primary drew near, the rhetoric, already intense, was amplified by coverage across the state and in national publications such as the New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution. The Florida State University student newspaper published a letter from the chairman of the steering committee of the Sumter Lowry Student Organization. “A Negro is now sitting on the doorstep of the University of Florida waiting for admittance,” the letter advised. “The time for action has past [sic], yet the Governor does nothing. It is no wonder that the NAACP has chosen LeRoy Collins as their standard bearer . . . On May 8, the voters of Florida will say whether they want to maintain segregation or let professional politicians sell out their children.”

  Meanwhile, Virgil Hawkins’s long battle was still far from over. His case would return to the Florida Supreme Court and then to the United States Supreme Court, where his victory again would prove to be in vain. The State of Florida simply refused to obey the mandate of the highest court in the nation and sought to make an example of Hawkins by steadfastly blocking his admission to the University of Florida College of Law. In the meantime, Hawkins once again rooted in, unaware that another case entirely would bring him and his family into the crosshairs of Sheriff Willis McCall.

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  ON DECEMBER 19, 1957, state attorney Gordon Oldham made a public statement about the Okahumpka rape case and the suspect. Not yet out of his twenties, Oldham was believed to be the youngest man ever elected state attorney in Florida. His baby face, though, belied a razor-sharp mind, which won him regard as a legal luminary, destined for higher office. The son of a prominent citrus man and a member of the Leesburg Quarterback Club, Oldham moved comfortably among the Lake County elite, including Sheriff Willis McCall, who was standing at his side during the hastily assembled press conference. Oldham first disclosed that the victim in the case had been assaulted in bed “by a young Negro who had gained entrance to the woman’s home by slashing a screen and unlatching the front door.” He indicated that, the rape notwithstanding, “the woman was not harmed otherwise.” He then announced that an “unnamed Negro,” who “would be identified only if he is charged in the case,” was currently being held for questioning. Further leads were meanwhile being investigated, he said, and he noted that a mobile unit from Orange County had been brought in to lift fingerprints from the victim’s home, prints that were now “being checked against the suspect.”

  Beyond that, the authorities had nothing to add about the circumstances surrounding the attack, and McCall refused bluntly to answer any questions from reporters. But later that evening, both Melvin Hawkins Jr.’s name and the news of his arrest by Sheriff Willis McCall were released. It was also confirmed that the heel prints Deputy Yates had discovered outside the victim’s home matched the bottoms of Hawkins’s shoes.

  The next day’s local newspapers linked the rape directly to Melvin’s notorious uncle, “Florida’s most publicized integrationist,” and soon newspapers around the country were carrying the story with inflammatory headlines like “Attack Charge for Nephew of Fla. Integrationist” and “Hawkins Kin Held by McCall in Rape Case.” Although, as one story pointed out, the governor had not had to call out the National Guard, as he had in the Groveland case, to restrain a mob of Klansmen from torching black homes, something more quietly sinister seemed to be afoot in Lake County. For one thing, now days after
his jailing, eighteen-year-old Sam Wiley Odom had still not been released; for another, the sheriff’s department was also refusing Bubba Hawkins his right to an attorney. All Virgil Hawkins could learn on a visit to Okahumpka was that his nephew was being held “incommunicado” in an undisclosed jail. When Mabel pressed the sheriff’s office as to why Hawkins wasn’t being arraigned, the department imposed a news blackout. When, on a courtroom plea day, county judge W. Troy Hall asked specifically that Hawkins appear before the circuit court, Deputy Yates curtly declined. Hawkins had been moved to an “undisclosed location,” Yates told the judge, and “we’re not ready to produce him yet.”

  More days passed with no further information on Bubba Hawkins’s whereabouts. Mabel, unaware that Hawkins had been moved from Tavares, wrote, “For a week now, an 18-year-old Okahumpka Negro has been lodged in Lake county jail, with no warrant filed to certify his arrest, and with no appearance of the man before any magistrate.” She cited statute 901.23 of the Florida Criminal Code, which states that a person arrested without warrant must, “without unnecessary delay,” be taken before the nearest magistrate with an official complaint describing the offense for which the person was arrested. Furthermore, McCall had “unofficially” charged Hawkins with rape and discussed the evidence against him publicly while continuing to hold him incommunicado and without representation. Mabel also criticized McCall for inflaming Melvin’s connection to his uncle.