Ruby McCollum

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In 1952, Ruby McCollum, a black woman, shot and killed her white lover, prominent Live Oak, Florida, physician C. Leroy Adams. She was convicted in 1952 and sentenced to death, despite her assertion that Adams had forced sex upon her and insisted that she bear his child. Her conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Florida Supreme Court, but she was declared mentally incompetent and incarcerated for 20 years in the Florida State Mental Hospital at Chattahoochee until she was set free under Florida's Baker Act. Zora Neale Hurston covered the trial for the Pittsburgh Courier and collaborated with William Bradford Huie, who later published Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail. Huie's book (along with two subsequently expanded editions) is the principal account of the case.

Anyone interested in this story should read Huie's book, since in each subsequent edition, he updated the story past Ruby McCollum's commitment to the State Mental Hospital in Chattahoochee Florida. Huie documents the townspeoples' efforts to cover up the story, and their anger at "outsiders" meddling in the case. In later editions, he reports being turned away from visiting McCollum at Chattahooche, and comments on subsequent federal investigations, including the indictment of A.K. Black, the friend of Dr.Adams who prosecuted the case.

In her reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier from the fall of 1952 through the early months of 1953 following McCollum's conviction, Hurston wrote that McCollum's trial sounded the death knell for "paramour rights", the presumed right of a white man to take a black woman to whom he was not married as his concubine.

Highlights of the trial include the fact that it had a jury made up solely of white men, that mitigating circumstances were not admitted into evidence, and that the defendant was never allowed to speak to the press, which violated her First Amendment rights. The entire transcript of the trial has been annotated and published by Ellis.

Some examples of other incidents in the case that would be considered unacceptable by contemporary standards are that Dr. Dillard Workman, who was Adams' medical associate, was Ruby McCollum's physician for her prenatal care of Adams' child by her, had actively campaigned for Adams during his senatorial race, testified to Ruby's sanity at the trial, conducted Adams' autopsy and testified to that autopsy during the murder trial.

Conspiracy theorists also point out that Workman's autopsy of Adams was performed after Adams' hometown funeral director had removed the bullets from the body and embalmed it. Without following a chain of custody, the bullets were given to a local jeweler for engraving to identify them prior to being placed in the custody of Sheriff Sim Howell. Sim Howell was an associate of Adams and was also in charge of transporting Sam McCollum's cash from a safety deposit box in Tampa where Sam McCollum, Ruby McCollum's husband, had secured it after Adams' death. Allegations are that Howell may have in some way played a part in Adams' murder, although no proof of this has ever been presented.

Lake City resident Arthur Keith Black was the state's prosecutor. Black was an Adams family friend who handled the wrongful death case for Mrs. Adams, including presenting Lavergne Blue's forged will to him after Adams' death. Blue denied ever signing the will, which was later determined to have been written by Adams in an apparent attempt to acquire Blue's lodge, a substantial property just west of Live Oak. Black was later indicted for racketeering.

[edit] Further reading

  • C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., State of Florida vs. Ruby McCollum, Defendant (Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu Press, 2007). ISBN 978-1-4303-1150-8.
  • Tammy Evans, The Silencing of Ruby McCollum: Race, Class, and Gender in the South (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2006). ISBN 0-8130-2973-2.
  • William Bradford Huie, Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956).
  • Zora Neale Hurston, "The Life Story Of Ruby McCollum" (the Pittsburgh Courier, Jan-March, 1953)