Willis V. McCall

Willis Virgil McCall (July 21, 1909 - April 28, 1994) was sheriff of Lake County, Florida for many years, from 1944 to 1972. He was elected seven times in a row. While he was sheriff, he supported segregation, meaning he supported laws that kept white people and black people apart, almost always with black people getting fewer resources and worse conditions. He enforced anti-miscegenation laws, which forbade black people and white people from marrying each other. He is famous because of the 1949 Groveland Case. In 1951, while he was taking two of the Groveland men to their new trial, he shot them, killing one. McCall said he had shot them in self-defense. He was not charged with a crime for this.
McCall ran for an eighth term as sheriff in 1972, but he lost. Also in 1972, he was on trial for killing Tommy J. Vickers. Vickers was black and disabled. Like the two Groveland men, he died while he was McCall's prisoner. The jury said McCall was not guilty of Vickers' death.
In the 1980s, a road in Umatilla was named Willis McCall Road. In 2007, every member of the Lake County Commission voted to change the name. They said it was because he was a "bully lawman whose notorious tenure was marked by charges of racial intolerance, brutality and murder." During his 28 years as sheriff, McCall was investigated multiple times for breaking civil rights rules and laws and for abusing prisoners. He was tried for murder but was never found guilty.
Early life
Willis McCall was born in Umatilla, Lake County, Florida. He was the son of a dirt farmer from Alabama (born c. 1877) and a woman named Pearl (born c. 1886).
Career
McCall was first elected Sheriff of Lake County in 1944. He was re-elected until 1972. "At 6 feet 1 and weighing more than 200 pounds, McCall loomed large as Lake sheriff from 1945 until 1972. He wore a white felt hat, black string tie, and polished boots." In 1972, Guy Bliss defeated McCall in the election for sheriff.
Groveland Four
On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17-year-old married white woman in Groveland, Florida, said that she had been raped by four young black men. Police arrested 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, Sam Shepherd, 22; and Walter Irvin, 22, and put them in jail until their trial. Shepherd and Irvin were both US Army veterans. Sheriff McCall had traveled out of Florida at that time but he came back the next day. Newspapers all over the United States wrote about the Groveland case, and they wrote about McCall often.
A fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, ran out of Lake County, so he was not arrested. However, a Sheriff's posse ran after him. They shot and killed him about 200 miles northwest of Lake County in Madison County. The coroner said he could not tell which person in the posse had killed Thomas because he had been shot about 400 times.
As word spread about the alleged rape, an angry crowd of white peoples came to the county jail. The jailhouse was in Tavares. The people in the crowd told McCall to give them the three suspects so they could hang them illegally. But two of the three men were not in the building. McCall had taken Shepherd and Irvin to his own house in Eustis, Florida and he had hidden them in the basement. He then moved them to Raiford State Prison, he said, to keep them safe.
The mob headed toward Groveland, where two of the suspects and their families lived. The mob continued to make trouble. On the third day, McCall and several prominent businessmen warned the black residents to leave town until things settled, and many of them did. McCall called the Florida Governor asking him to send National Guard troops to Lake County; when the troops arrived in Groveland, the mob had already burned several buildings to the ground, including the family home of Sam Shepherd.
A grand jury indicted the three rape suspects. Shepherd and Greenlee later told FBI investigators that deputies beat them until they lied and said they had raped the woman. US Attorney Herbert Phillips did not indict Lake County Sheriff's Deputies James Yates or Leroy Campbell for this.
Later, experts looked closely at the trial. They found it was full of legal problems. Before the trial, McCall had told journalists that two men had confessed. The journalists wrote about this in their newspapers. One newspaper had a large drawing on the front page. The jury had only white men and not even one black person. The jury quickly convicted all three men. The judge sentenced Shepherd and Irvin to death. Because Greenlee was 16 and not an adult, he was sentenced to life in prison. In 1951, the US Supreme Court overturned Lake County's conviction of Shepherd and Irvin on the grounds that it was not right that there had been no blacks people on the jury. (Most blacks were still disenfranchised by the state constitution and racist laws and rules in the segregated Jim Crow state; because they could not vote, they were not eligible to sit on juries.)
This did not mean that Shepherd and Irvin were freed. Instead, they were to have a new trial. In November 1951, McCall was personally driving Shepherd and Irvin from Raiford to Tavares for the retrial. He pulled off to a country road. He said there was something wrong with one of the vehicle's tires. McCall shot both men. Shepherd died there by the roadside, but Irvin lived. Deputy James Yates showed up and shot Irvin again.
McCall later swore in a deposition that Shepherd and Irvin attacked him so they could try to escape. He said that he shot them both in self-defense. But the prisoners had both been handcuffed to each other.
Ambulances took McCall and Irvin to Waterman Hospital in Eustis. McCall was treated for a concussion and facial injuries and Irvin for his gunshot wounds. At the hospital, Irvin met with NAACP lawyers and later told the press that McCall shot him and Shepherd without provocation, as did Yates. In the early 21st century, Gilbert King examined the unredacted FBI files from the case. He wrote in a 2012 book that the FBI had located a bullet in the soil ten inches below the blood stain where Irvin had lain wounded. This supported Irvin's claim that Yates fired at him from nearly point-blank range.
A Lake County coroner's inquest said that McCall had not done anything wrong. Judge Truman Futch ruled that he saw no need to impanel a grand jury, which means McCall was not indicted (formally accused) for any crime. After Irvin recovered from the shooting, his retrial was moved to Marion County, just north of Lake County. It began in February 1952. He was offered a plea bargain, meaning he would get a lighter punishment if he confessed to the rape. But Irvin refused to plead guilty, instead saying he was innocent. The jury found Irvin guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death again. The case was appealed, but the conviction was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court. In early 1954, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
People who believed Irvin asked the governor of Florida for clemency. In the United States, a governor can let a prisoner go even if a jury has convicted that person. Newly elected Governor LeRoy Collins looked at the evidence himself. In 1955, he commuted Irvin's sentence to life in prison, saying that he did not believe that the state established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Greenlee, who did not appeal his case, was paroled in 1962 and Irvin was paroled in 1968. Irvin died in 1969 while visiting Lake County. Greenlee moved with his wife and daughter to Tennessee, where his son was born a few years later. Greenlee lived until 2012.
1951 Harry T. Moore bombing
Harry T. Moore, executive director of the Florida NAACP, challenged segregation and law enforcement. In the 1940s and the early 1950s, he helped tens of thousands of blacks register to vote. Before this, most of the black people in Florida had been disfranchised because of the state constitution written at the turn of the century. After the Groveland case, Moore asked the governor to suspend McCall from office and investigate whether he had abused prisoners. Six weeks later, a bomb exploded in Moore's house in Mims in Brevard County, under the bedroom. Moore and his wife both died. It was Christmas 1952. Rumors said McCall had planned the bombing. The FBI looked for at the time and years later, and the Justice Department looked for evidence too, but none of these investigations found any proof McCall helped in the bombing.
In 2005, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began a new investigation of the Moore bombing. This was different from earlier investigations, because teams would dig under the house for new forensic evidence. On August 16, 2006, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist announced his office had completed its 20-month investigation. They named four now-dead suspects: Earl Brooklyn, Tillman Belvin, Joseph Cox and Edward Spivey. All four had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan and served as officers in the Orange County Klavern. The investigators did not find any evidence that McCall had anything to do with the bombing.
Platt children
In 1954, the Lake County school board asked McCall to enforce their decision to ban five children from a segregated white public school in Mount Dora. This was because parents and teachers in the school suspected them of being "Negro," meaning they thought the children were pretending to be white but were really black. (Under a one-drop law in Florida passed in the early 20th century, anyone with any African ancestry at all counted as black, even if they looked white or if far more of their ancestors had come from Europe.) In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. But many white people in the south did not want to obey the Supreme Court.
McCall visited the Platts' house and looked at the five children. He said they were negroes, and that they were not allowed to go to schools for white students. Official birth and marriage records all classified the Platts as white, and they were said to have Indian ancestry as well. McCall spoke to a Delaware chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People later that year and said whites should not allow desegregation of schools.
Because of threats and violence, the Platts did not have their children attend the public school. McCall arranged to have the children enrolled in the Mt. Dora Christian Home and Bible School, a private school. Because it was a private school, it did not have to obey the segregation laws. On October 18, 1955, a court ruled that the children could attend white public school. By then, the Platt family had moved away from Florida.
Indictment for death of prisoner Tommy J. Vickers
In 1972 McCall was formally accused of second-degree murder by a state grand jury. They accused him of killing Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally disabled black prisoner. Vickers died in the hospital in April 1972 of acute peritonitis after someone hit him hard in the belly. McCall was accused of kicking and beating Vickers to death after Vickers threw his food on the floor.
Governor Reubin Askew suspended McCall the day of the indictment, meaning he ordered McCall to stop working as sheriff. McCall was put on trial in Ocala in Marion County. Everyone on the jury was white. The trial lasted a long time and the jurors declared McCall not guilty after talking to each other for only 70 minutes. McCall returned to working as sheriff. Critics said that the all-white jury never really thought about the charges or evidence. Supporters of the sheriff said that the charges made against McCall were lies and based on politics. The presiding state judge said he thought the charges brought against McCall were false.
Later life
Days after the trial for the death of Vickers, McCall lost his 1972 re-election bid. Lake County had changed during his time in office. It had many more people, including people from the north who had come to Florida to retire. McCall was said to have bragged that he had been investigated 49 times and that five different governors had tried to remove him: "I've been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God," he like[d] to say. He retired to his home in Umatilla, Florida.
In 1985, the Lake County Board of County Commissioners named the road by his house, County Road 450A (CR 450A), Willis V. McCall Road in his honor. More than 20 years later, the South Umatilla Neighborhood Association, a group of black residents on the road, some of whom had lived there for 50 years, asked the Lake County Commission to change the name of the road. They said it should not honor a man who had done so many bad things. Every member of the Commission voted to change the road's name back to County Road 450A.
Late in life, McCall wrote a memoir, a book about his life, The Wisdom of Willis McCall. He defended his long career as sheriff and answered criticism. "McCall never doubted himself, the usefulness of segregation or the morality of the methods he used to enforce law and order." McCall died on April 28, 1994 at the age of 84.
Family
In 2021, McCall's son, Douglas McCall, was indicted for molesting an eight-year-old girl and for having child pornography. His trial began in October 2021.
References
Further reading
Isaac M. Flores, Justice Gone Wrong: A Sheriff's Power of Fear (Google eBook), iUniverse (self-published), Apr 2009
Ben Green, Chap. One, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyr. New York: Free Press, 1999
Other websites
Official website for Legal Lynching: The Sad Saga of the Groveland Four by Gary Corsair
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, Official Website
The Allen Platt case
"A Southern sheriff's law and disorder", St. Petersburg Times
"Frank Trippett, "High and Mighty Sheriff",Life Magazine
1909 births
1994 deaths
People from Florida
Police
People acquitted of murder
20th-century American politicians