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. Her subsequent conviction and death sentence (1954) were later overturned by the Florida Supreme Court, but she was declared mentally incompetent and incarcerated for 20 years in a the Florida State Mental Hospital at Chattahoochee until she was set free under Florida's Baker Act. Zora Neal Hurston covered the trial for the Pittsburgh Courier and collaborated with William Bradford Huie who came in after the trial, and later published Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (New York, 1956). Huie's book is the principal account of the case, but is no longer in print. An annotated, copyrighted version of the trial transcript is published in ''The Trial of Ruby McCollum," written by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D., and is currently available.
The Trial of Ruby McCollum has drawn criticism from friends and relatives of key figures for its alleged scathing fictionalization of events and biased portrayal of persons involved in McCollum's life and subsequent trial. The author has rebutted these criticisms as self-serving revisionist history and pointed out that the same people criticized Huie's reporting of the case, which was, for a time, legally banned in Florida for "embarrassing" the community.
Some examples of incidents in the case are that Dr. John Workman, who was Adams' associate, was also Ruby McCollum's physician for her prenatal care of Adams' child by her. Workman also testified to Ruby's sanity at the trial. What was never mentioned in the trial was that Workman and his wife also campaigned for Adams for his Florida Senate race, which is documented in a 1952 issue of the Suwannee Democrat, the town's newspaper.
Conspiracy theorists also point out that Workman's autopsy of Adams was after Adams' hometown funeral director had removed the bullets from the body and embalmed it. The bullets were placed in the custody of Sheriff Sim Howell, who was an associate of Adams and who was also in charge of transporting Sam McCollum's cash from a safety deposit box in Tampa where McCollum had secured it after Adams' death. Allegations are that Howel 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, who was later under federal indictment for racketeering until he suffered a severe heart attack. Black was also 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 his lodge, a substantial property just west of Live Oak.
In 'The Trial of Ruby McCollum', Dr. Ellis is the first scholar to report that the case was a pivotal test of Florida's "paramour rights." Paramour rights refer to a white man's assumed right over a "colored" woman's body, whether she was married or not.
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