FLORIDA KLAN TERRORISM MASKS PEONAGE SYSTEM
McCarthy, Terence
FLORIDA KLAN TERRORISM MASKS PEONAGE SYSTEM By TERENCE McCARTHY Special to The New Leader QROVELANDr Ftortfa. FOUR HUNDRED NEGROES FLED THEIR HOMES in Lake County, Florida. Three of their...
...They lay, carefully posed for press photographers, as "evidence" that Henry Shepherd had owned three shotguns, and must theiefore be a dangerous Negro...
...I don't know...
...Greenlee's testicles were swollen...
...and to urge a full Un-American Activities Committee investigation of theJClan...
...From Orlando, thirty miles away, from Leesburg, from out of the fastnesses of Florida's swamps —and even from faroff Georgia — nightriders swooped down on this terror-stricken community...
...His stomach, chest and back were torn from repeated beatings with rubber hoses...
...We should keep 'em together where we can keep our eyes on 'em and not let 'em buy white man's land...
...Sworn affidavits prove beyond doubt that, although Willis McCall was ostensibly elected to serve and protect Lake County citizens in observance of the law, one of his main functions for years appears to have been to dragoon the colored peons used in the country's citrus fields and packing plants...
...Shall the rest of us stand by while the South abdicates to Ku Klux Klan terrorism and our entire democracy is threatened...
...As one white man put it, "They'll get out...
...What manner of maanfas Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County...
...Th* South must be mad aware that we will aot countenance white barbarism in America any more than we tolerate brown or red barbarism abroad...
...Also they say the posse found him with gun in hand, finger poised on the trigger...
...He is dead...
...To what...
...2. Ask your Congressman to introduce or sponsor measures to outlaw the Klan...
...He wasn't a rough of any sort...
...On each of the nights of July 16, 17 and 18, most of them left their homes* before nightfall and hid out in the orange groves, swamps and deep woods...
...I don't know...
...Remember, behind the Klan's outrages in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolines and now Florida, is a concerted campaign to scrap the President's civil rights program...
...All Greenlee knowt it that, after hours of being beaten and tortured, he finally laid yet to anything they asked of him...
...Had the swelling wave of violence against Negroes that has been surging through the Carolines, Alabamu and Georgia, been^stopped at Florida...
...I had read In the newspapers that they had slopped a mob from lynching the four boys accused of rape...
...Knowing better than to argue with a white law enforcement officer, Fryar, turning to get his hat, Was struck by McCall with a blackjack...
...When we got there, he pointed and said, "That's why...
...In...
...20 West 40th Street...
...He answered carefully, "They should never have let those niggers live here...
...They are determined to drive out all independent colored farmers...
...His genitals were bruised and bleeding...
...or be killed, especially around Bay Lake...
...He turned away, "feet's go," he said...
...both were burned to the ground...
...But one elected county official broadly hinted to me that it was an unlikely story...
...Next Monday a Eustis police officer, James Dickerson...
...What did I find...
...Early Saturday, July 16, a white woman was allegedly raped by four Negro youths...
...A lecture lour of Florida irt 1947 led to hit current project, a study of peonage in theSouth...
...7 East ISth Street, N*w York 3. N. Y. What you do will not only help Lake County Negroes—it will help benighted Lake County itself...
...I found instead, that the Negroes had fled their homes in terror...
...Friendly whites, newspapers North and South had reported, had evacuated Lake County Negroes to help them escape mob fury...
...Across the way, deeper in this farmland recaptured from jungle swamp, George Valree had owned two houses...
...It's these nigger farmers—4hey've got to go...
...Nathan Bailey testifies that he failed to report to work in Eustis one Saturday...
...Padgett's allegations provided the excuse the Klan had been seeking...
...Hence, the burning of his home...
...But Thomas cannot testify...
...N. Y. 5. Publicise the story of Lake County by urging your local newspaper to get the facts from the NAACP...
...But already central Florida newspapers were calling for Negro blood, and were beading their demand "No Compromise...
...Their restaurant was riddled with bullets, their church attacked with buckshot...
...called out the National Guard, mounted them in jeeps, armed them with machineguns and planes, and that these and the Florida highway patrol were in Mascotte...
...Within an hour, the forces of race hate, arson, terror and savagery struck the Negroes of Lake County...
...One eye was completely closed...
...Each morning they returned...
...What they want is not merely revenge...
...I went^^ G/i^j^jnd believing that it three Negroes arrested for tape and of the fourth shot ^o death while "attempting to escape a sheriff's posse...
...Henry Shepherd once bought thirty acres of overgrown Florida jungle for $255, cleared it, ploughed it and planted it...
...I gazed at what had been Henry Shepherd's home Three twisted bcdJraines warped by the liie't, heat, a smashed camp cot, an upturned stove, a heap of canned goods swollen arid lusted by the Haines . . . somehow it all failed to suggest that anyone had ever lived here...
...Mack Fryar had been working all that week, but had failed to turn up on the Saturday ending the week...
...But at Charles Greenlee't trial it will be claimed, before enough witnesses, that he confessed when questioned by police...
...Shortly before midnight, July 18, an armed mob of over a hundred men lobbed kerosene bottles through the windows and onto the roof, andbelieving Shepherd's seven-year-old daughter to be still Inside -fired it...
...New York 18...
...I. a whit* man...
...Make all checks payable to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...SAMMY SHEPHERD and Walter Irwin have been tortured as severely as Greenlee...
...Bay Lake, Groveland and Stuckay's Still and on the highways, alerted to halt trouble...
...He, and Wilfred Williams, J-ames Neary, Harcourt Hepbourne and Zacharias Griflin all British subjects--were jailed twenty-four hours and fined $25 each for refusing to work...
...Perhaps...
...With what...
...Turning to follow the driver I noticed, on one of the brick supports, the remains of three shotguns, the only things from, which the dust and ashes had been shaken...
...Assuming, for a moment, that this has nothing to do with McCall's role as protector of the three boys charged with rape, what has happened to those boys since their arrest, since they hav come under Shei ill McCall's direct supervision'.' * * # ATTORNEYS for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have interviewed the three accused — Charles , Greenlee, Sammy Shephercd and Walter Irwin — and examined their physical condition...
...Why...
...He had grown, they told me in Groveland, "too damned independent" In a county where peonage is prevalent, a Negro who turns farmer menaces the peonage system...
...The Orlando Evening Sen fine...
...I learned that Negroes, who comprise forty per cent of the population, do most of the work upon which the remaining sixty per cent live...
...But the cards seem stacked against them, particularly against Sammy Shepherd...
...Now there was only black ash...
...Greenlee states further that Ernest Thomas would substantiate his story of how he was sitting in a railroad freight depot when he was picked up by two night watchmen...
...The Negroes do most of the work around here," one Klansman told me...
...Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irwin, the three Negro boys falsely accused of rap...
...McCall claims Greenlee hat confessed...
...On the basis of my observations in Groveland, and talks I had with white residents of the community, I am convinced that even the death of the three accused Negro boys—who are aged 16, 20 and 22-~will fail to pacify the whites...
...A few days back they had supported a house...
...In Groveland, a colored restaurant was riddled with rifle bullets...
...THREE DAYS AFTER the supposed offence, the Orlando Morning Sentinel printed the cartoon reproduced on page one...
...I asked my driver...
...Three of their houses were put to the torch...
...But, Greenlee asserts, h* hat never in his whole life met the other two who are in jail with him, a statement confirmed by the two themselves...
...a British Negro from tile Bahamas, complained that he could not earn enough working Lake County citru^j, groves because the fruit was too thin...
...And I had seen somewhere that Florida's Governor Fuller Warren had...
...I RODE OVER miles of clay road down into the backwoods farmlands to see what had happened...
...and by writing letters to the editor...
...Thomas was a bright, well-dressed, college-educated man," he said...
...Our problem is the ancient yet ever new one: What shall we do...
...No one commented that Lake County males, young and old, all possess guns...
...Willie Padgett who lives in the swamps—was assaulted, and perhaps by a Negro...
...How Thomas really died is a mystery...
...After posting a $25 bond, Fryar was released...
...Mack Fryar, a Negro who once lived in Leesburg, Lake County, testifies that not long ago this same Sheriff McCall entered his home and, without a warrant, put him under arrest...
...It is a hunter's paradise...
...But these boys must not die, and Lake County Negroes must be given protection...
...a ¦ Sheriff McCall to arrest any Lake County Negro found not working...
...I had read that the sheriff had thrown tear gas bombs into the mob and had walked unarmed into it and had attempted to reason with it...
...Some—among them the parents and relatives of the accused boys made their way far out of town, permanently, their families broken, scattering because whites had told them that death awaited them at home although they were accused of nothing...
...His face and head were scarred...
...editorially supplied this answer "If smart lawyers or agents of different outside organizations seek to hamper justice through the employment of legal technicalities, they may bring suffering to many innocent Negroes...
...OBADIAH MACKEY...
...Press accounts say he died in Greenville, Florida, just south of Georgia, two hundred miles away, in tl* woods, pursued by u sheriff's posse...
...Fresh headlines daily proclaim thai "states' rights" means abandoning Negroes to lynch law...
...This appeared before any formal charge was made, before the grand jury had met, before even the details of the "crime" were known to the public...
...Twenty miles north of Groveland, in Polk City, across the wilderness of swamp, scrub palm and pine trees over which vultures slowly circle, fiery crosses burned...
...Why was this done...
...Greenlee, although they claim they have never seen Greenlee before and insist the rape story is, so far as they are concerned, a frameup...
...I don't know what the legal technicalities are, but if the federal government is worthy of the adjectives "democratic" and "civilized", it must step into the jungle that is Lake County...
...Such were my firsthand observations of the manner in which Lake County whites had "helped" the Negroes "evacuate" their homes...
...At least these things: 1. Write the Attorney General demanding the Justice Department step into Lake County at once...
...Unconscious, Fryar was taken to jail and kept there some days before receiving medical treatment...
...From what I learned in central Florida, it is possible but not probable that the girl who was allegedly raped—a Mrs...
...Henry Shepherd, father of one of the boys Lake County Is determined to kill-by process of law—had lived there with his wife and six children...
...But not all...
...One week ago the houses of hundreds of Negroes were still deserted...
...armed with an order from Sheriff McCall, picked up Bailey for vagrancy...
...BUT WHAT ABOUT the "valiant sheriff" the nation's press had talked of...
...The cartoon is headed, "No Compromise...
...the Klansmen's torches, it wag feared, were still lit...
...The man whp_bjid, single-handed, curbed the mob and saved three Negro boys .JBfetWynching...
...Here is what they found...
...be driven out...
...You can obtain copies of Terence McCaihy's article, free from The Sew Leader...
...other words, unless the three accused boys are offered up as a "legal" blood-sacrifice, the Sentinel threatens that evil will befall the rest of the Negro comunity...
...But I do know, on the basis of what I have seen, that young Negroes like Shepherd and Thomas sons of prospering parents—were madeto-order culprits...
...3. Urge your Congressman to support the civil rights proposals expected to come before Congress shortly...
...Before us stood fourteen squat columns of cemented brick...
...Both are awaiting trial with...
...TERENCE MCCARTHY'S report on this page speaks eloquently tor itself...
...V ' My mind still cannot accept what my eyes have seen in Groveland...
...No compromise with whom...
...In Bay Lake and Stuckey's Still, all the Negro residences had been shot up...
...Floor beams had rested on them...
...went to Groveland to discover whether it was true Florida whites were protecting Negroes from the Klan...
...He—rather his father—¦ committed the worst crime a Lake County Negro is capable of...
...Thereupon it was explained to him that a blanket warrant permits /--Terence McCarthy, British consulting economist now working in the field of American finance and industrial management, hat written for Barron's Financial Weekly, The Magaitne of Wall Street, the New Statesman and Nation and the Liverpool Echo...
...4. Send money or organise fundraising activities to support the defense of Charles Greenlee...
...He was fined $25...
...Nor does anyone else...
...In any case, he can't verify Greenlee's statement that he was in a railroad depot the night of the rape...
...Negroes who take up farming-—who date leave the orange groves to better themselves threaten, by their example, the whole system of servitude and forced labor which is the base of the local economy...
...I'll show you why the Negroes scattered," my driver had volunteered...
...An Editorial— Help Lake County Rejoin the U.S.A...
...Orlando Morning Sentinel...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 33
