FLORIDA: Murmur in the Streets

The story spread across sleepy Lake County like fire in a stand of slash pine. By nightfall all the county knew that Willie Padgett’s 17-year-old wife had been raped by four Negroes; two of the suspects were already locked up in the county jail at Tavares.

Sullen, glint-eyed men collected in murmuring knots in the dusty, farm-town streets. Soon, the small angry knots had. become one 125-man mob pulling up at the Tavares courthouse in a 20-car caravan. Most of the mob stayed behind while its leaders walked up the steps to talk with big, easygoing Sheriff Willis McCall. “Willis,” said one,”we want them niggers.”

Buckshot for a Juke Joint. The sheriff let himself down on the steps and talked softly. “You know that when you elected me, I was sworn to uphold the law,” he said. “And I have to protect my prisoners.” Anyway, he added, the prisoners had been rushed off to another jail for safekeeping. (A third suspect was in the jail at the time, but was sneaked off later.)

Grumbling, the mob rode off, and almost broke up. Just for the hell of it, though, in the little fanning town of Groveland, 65 miles from Tampa and not far from Willie and Norma Padgett’s house, the men with shotguns pumped 15 loads of buckshot into a Negro-owned juke joint. Then they looked around for more Negroes—but the 400 residents of Groveland’s Negro district had been carted to safety by white citizens who feared what was coming.

Calm, determined Sheriff McCall put in a hurry call to Governor Fuller Warren that brought 78 National Guardsmen to the scene. Off and on for three days, small mobs, sprinkled now with strangers from other counties, cruised menacingly in cars, or shuffled through the small-town streets, but did no damage. Then, all of a sudden, they were roused again. A hundred shouting whites with rifles and pistols roared into tiny Mascotte in trucks, forced Guardsmen and police to withdraw and took over the community for the night.

At Stuckey’s Still, a bedraggled Negro home site three miles from Groveland, the band poured shots into one house (someone thought it belonged to the father of one of the rape suspects) and started after more. Sheriff’s men and highway police stopped them with tear-gas grenades. A few miles away, whites tossing kerosene-filled bottles burned three Negro homes to the ground.

Uneasy Order. By midweek, National Guardsmen, swollen to 300 and mounting .50-caliber machine guns, had brought uneasy order to Lake County. A hastily summoned grand jury indicted the three jailed Negroes for rape. Scared Negroes began trickling back to their homes. It looked as if the terror had run its course, without injury to any Negro.

But many Lake County white men still muttered darkly. The next time, said one of their leaders, husky, brash Flowers Cockcroft, “We’ll clean out every Negro section in south Lake County.”