The Warmth of Other Suns (82 page)

LAKE COUNTY, FLORIDA
, began to join the rest of the free world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, six decades into the Great Migration, when black children and white children, for the first time in county history, began sitting in the same buildings to learn their cursive and multiplication tables.

Change did not come without incident. The first sign of trouble was a fight at the newly integrated high school between a white boy and a black boy. It fell to the black assistant principal, who had been demoted from principal of the colored high school to an assistant at the reconstituted school, to intervene. It was unclear who started what, but the black assistant principal ruled in favor of the white student to the outcries of reverse favoritism from the black parents.

“The black people could not understand why he should discipline this black kid that had an altercation with the white kid, and they been dogging us all our lives,” George Starling, who had been keeping close contact, said years later. The assistant principal was his stepbrother in that small world of Eustis, Florida.

The black parents felt the white student had started the fight by provoking the black student and that the assistant principal should have ruled accordingly. But in the tinderbox of what was still very much an experiment in caste integration, he had little choice.

“We’re crying out against prejudice and mistreatment,” George said. “If you want it eliminated, you have to do unto others as you want them to do unto you.”

When the next big fight broke out, Willis McCall rode up with his police dog to go after the black student. This time, the black parents rose up and protested. A church load of them, emboldened by the civil rights gains and the counterbalancing effect of all the people they knew up north, rode over to the county seat of Tavares, got a Reverend Jones to speak for them, and protested to the Lake County School Board.

“The people let Willis McCall know that they weren’t scared of him or his dog,” Viola Dunham, a long-time resident with three boys in school at the time, remembered. “We let him know he does not run the school system. We let them know we didn’t want Willis McCall raising our children. And we did not back down that time.”

Since the 1940s, Willis McCall had cast a long shadow over Lake County. His handling of the Groveland case, in which a white woman accused four black men of raping her back in 1949, had made national headlines and put Lake County on the map as a symbol of racial injustice. McCall had shot two shackled defendants while transporting them the night before their second trial. One of the men, Walter Irvin, actually survived the shooting and lived to tell how McCall had taken the
backwoods, stopped in a remote location, told them to get out, and shot them.

After being hospitalized for his wounds, Irvin was retried, reconvicted, and once again sentenced to death. A few years later, a new governor, LeRoy Collins, reviewed his case and, in 1955, commuted Irvin’s death sentence to life imprisonment. It was a stunning decision at that time in the Jim Crow South and one handed down against the vehement opposition of Sheriff McCall and other white Floridians.

The governor, a segregationist but otherwise a moderate by southern standards, was disturbed by the many shortcomings in the case. “My conscience told me it was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried and now, on this bad performance, I was asked to take a man’s life,” Collins later said.
⁸
“My conscience would not let me do it.”

His death sentence commuted, Walter Irvin would be imprisoned for eighteen years for a crime he maintained his whole life he had not committed. DNA testing was not yet in use to prove or disprove his claim. In 1969, he was paroled on the condition that he never set foot in Lake County again. But the following year, he was granted permission to visit his family there for a single day. Soon after he got there, “he dropped dead while sitting on a front porch.”
⁹
He was forty-two years old. Officials like McCall said he had a heart attack. But after all that had preceded Irvin’s death, some black people in town believed it was no accident.

Into the early 1970s, Willis McCall was still the sheriff of Lake County. He was still wearing his ten-gallon hats. The Groveland case had made him something of a celebrity among Florida segregationists. He would become the center of case after case of alleged abuse and misconduct against black people in the county. He would be investigated forty-nine times and survive every one of them.

As the world began to change around him, he stood his ground in defense of the old order of things. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, “the only public building in the United States that refused to lower its flag to half-staff was McCall’s jail in Tavares,” the Lake County seat, according to the author Ben Green.
¹⁰

COLORED ONLY
and
WHITE ONLY
signs were coming down all over the South during the 1960s. But Sheriff McCall did not take down the
COLORED WAITING ROOM
sign in his office until September 1971, and then
only under threat of a federal court order.
¹¹
He may have been the last elected official in the country to remove his Jim Crow sign, Green said.

McCall was reelected seven times, that is, until 1972, when Florida Governor Reubin Askew stepped in and suspended him after yet another violent assault on someone in his custody.
¹²
This time, McCall was indicted for second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death. The prisoner was in jail for a twenty-six-dollar traffic ticket. McCall was acquitted.

But he lost the election that November. Blacks were now able to vote, and they turned out in force to defeat him the first chance they got.

“We sent cars out and taxicabs,” Viola Dunham, a longtime resident and a sister-in-law of George Starling, remembered. “We started getting these people out to vote.”

Then, too, a new generation of whites had entered the Florida electorate, the younger people who may have identified with the young freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama even if they would not have participated themselves, and the snowbirds, the white northerners who were buying up vacation homes or retiring to central Florida with the boom that came with the arrival of Disney World and who couldn’t relate to the heavy-handedness of a small-town southern sheriff. And now it seemed that even the most steadfast traditionalists had finally tired of the controversies and felt it was time for him to go.

The defeated sheriff retreated to his ranch on Willis V. McCall Road in Eustis, where he tended his citrus grove, welcomed his partisans, and held forth on his decades of lordship over Lake County. He could take comfort in the fact that, for better or for worse, Lake County would not soon forget him, and he took pride in his role of protecting southern tradition.

The times might have changed, but he never would or sought to. Displayed in his home was the
COLORED WAITING ROOM
sign that once hung in his office and that he was forced to take down under threat of a court order. Nobody in the world was going to tell him what he could do or what he could hang in his own home on Willis V. McCall Road.

THE FOSTERS HAD ALWAYS
had a complicated relationship with their hometown of Monroe—or rather, with the few other ambitious and educated black people maneuvering among themselves for the few spoils allowed them in a segregated world. The rivalries would pass from one generation to the next until it no longer mattered because most of the Foster descendants had died or, like Robert, migrated away. As prominent as the Fosters had been, there would be no direct descendants living there by the 1970s, and the rivalries would play out from afar.

In the time since Robert drove away from Monroe for good, Robert’s father had died, his brother Madison had visited Los Angeles for surgery and died from complications there, his brother Leland had moved to the Midwest, his sister, Gold, had followed Robert to L.A. in the 1960s, and his nephew, Madison James, was in graduate school at the University of Michigan and not likely to move back.

But even before Robert migrated west, the Fosters had begun to languish like deposed monarchs on the outskirts of influence in town. By the 1950s, Professor Foster had been edged out of his principalship and a new colored high school had gone up to replace the old one the Fosters had run for decades.

There was a time when hardly any black child in Monroe could get through high school without getting past a Foster. Now a whole new generation was growing up not knowing who they were. Not only had many of the Fosters left, but the Migration had drained away many of the people who remembered them. It was the price they paid for migrating.

Some old-timers expected that the new high school would be named after Professor Foster for all his years of service.
¹³
He had taught, overseen, or influenced the education of most every black person in Monroe from the 1920s to the 1940s. But there were not enough partisans to push the case.

The new high school would take the name of a family that had stayed in Monroe, had not run north or west or forsaken Monroe for the so-called Promised Land. The Carrolls had been in Ouachita Parish since Reconstruction, and, like others who stayed, moved into greater prominence as possible competitors migrated away. When the new school
went up, it was named after one of the Carrolls—Henry Carroll, who had become the first black member of the Monroe Board of Education—rather than the retired and nearly forgotten Professor Foster. Robert’s father had to watch from the sidelines as the new school he had always dreamed of rose up in the name of a rival.

“Papa was hurting, dying inside,” Robert said. “But he never let you know it.”

The next year, the Foster name was affixed to something the Fosters would not, in principle, have been against but would not have otherwise chosen for themselves, given their preoccupation with high-minded achievement. The Fosters lost out with the high school, but as a consolation prize, a public housing project was named after Professor Foster, the Foster Heights Homes on Swayze Street, a few blocks from the new high school. It was as if all that Professor Foster had endured and devoted his life to had been boiled down to an assemblage of low-rise apartments of pink brick and struggling lawn. Every shooting or drug bust or robbery that might happen there and make it to the evening news (“Last night, in a drug raid at the Foster Heights Homes …”) would resurrect the Foster name in a way that was counter to everything the family stood for.

Robert didn’t want to go back to see the housing project with his surname on it, but he did and found it neatly spread out, rather like a roadside motel. He would have to go back to bury his father and big brother and sister-in-law Harriet.

Each visit was a time of melancholy. Finally, no immediate family was left. There were still no sidewalks in New Town, and the streets were still unpaved, just as they were when he was a boy. It only confirmed that he could not have lived out his life in this place.