'Beneath a Ruthless Sun': A Tale of Rape, Race and Deceit in 1950s Florida

As the popular sheriff of Lake County, Florida, between 1944 and 1972, Willis McCall seemed to embrace the hallmarks of ignominy: a penchant for brazen cruelty and an unyielding commitment to an unjust cause. Punching a wayward horse in the head, as he did on at least one occasion, was the least of it; McCall enforced Jim Crow with a brutality that made even his fellow segregationists blanch.

In “Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found,” Gilbert King recounts how the sheriff descended on the cabin rendezvous of two interracial couples in 1956 and arrested them for violating Florida’s anti-miscegenation statute — but not before trying to enlist his deputies to help him throw the black men “to the alligators” and daring one of the men to run. (“I want to get in some target practice,” McCall said.) The FBI investigated, and then withdrew. McCall was re-elected to his fourth term as sheriff, celebrated by those who praised him for what one supporter called his “efficiency and untiring efforts” in punishing “the ravages of Negroes upon white women and girls.”

This isn’t the main incident in the book, but it’s a telling one, if only because it reflects the many convolutions King pursues. As the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Devil in the Grove” (2012) and “The Execution of Willie Francis” (2008), King has written about racism and spectacular miscarriages of justice before. McCall was a central figure in “Devil in the Grove,” having participated in the zealous prosecution of four black men wrongly convicted of raping a 17-year-old white woman in 1949. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions of two of the Groveland Four, McCall shot the men, killing one of them.

At first glance, King’s new book looks like it will recount another one of McCall’s fervid campaigns to incarcerate a black man for a crime he didn’t necessarily commit. “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” begins in December 1957, when Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wife of a Lake County citrus baron, reported a rape. Her husband was out of town and she was at home, alone with their three children, when, she said, a “husky Negro” with “bushy hair” attacked her in the middle of the night. McCall told his deputies to round up every black man they could find.

A week and a half later, McCall and the state attorney, Gordon Oldham, announced they had found the rapist and were holding him in custody. The alleged culprit? Jesse Delbert Daniels, an impoverished, mentally impaired 19-year-old with a fifth-grade education. Daniels was also white. Oldham explained that the house was so dark at the time of the rape that Knowles had misidentified her assailant’s skin color.

Was this a case in which justice was actually served? Or was something more confounding — and insidious — at work? McCall had held two black men in custody for several days; Knowles stated that a black man attacked her, and now McCall, who once declared that black men had a “barbarous animal instinct” that “a white man don’t have,” was suddenly saying a white man did it.

As a local journalist named Mabel Norris Reese put it at the time, this was a puzzling turn from an office “that gloats over the ‘crime record’ of Negroes.”

If McCall is the villain of King’s book, Reese is clearly the hero, doggedly trying to find out what happened to Blanche Knowles while teaming up with Daniels’ mother, Pearl, to advocate on his behalf. At a hearing that lasted barely five minutes, Truman G. Futch — the same judge from the Groveland case — deemed Daniels “insane and incompetent,” and had him committed to the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee without a trial. Daniels, who still slept with a teddy bear, would spend the next 14 years there, confined to the criminal ward.

Reese got ensnared in a tangled web of promising leads and dead ends — as does King’s book, which can get bogged down in the morass of Lake County’s unrelenting racism and squalid corruption.

A chapter on Chattahoochee meanders away from the Daniels case and into varieties of shock therapy, ice pick lobotomies, Rosemary Kennedy and unwritten “paramour rights.” Another chapter is devoted to the plight of the Platt family, whose five children were expelled from a Lake County public school in 1954 on suspicion of being black (even though the Platts identified as Irish-Indian and had government documentation stating they were white). McCall insisted on inspecting the children himself, pointing to the 13-year-old daughter and saying, “I don’t like the shape of that one’s nose.”

This isn’t to say that King’s digressions are uninteresting, or even irrelevant. It’s just that combined with the baroque twists of the Daniels case, the book begins to get unwieldy. King, an amateur historian, has an appreciation for the startling detail and the circuitous connection. He’s clearly done his research, unearthing transcripts and talking to survivors.

But where “Devil in the Grove” pitted McCall’s viciousness against the rich and complicated character of Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice who defended the Groveland Four, “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” tracks the noble efforts of Reese, who is mainly presented here through her earnest editorials. No doubt Reese was not as one-dimensional as the upstanding figure in this book (in the Groveland case, King mentions, she had initially called for the execution of the defendants). But without a more riveting linchpin to anchor the narrative, “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” grows as sprawling as the conspiracy it depicts.

Which ultimately might illustrate King’s point. The plot against Daniels seems baffling, verging on nonsensical — until you begin to see the community the way King does: so deformed by racial animus and misogyny that the white establishment of Lake County deemed it less of an “indignity” for Knowles to have been raped by a white man than a black man.

To disclose too many details would be to spoil the book, since much of its momentum relies on the true crime at the center of it, and the mystery of how the many bewildering bits of information might all fit together. The racism and corruption King depicts were so embedded in Lake County that they perverted even perversions of justice; the argument is timely and important, even if one sometimes wishes it were more clearly made.

— Publication Notes:

“Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found”

By Gilbert King

Illustrated. 416 pages. Riverhead Books. $28.