[Darryl Owens]

BEACON SALON SPEAKER SERIES PROMO: https://youtu.be/zPdhZMwzeXs

Sleepy towns with nightmarish big secrets ...

In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.”And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” and the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, into the deadly fray.

Eight years later, in December 1957, the wife of a wealthy Florida citrus man is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a “husky Negro” did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. Within days, however, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Jesse is promptly railroaded up to the insane asylum in Chattahoochee and locked away without trial.

In March's installment of the Beacon Salon Speaker Series, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King examines injustice, racial bigotry, and corrupting power through the lens of these two monstrous cases in Lake County in the late 1940s and 1950s connected only by the one central figure: infamous Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall in his presentation, "Bedeviling Confluence: Injustice and Willis McCall through the Prism of 'Devil in the Grove' and 'Beneath a Ruthless Sun'."

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The Beacon Salon Team

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