Caught Between Two Guns

Preface August 4, 1952. It’s a hot Sunday morning in my rural hometown of Live Oak, Florida during the height of tobacco season. Except for cars parked along the street in front of the Methodist church, the main highway through town is empty when a shiny two-toned blue Oldsmobile turns right and pulls into the alley behind an office with “Dr. C. LeRoy Adams, M.D. Colored Entrance” hand lettered on a screen door. A pregnant African-American woman parks the Oldsmobile, enters the doctor’s office, walks past the patients in the colored waiting area, finds the doctor alone in a treatment room, demands an abortion of his baby, and—when he refuses and threatens to shoot her if she seeks an abortion elsewhere—fires three shots point blank into his back. She then calmly steps over his dying body lying face down in a pool of blood, leaves the office behind several screaming women fleeing ahead of her, and drives away in her car accompanied by the notes of Nearer My God to Thee floating through the open windows of the Methodist church. Following the murder, the nationally distributed African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, retained Zora Neale Hurston to cover the high-profile murder of a white physician recently elected to the Florida state senate by a “Negress.” Aside from witnessing Ruby’s salacious testimony during the trial, Hurston unearthed the subterranean dealings between coloreds and whites involving an illegal gambling scheme known as “bolita,” with Dr. Adams heading the operation in the white community and the McCollums heading the operation in the colored community. Hurston’s May 2, 1953 article ended with a teaser announcing her next installment, which never appeared due to a disagreement over payment for her work. Instead, the editors replaced the article Hurston promised for the May 9 issue with the column, ‘Ruby! Good or Bad?” The distraction worked. Comments from readers poured in. Some were convinced that she had been framed for the murder by the sheriff who wanted Adams out of the way so he could be the bolita kingpin in the white community; others laid the blame squarely on her shoulders. Still others applauded her courage in standing up to a white man who forced his child upon her, while some condemned her for violating one of the Ten Commandments. The question of whether Ruby’s desperate action was morally justified or not, given her circumstances and the time in which she lived, continues to be debated by scholars to this day. Now readers have the opportunity to read the story for themselves, recounted from my perspective as someone who was delivered by Dr. Adams, grew up as a neighbor to the McCollums, and knew all of the characters. In the Afterword, I use primary sources to set forth my own evaluation of Ruby’s dilemma within a completely different moral construct that dismisses the question of “right” or “wrong.” Enjoy, C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D.