About six months ago, an editor I was working with at the time asked me to make a few adjustments to a piece I had written about a new book by poet DaMaris B. Hill, “A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing.”
The editor was uncomfortable with the story of Ruby McCollum, who’d been forced into a sexual relationship with the town doctor and soon-to-be senator C. LeRoy Adams.
On Aug. 3, 1952, she shot him dead in his office. Her trial for murder, which received national attention, was covered by Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African American anthropologist and writer. Ms. Hurston described Dr. Adams as exerting his “paramour rights” on Mrs. McCollum, an unwritten law that referred to the presumed right of a white man to take a Black woman as his concubine and force her to have his children.
That notion was new to me when I first read DaMaris Hill’s poem about Ruby McCollum. I realized it was part of “hard history” which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the real history around African enslavement. This, one of the dark parts, is not included in most history books.
Although not surprising during slavery, this practice continued after the Civil War. With miscegenation illegal in the Jim Crow era, women of African descent had no right to sue for things like child support for offspring resulting from rape.
After the shooting, McCollum put her gun away and locked up the judge’s office. She drove home, her two small children in the back seat. Every law enforcement officer in the county was at her house shortly after, along with a squad of Florida Highway Patrol cars. Under direct orders from Governor Fuller Warren, she was transported to the Florida State Prison Farm in Raiford, the home of Florida’s electric chair.
Under questioning, she admitted she shot the doctor because he would not agree to leave her alone. She asserted that over a period of years, he had forced her to submit to sex and bear his child. Her 2-year-old, Loretta, was the judge’s she declared.
In the courtroom, the prosecution insisted that the source of contention between Ruby and the doctor was an unpaid bill. Ruby was restricted in what she was permitted to say on the stand, and she was initially convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction because of several conflicts of interest of the presiding judge, who also failed to show up for the jury’s inspection of the scene of the crime. In the second trial, Ruby’s defense attorneys filed a motion of insanity. A “smothering blanket of silence” surrounded the proceedings, and Ruby’s First Amendment rights were revoked for fear her honest testimony about the forced sex would “subject the community to embarrassment.”
Conditions at the mental hospital were terrible, with electroshock and Thorazine standard treatments. Ruby was incarcerated there for years until a lawsuit involving another patient led to the Florida Mental Health Act and the de-institutionalization movement. She was released in 1974 and died in 1992.
My then-editor asked me to delete a quote from a poem in DaMaris B. Hill’s book, “A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing,” that said the doctor thought it was his right to exert “his white man’s pleasure, a Black mistress of his choosing to bear his children.”
I am ashamed to admit I gave in to his pressure.
DaMaris Hill, who teaches at the University of Kentucky, describes her book as “a love letter to women who have been denied their humanity.” This column is a love letter to Ruby McCollum and to all the Black women, women of color, and women in general, who have endured unwanted advances and forced intimacy with men. As we move from Black History Month to Women’s History Month, I owe them all an apology for caving in and deleting the hard history.
By the way, I didn’t want to lose the gig, but in the end, I did anyway.
For more information about “A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland,” visit www.bloomsbury.com
