Америкалық әйелдің кісі өлтіру айыбында болуы

American woman accused of murder

Ruby McCollum, born Ruby Jackson (August 31, 1909 – May 23, 1992), was a wealthy married African American woman in Live Oak, Florida, who is known for being arrested and convicted in 1952 for killing Dr. C. Leroy Adams, a prominent white doctor and state senator–elect. She testified as to their sexual relationship and his paternity of her child. The judge prohibited her from recounting her allegations of abuse by Adams. She was sentenced to death for his murder by an all white jury. The sensational case was covered widely in the United States press (including a press report written by Zora Neale Hurston, as well as by international papers). McCollum was subjected to a gag order. Her case was appealed and overturned by the State Supreme Court. Before the second trial, McCollum was examined and found mentally incompetent to stand trial. She was committed to the state mental hospital (Florida State Hospital) at Chattahoochee, Florida. In 1974 her attorney, Frank Cannon, obtained her release under the Baker Act, as she was not considered a danger to herself or others. In the 21st century, McCollum and her case received renewed attention, with books and four film documentaries exploring the issues of race, class, sexual violence, gender, and corruption in local politics from a modernist perspective. McCollum's case is considered a landmark trial by these people in the struggle for civil rights as they believe she was the first black woman to testify against a white man's sexual abuse and paternity of their child. It is considered to have helped change attitudes about the practice of "paramour rights”. McCollum later said that a fourth and youngest, Loretta, was a biracial child fathered by Dr. C. Leroy Adams in a forced relationship.

Florida was a segregated state where Black people had been essentially disenfranchised since the turn of the century amid passage of a constitution and laws imposing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers to voter registration and Black voting. The exclusion from voting meant that African Americans could not serve on juries, and they were generally excluded from any political office. The White Democrat dominated state legislature following Reconstruction had passed laws to create legal segregation and Jim Crow. African Americans were kept in second class status until passage in the mid 1960s of civil rights legislation following their decades of activism and support from the national Democratic Party led by President Lyndon Johnson. By 1952, black men could serve on juries, but during the voir dire for McCollum's case, blacks generally shied away from jury duty, and only two black alternates in the McCollum case were chosen but never called to serve. The jury in the case consisted of all white males, according to the transcript of the trial published by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr. as State of Florida vs. Ruby McCollum, Defendant. The power relations of many White men taking sexual advantage of Black women had a long history dating to slavery times, when enslaved women were frequently raped by White slaveholders, many times for purposes of breeding new slaves. From the late 17th century, Virginia and other colonies established laws that children of enslaved mothers were also born into slavery, regardless of their paternity, under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. An assumption that powerful White men could take Black women as sexual partners, regardless of the women's desire or social status, continued to underlie many 20th century relations. This was called "paramour rights" at the time of the trial. Dr. C. Leroy Adams had a reputation as a "benevolent and popular doctor who administered to the needy."

Upon appeal of her death sentence, the Florida Supreme Court determined that Judge Adams had violated her civil rights by not allowing her to be present at the jury visit to the scene of the crime. Concerned for her mental health following her impending second trial, defense attorney Frank Cannon arranged for McCollum to be examined in the county jail, where she had been held for about two years. At at the beginning of her second trial, he entered a plea of insanity. Upon receiving the results of an examination of McCollum by court appointed physicians, including Dr. Adams' associate Dr. Dillard Workman, the state attorney Randall Slaughter agreed to the plea and Judge Adams committed her to the Florida State Hospital for mental patients at Chattahoochee, Florida. McCollum was institutionalized at the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee until 1974, when her attorney, Frank Cannon, successfully filed for her release under Florida's recently enacted Baker Act. It allowed release of mental patients who were not judged to be a threat to themselves or the community.

There was extensive coverage of the trial, but the judge put McCollum under a gag order. The press was never allowed to interview McCollum. Ellis, who remembers the trial in his hometown, emphasizes that this isolation of McCollum from the press was done less to cover up the affair between McCollum and Adams, which was already making the gossip circuits of the town, than it was to conceal the illegal dealings between whites and blacks in the community related to gambling and liquor. The IRS was in town to collect taxes on unreported gambling and liquor sales. Ellis writes that this attempt to silence McCollum proved in the long run to be totally unsuccessful. Following his publication of the annotated transcript of the trial, McCollum and her case have been the subject of a number of books and documentaries published. The noted African American writer Zora Neale Hurston covered the trial for the Pittsburgh Courier from the fall of 1952 through Ruby McCollum's conviction just before Christmas that year. She was forced to sit in the segregated second floor gallery of the courtroom. From January–March 1953, the Courier published Hurston's series entitled, "The Life Story of Ruby McCollum". Hurston, who was unable to attend the appeal or the second trial for financial reasons, contacted journalist William Bradford Huie to interest him in the case. They had worked together before and he had taken on controversial cases. She shared her notes from the first trial and corresponded with him to furnish additional information. She also asked for bus fare to attend the trial, but Huie did not respond. Huie did investigate the story and, after attending the appeal and second trial, published Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956). This book became a bestseller. Huie asked his publisher not to distribute the book in Florida due to his continuing legal troubles there. Huie's book also addresses his effort to fight Judge Adams' gag order against the press. He filed a First Amendment challenge, claiming freedom of the press to speak to the defendant, but did not succeed in his suit. At one point, Judge Adams charged Huie with contempt of court for attempting to influence Dr. Fernay, a witness scheduled to testify as to McCollum's sanity. The journalist served overnight in jail as a result of not paying a fine the judge had imposed in the contempt charge. During that period, Huie met the director, Elia Kazan. In 1960 they had discussions about Kazan's directing a film to be adapted from Huie's book and entitled The Ruby McCollum Story. Huie never interviewed McCollum. Lee wrote that McCollum had no memory of her ordeal. He reported that psychiatrists said that she may have suffered Ganser syndrome, or the suppression of painful memories. Her brother, Matt Jackson, had died less than a year before. The family arranged for her to be buried beside her brother and his wife in the cemetery behind Hopewell Baptist Church in Live Oak. Her name was mistakenly spelled on her death certificate as "Ruby McCollumn". Also included in the work are letters from McCollum proclaiming her love of Adams, and a letter from Hurston to Huie dated May 14, 1954 stating, "I suspect that two ruthless individuals met and tangled in Ruby and Dr. Adams. Perhaps 'egotistical' is a better word, or does it add up to the same thing?" Ellis maintains that these communications dispute revisionist claims of Ruby being a helpless rape victim for nearly a decade, while acknowledging that she was abused in the relationship.

In 1999, Thulani Davis wrote a play, Everybody's Ruby: Story of a Murder in Florida, which premiered in New York at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon. It starred Viola Davis as McCollum and Phylicia Rashad as author Zora Neale Hurston. The play is described as highly artistic, but departing significantly from the historical facts. In 2009, C. Arthur Ellis wrote a historical novel, Zora Hurston And The Strange Case Of Ruby McCollum, based on Hurston's articles for the Pittsburgh Courier and his own research for his non fiction book on the trial. In 2010, "The Ballad of Ruby McCollum", a song performed by Peg and Chip Carbone, written by Peg and Chip Carbone and David Schmeling, was recorded at Reveal Audio Atlanta.) The film contains an interview with A. K. Black, the prosecutor in the McCollum case. Johnson reported receiving a death threat while working on the film. The film was the official nominee at several film festivals in 2012. In November 2014, '"The Shot Doctor", an episode in the A Crime to Remember series airing on Investigation Discovery, included historian, Dr. C. Arthur Ellis, Jr. The narrator mistakenly said that McCollum was not allowed to testify at her trial. Ellis correctly noted that she was allowed to testify that Adams forced sex upon her, that she bore his child. Other details her defense tried to introduce were prevented by the judge upholding prosecutor's objections. You Belong to Me: Sex, Race and Murder in the South (2015), a feature length documentary about Ruby McCollum and her case, was released on video on demand and DVD, in conjunction with Black History Month and Women's History Month. The film was produced by Hilary Saltzman, Kitty Potapow, and Jude Hagin (former state film commissioner) through Hummingbird Film Productions, LLC. It was written and directed by John Cork. It was the first film for which members of the McCollum and Adams families spoke on the record about the case. The last surviving juror from the trial and others involved in case also participated in the film. C. Arthur Ellis, Jr. published a monograph, Hall of Mirrors: Confirmation and Presentist Biases in Continuing Accounts of the Ruby McCollum Story (2015). It explores how the events have been interpreted in print and film. A second, updated, edition was published in 2023.

Davis, Thulani. Everybody's Ruby (Samuel French, Inc., 2000, 79 pages), drama play, Ellis, C. Arthur (Jr.). Zora Hurston And The Strange Case Of Ruby McCollum, historical novel based upon events. (Chattanooga, TN: Gadfly Publishing, 2009). .