ABOUT "RUBY"

On August 3rd, 1952, a Black woman murdered a white man in Florida. Ruby McCollum murdered Dr. C. Leroy Adams. This shooting was noted in African American communities as the O.J. Simpson Murder trial 43 years later.

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It happened in Live Oak, a small farming town in north Florida. After the shooting, Ruby McCollum put away her nickel-plated Smith & Wesson, locked up his office, and walked to her 1951 two-toned blue Chrysler. She checked on her two small children in the back seat and drove home. Every law enforcement vehicle in Suwannee County was parked in front of the McCollum home in less than an hour.

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Accompanied by a squad of Florida Highway Patrol cars and under direct orders from Governor Fuller Warren in Tallahassee, Ruby has rushed over 50 miles away to the Florida State Prison Farm in Raiford, the home of Florida’s electric chair. She had driven there in the car with her two young children. She later admitted that she shot him four times with a revolver after he would not agree to leave her alone. She said that over years, he had repeatedly forced her to submit to sex and bear his child and that her two-year-old daughter, Loretta, was his.

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In notes and letters, McCollum said that he had abused her and that she was pregnant with another child by him when she killed him. McCollum also said that Adams participated in her husband Sam's "illegal gambling operation." Employees at the doctor’s office later described seeing the doctor accept "large deliveries of cash in examination rooms." The day after McCollum’s arrest, her husband, Sam, died of a heart attack in Zuber, Florida, where he had taken his children for safekeeping with Ruby's mother. A newspaper outside Florida first covered the case. This was by anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, assigned from the Pittsburgh Courier. She had to sit upstairs in the segregated gallery because of Ku Klux Klan members who were present. Her coverage helped McCollum gain a national and even international readership during her two trials.

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Source: African American Registry. Link: https://aaregistry.org/story/the-ruby-mccollum-case-begins/