Ruby McCollum

Ruby McCollum (August 31, 1909 – May 23, 1992), born Ruby Jackson, was a wealthy married Black woman in Live Oak, Florida, who was charged in 1952 for first-degree murder for killing Dr. C. Leroy Adams, a 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 more details of her allegations of abuse by Adams. She was convicted and sentenced to death for his murder by an all-white jury.

The case was covered widely in the United States press (including a report written by Zora Neale Hurston for the Pittsburgh Courier, the first for a newspaper outside Florida), and gained coverage by international papers also. The judge subjected McCollum to a gag order. Her case was appealed and overturned on technical grounds by the State Supreme Court. McCollum later said that her youngest child, Loretta, who was born in Live Oak, was fathered by C. Leroy Adams, a White doctor, during a forced relationship. The couple was considered financially successful and well respected in the community, where they contributed liberally to their church.

Background 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. Those African Americans excluded from voters' lists could not serve on juries, and they were generally excluded from any political office. Following Reconstruction, the White Democrat-dominated state legislature had passed a new constitution and laws to create legal racial segregation and Jim Crow conditions. African-Americans were kept in second-class status until passage in the mid-1960s of civil rights legislation.

By 1952, black men could legally serve on juries, but participation was restricted due to the barriers to voting, as noted above. In addition, attorneys' challenges could be used to reject blacks as jurors, while using ostensible reasons other than race.

The jury in the McCollum 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 White men taking sexual advantage of Black women had a long history dating to the antebellum years, when African Americans were enslaved throughout the South. Into the 20th century, powerful white men would insist on what was called "paramour rights", forcing Black women into sexual relations. The assumption that powerful White men could take Black women as sexual partners, regardless of the women's desire or social status, continued to underlie 20th-century relations.

From the late 17th century, Virginia and other colonies established laws defining social status in the colonies. Under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, they ruled that children of enslaved mothers were also born into slavery, regardless of their paternity. This was in contrast to English common law, in which the fathers of children established their social status and had financial and legal responsibility for them.

Dr. C. Leroy Adams had a reputation as a "benevolent and popular doctor who administered to the needy."

Shooting of Dr. C. Leroy Adams On August 3, 1952, Ruby McCollum met Dr. C. Leroy Adams, a white physician and state senator-elect, in his office in Live Oak, Florida. She had driven there with her two young children. She later admitted that she shot him four times with a revolver, and said it was because he would not agree to leave her alone. She said that over a period of years, he had repeatedly forced her to submit to sex and to bear his child. She claimed that her two-year-old daughter, Loretta, was fathered by him.

Later, researchers found that McCollum had left notes and letters that said Adams had sexually abused her, and that she was pregnant with another child by him when she killed him.

The prosecuting attorney said that McCollum had shot Adams in anger over a disputed bill, an account supported by three witnesses during the trial. McCollum testified that she had discussed a bill with Adams that day, but maintained that she fired at the doctor in self-defense when he attacked her. The prosecution questioned this. He noted that although Adams was 100 pounds heavier than Ruby McCollum, all of her shots were fired into his back.

Her case was appealed. During the period before the appeal was decided, McCollum was held in the Suwannee County Jail.

Appeal and Second Trial Upon appeal of McCollum's death sentence, the Florida Supreme Court determined that Judge Adams had violated the defendant's 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 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. 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. That year 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.

Coverage 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 suggests 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, 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.

The noted African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston covered the trial as a free lance reporter 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". 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 give limited testimony. The judge upheld 38 objections by the prosecutor to additional testimony. 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. It was written and directed by John Cork. The film was produced by Hilary Saltzman, Kitty Potapow, and Jude Hagin (former state film commissioner) through Hummingbird Film Productions, LLC. 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. A sung-through musical about Ruby McCollum called "Ruby," directed and co-written by Nate Jacobs, was produced by the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe in 2024, and presented again at Detroit's Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts in 2025. It covers McCollum's courtship by husband Sam, move to Live Oak, the murder of Adams, and the courtroom trials. Zora Neale Hurston is a character and the story is told in part through her reporting.