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Summary Of Live Oak And The Trial Of Ruby Mccollum

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Live Oak and the Trial of Ruby McCollum
The city of Live Oak, Florida gained more recognition because of the appalling trial of Ruby McCollum. She was a wealthy, married woman that lived in Live Oak, and in 1952 she had been convicted of killing the city’s only white doctor, Clifford Adams. However, there was much more to the story than just a cruel act of murder. McCollum claimed that Adams had repeatedly raped her, beat her, and forced her to bear his child, although they were lovers for six years. Zora Hurston was to write about the trial as it went on, and get as much truth as she could.
The Ruby McCollum case sparked a debate about African American rights in the United States. Mostly all of the white folks in Live Oak had only wonderful things to say about Dr. Adams; they always talked about how kind he was, therefore no one believed that he could have done the things McCollum accused him of. Dr. Adams had promised the white folks that he would keep them high in cotton if they supported him politically since he was running for the state senator as well, a promise that could never …show more content…

Clifford Adams, she was sentenced to death by the electric chair on January 23, 1953. Hurston could see the agony in her face, and she wrote: “The trial was ended. A Negro woman had become infuriated over a doctor bill, and she had killed the good doctor...the friend of the poor...a man whose only rule had been the Golden Rule. And now the poor men would have their justice: Their eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The Community will had been done.” Hurston only said that to explain what the whole trial boiled down to, but Hurston did empathize with McCollum so she did not exactly agree with this statement. No one would ever know the full truth anyhow, and even if Ruby was telling the truth not many people believed her. When it was all over, the Pittsburgh Courier never did pay Hurston for her

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