In Live Oak, Florida, the year of 1952, an African American woman named Ruby McCollum was arrested and convicted for killing a white doctor named C. Leroy Adams. During this point in time, racism was even more alive than it is today. It was said that McCollum was lucky to have even gotten a trial at all instead of just being lynched. Her trial is very interesting to me because she stood up against people that wanted to see her be put in prison for the rest of her life. To be specific, none of the jury were female, and all of them were white, some of whom were patients of Dr. Adams. Ruby McCollum was a wealthy black woman; people said she was the wealthiest black woman in Live Oak. She was married to a man named Sam McCollum and they had four children together. Dr. Adams was a well known doctor in the town, everyone had nice …show more content…
Ruby McCollum murdered a man. I will never know what it was like because I will never be able to understand it from her perspective, yet I wonder how it all started, or if what she claimed happened is even true. If Dr. Adams had lived, would he have been as nice as everyone said or would he have been just as racist as all the others? I agree that her trial was very unfair in the aspect that only white men decided her fate for the solemn reason that she was black. They didn’t allow any reporters to speak to her. A lot of times, she couldn’t do much explaining. I wish there was more to the case, because there are just a lot of unanswered questions. She knew that killing a white man could get her killed because of her race. She was rich and had a family. Why didn’t she just leave the city? I feel as if there may have been more to it than what she said in her trial, but who knows. Maybe she finally had enough of the racism and Dr. Adams and wanted him and everyone else to know it. I can’t help but wonder if this same case happened today, with different people, what the outcome would