THE TRIAL THAT EXPOSED PARAMOUR RIGHTS IN THE SOUTH

In 1952, Ruby McCollum, a wealthy African American wife, murdered her White, physician and senator-elect lover in the Segregationist South. She was tried by an all-White male jury and sentenced to death, but was, upon appeal, committed to the Florida State Hospital mental ward for 20 years. Zora Neale Hurston covered her trial for The Pittsburgh Courier, and William B. Huie followed the appeal and fought for Ruby McCollum's 1st Amendment Rights against a judge who issued a gag order on the defendant. Hurston was the first to point out that Ruby's story was an example of "paramour rights," the antebellum practice of White men to choose "Colored" women as their mistresses and force them to bear their children. Dr. Ellis pursued the lost transcripts of the trial and has published a reconstructed, annotated copy in this volume. The transcript gives today's readers a look back to a time when there were no Miranda rights, no forensic methods, no chain of custody for evidence, no "Coloreds" on juries, and no ability of a Defendant to speak with the press if the judge so ordered.