Willis Virgil McCall (July 21, 1909 – April 28, 1994) was sheriff of Lake County, Florida for many years, from 1944 to 1972. He was elected seven times in a row. While he was sheriff, he supported segregation, meaning he supported laws that kept white people and black people apart, almost always with black people getting fewer resources and worse conditions. He enforced anti-miscegenation laws, which forbade black people and white people from marrying each other. He is famous because of the 1949 Groveland Case. In 1951, while he was taking two of the Groveland men to their new trial, he shot them, killing one. McCall said he had shot them in self-defense. He was not charged with a crime for this.
McCall ran for an eighth term as sheriff in 1972, but he lost. Also in 1972, he was on trial for killing Tommy J. Vickers. Vickers was black and disabled. Like the two Groveland men, he died while he was McCall's prisoner. The jury said McCall was not guilty of Vickers' death.
In the 1980s, a road in Umatilla was named Willis McCall Road. In 2007, every member of the Lake County Commission voted to change the name. They said it was because he was a "bully lawman whose notorious tenure was marked by charges of racial intolerance, brutality and murder." During his 28 years as sheriff, McCall was investigated multiple times for breaking civil rights rules and laws and for abusing prisoners. He was tried for murder but was never found guilty.
Early life
Willis McCall was born in Umatilla, Lake County, Florida. He was the son of a dirt farmer from Alabama (born c. 1877) and a woman named Pearl (born c. 1886).
Career
McCall was first elected Sheriff of Lake County in 1944. He was re-elected until 1972. "At 6 feet 1 and weighing more than 200 pounds, McCall loomed large as Lake sheriff from 1945 until 1972. He wore a white felt hat, black string tie, and polished boots." In 1972, Guy Bliss defeated McCall in the election for sheriff.
Groveland Four
On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17-year-old married white woman in Groveland, Florida, said that she had been raped by four young black men. Police arrested 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, Sam Shepherd, 22; and Walter Irvin, 22, and put them in jail until their trial. Shepherd and Irvin were both US Army veterans. Sheriff McCall had traveled out of Florida at that time but he came back the next day. Newspapers all over the United States wrote about the Groveland case, and they wrote about McCall often.
A fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, ran out of Lake County, so he was not arrested. However, a Sheriff's posse ran after him. They shot and killed him about 200 miles northwest of Lake County in Madison County. The coroner said he could not tell which person in the posse had killed Thomas because he had been shot about 400 times.
As word spread about the alleged rape, an angry crowd of white peoples came to the county jail. The jailhouse was in Tavares. The people in the crowd told McCall to give them the three suspects so they could hang them illegally. But two of the three men were not in the building. McCall had taken Shepherd and Irvin to his own house in Eustis, Florida and he had hidden them in the basement. He then moved them to Raiford State Prison, he said, to keep them safe.
The mob headed toward Groveland, where two of the suspects and their families lived. The mob continued to make trouble. On the third day, McCall and several prominent businessmen warned the black residents to leave town until things settled, and many of them did. McCall called the Florida Governor asking him to send National Guard troops to Lake County; when the troops arrived in Groveland, the mob had already burned several buildings to the ground, including the family home of Sam Shepherd.
A grand jury indicted the three rape suspects. Shepherd and Greenlee later told FBI investigators that deputies beat them until they lied and said they had raped the woman. US Attorney Herbert Phillips did not indict Lake County Sheriff's Deputies James Yates or Leroy Campbell for this.