Original subtitles

Answer me this.

How do you tell the true story of something that happened 60 years ago

two people can agree on exactly what occurred?

When the players, long dead, lived in a world that barely resembles ours.

So much time has passed.

So many secrets taken to the grave.

What are you doing here?

How do I make you understand why the events that occurred in my little

on this sunny Sunday morning?

came to be one of the most famous crimes you've never heard of.

In 1952, Live Oak, Florida was a sleepy little place on the banks of the

Suwannee River.

Around here, cotton used to be king.

Now most folks made their living growing tobacco and pine trees.

But making a living was for the weekdays.

Sundays were for church.

Whether you were black or

white.

And there was certainly a racial divide with tremendous segregation so that

blacks and whites were entirely separated.

You know all of this.

Jim Crow laws were supposed to mean separate but equal.

But even I could have told you, and I was just 10 years old then. In reality,

was separate and unequal.

1952, Iowa Florida is like most southern towns. On the surface, it appeared that

everything was nice and sweet on the surface.

And so isn't it just a little ironic that the worst thing to ever happen in

life, oh, happened in one of the only places open to both blacks and whites,

office of Dr.

Leroy Adams.

Within minutes, the police were there because the police station was one block

away. What they see leaves them aghast.

They see Dr.

Adams laying in a pool of blood.

that he had two gunshots in his back. They did not notice the other two

that had been fired at the time.

And clutched in his hand was a $100 bill.

Now you've got to understand, in addition to the fact that no one, I mean

one, had ever shot a person in cold blood in town in recent memory, this was

Adams.

Jack Spurlock.

He was like Santa Claus.

Dr. Adams was everybody's family physician in town, black and white,

kind of unheard of in the 1950s in the South.

He was not one of those doctors who had to collect money. Pay me when you can.

He doctored on people seven days a week.

Separate weight room, separate treatment room within the same building.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

He was known as the shot doctor.

He'd come into town in 1945 as a new physician.

He was wielding penicillin, which could save your life.

Aren't you glad I didn't say banana?

Take a deep breath now, big guy.

It's hard to understand today the kind of power a man had when he could prevent

a child from dying by just giving them a shot.

Antibiotic wasn't a word we used much back then.

But a miracle was.

There you go.

Dr. Adams was the savior.

Dr. Adams was beloved by all, black and white alike.

And on top of that, Doc Adams was practically famous. He'd just gotten

to the Florida State Senate, and everyone said if he played his cards

could be governor someday.

The police speak.

to three women who had been in the colored waiting room.

One of them had come in immediately before the gunshots.

The other two women had actually seen a woman enter.

This lady was approximately 5 feet 2 inches tall.

She was a little over medium weight.

Dark skin, yellow dress, tan handbag, tan shoes.

The women had heard.

an argument centered around a medical bill. She said, I want to pay my bill.

Here's $100. I want a receipt for it.

And the doctor then said, you know, goddamn you, woman, I've had enough of

At that point, she heard the first gunshot.

As Dr.

Adams tried to turn around and exit the door, there was a second gunshot.

And then another shot towards his back. And after a pause, the fourth

shot.

The three women said they didn't know who it was. It was a colored woman. But

it's a small town. Everybody knows everybody.

This was the separate part of separate but equal.

You learned to have as little to do with white folks' business as you could.

You didn't put yourself in a position to know everything.

Tell us what happened here. I was sitting right over there in the truck.

A few minutes before the gunshot, Harold Musgrove, a teen sitting in a pickup

truck, saw a woman wearing the same outfit that was described.

The woman appears to be nervous. She walks back and forth, peers in

to Dr. Adams' office.

Then she would walk back to her car.

The two kids are just sitting in the car.

Stop it.

In the car are two children, one about seven, and the other was... A little

girl.

Then my mom and pa came out. That's all I saw.

Aside from the fact that those deputies must have wondered what woman in her

right mind would bring her children along to a murder, the description of

mysterious person wasn't so mysterious.

When the law enforcement officers hear how finely dressed this lady is, and on

top of this, they have the $100 bill, there's only one person that could be.

And that was Ruby McCollum.

Everybody knew Ruby McCollum. She was just about the last person you would

expect to be involved in this kind of mess.

She's the richest black woman in Live Oak.

How you doing, Ruby?

I'm fine, officer.

How may I help you?

Ruby is preparing a bottle for the baby, and her outfit doesn't match the

description of the woman at the crime scene.

They are struck by the normalcy of the scene.

So they are confused at this point.

Now, how may I help you?

So, on this sunny Sunday morning, nothing was as it seemed.

But that was the way things were in Live Oak.

Appearances were deceiving, and the truth was often trapped under layers of

secrets.

On a sunny Sunday morning in 1952, someone shot Live Oak, Florida's beloved

Leroy Adams dead, right in his office.

Folks in the waiting room said they heard him arguing with a woman over

a bill.

And the police believe that that woman was none other than Ruby McCollum, the

richest black woman in town.

Here's this woman appearing to not know anything about what has happened to Dr.

Adams. So the police are searching for evidence.

searching her purse.

One of them finds a roll of 18 $100 bills.

Back in those days, the average worker made $2 ,000 a year. So the $1 ,800 that

Ruby carried in her purse was an annual salary.

These were people who could pay a doctor bill.

What the heck was going on here?

Who knows why Ruby did what she did next?

Come on.

Maybe she thought she was protecting her family.

Maybe she thought she'd find a sympathetic ear.

Ruby, did you kill Dr. Adams?

I don't know whether I did right or whether I did wrong.

I don't know.

And none of us would ever have a chance to find out.

Although the answer is cryptic, they have, for all intents and purposes, an

admission of guilt.

It was incomprehensible.

Black people didn't dare look too long at a white person, let alone hurt them.

We were all too familiar with how that would end.

Eight or nine years before this boy, Willie Howard, all he did was send a

Christmas card to a white girl, and he was brought to the edge of a riverbank

three white men in front of his father, bound, gagged, and thrown into the

river.

Mama!

Mama!

The river where they threw that boy, that was the Sewanee River, and like I

said, that river ran right through Live Oak.

So obviously this was a big fuse leading to a huge bomb, and they

had to somehow defuse it.

Normally, if someone is committed a crime, they would take them to the

County Jail. But if you carried her to Suwannee County Jail, she was going to

dead, dead, dead shortly.

And a lynching was not something the law in Live Oak wanted.

I like to say it was because they believed lynching was an affront to our

humanity. But knowing what I know now, I suspect that there was more to it than

that. It would have made national news.

And Live Oak would have been put under this microscope.

Northerners could come down digging deep into the southern soil to find out the

subterranean affairs, and that's something they did not want, outside

interference.

So they whisk her about an hour away to the state penitentiary in Rayford,

Florida.

Those folks had to be very careful because sitting in that back seat was

richest black woman in the county.

The one person in Live Oak who knew all the secrets.

What you gonna do with that?

Wait, wait, wait.

Ruby, where's my lighter?

Ruby McCollum grew up in Zuber, Florida, and her parents were farmers, and they

were really interested in her getting educated.

She was smart. She excelled in math.

She has a lot of ambition.

Ruby knew she wanted to have only the finest things in life.

When she was just 19 years old, Ruby Johnson was singing in church and caught

the eye of Sam McCollum. He fell for her right away and proposed then and there.

She said, I'm going to marry Sam because I see a way to have a better future

with Sam.

Sam McCollum had a thriving business. He was a farmer. He had the largest

tobacco allotment in Suwannee County.

And they also have a number of juke joints.

What the community cannot see is the invisible source of income.

All right, now, let's get these Bolita numbers called to find out who's the

winner. Seventy -four.

Sam McCullum was in the Bolita business making thousands of dollars a week.

Bolita is numbers.

Eighty -seven.

Players would pay money.

For a chance to hit a series of numbers drawn from a bag.

47. However, it was an illegal game.

33. Hey, it's me. I won.

I won.

All right now, Miss Lady.

Ruby McCollum is a smart woman and an excellent bookkeeper. So

Sam and Ruby are in business together.

And Ruby.

Sam had found a wife who could help him run his numbers game like a real honest

-to -God business.

How we looking?

Oh, we looking real good, baby.

Double what we brought him last year.

You know, I like that.

And in Sam, Ruby had a husband who fed her ambition.

And very soon, they had amassed a small fortune.

But they couldn't do this on their own.

During this time, for a black man to run an illegal gambling operation would

have required help.

How could Sam McCollum possibly operate?

The answer is very simple. He paid law enforcement.

Now, if Willie Howard was drowned for nothing but sending a note to a little

girl, you might wonder, Why was Ruby, Sam's bookkeeper,

and an actual threat to some powerful people, still alive?

There were rumors that Ruby McCollum kept the little black book, which

all of the payouts to the law enforcement.

They couldn't find it.

They do not want her lynched. Not long as that book was out there.

Who can say?

You'll come to see that the so -called facts in this story often seem more like

fables.

Sam was in church with his oldest daughter, Kay.

A deacon came, told him that his wife had shot Dr. Adams.

And he knows right then and there that their life is over. Everything is going

to come crumbling down.

Your wife done killed at most.

Love respected white man in this county.

You gonna get your next stretch, too.

All that was left was for him to pack up and get going before everyone figured

out why Ruby done what she done.

And that it all led back to their silent partner who stayed in the shadows.

Ruby McCullum was on her way to jail for killing Dr. Leroy Adams.

Ruby's husband, Sam, knew he had just a very short time to get their children

out of town and somewhere safe.

Sam McCullum secured all three children.

Loaded up suitcases full of $100 bills.

and drives as fast as he can to his in -laws' house in Zuber, Florida.

Of course, law enforcement wanted to talk to Sam McCollum to find out what he

knew. He agreed to meet them in Lake City the following day.

But before he can do that, he has a heart attack and dies.

Now, Sam did have a bad heart.

But when one day a man is running for his life from the law, and the next day

dies of natural causes?

Like with so many other parts of this story, people start to wonder.

They say he had a heart attack, or he overdosed on his heart pills. I don't

think so. I don't buy it. I don't have any proof. I'm speculating just like

everybody else, but I don't think so. I think that somebody got to him, and

they killed him.

Where are the children?

They were two people in Zuber.

The children will be just fine, Ms. McCullough.

I'll make sure of it.

Ruby talked to Relaford McGriff, a family friend who also happened to be a

lawyer and was one of the few people that she was actually able to speak to

throughout this ordeal.

And it was to Relaford McGriff that Ruby told the entire story.

How Sam and Ruby hadn't been alone in the Belita business.

They had a partner.

And that partner was none other than Doc Adams.

Six years earlier, Ruby had fallen ill.

Ruby? And Sam had called the new doctor in town, the one who made house calls in

the black neighborhoods.

He said, Dr. Adams, you're the one I told you about.

Soon, Dr. Adams took care of all the McCollums.

He would even deliver Ruby and Sam's second daughter, Sonia.

But that was just the beginning.

Dr. Adams' family is an old Southern family from back slavery

time.

Big landowners in Hamilton County.

Mm -mm, Ruby.

Better than my mama's. Well, thank you.

As time wore on, though, his family had not been as prominent.

And they went broke.

Sam, let's talk us some business.

Dr. Adams was a shrewd man, and he knew what he wanted, and

what he wanted was power and money.

Ruby and Sam McCollum had some tremendous wealth, but at the same time,

wealth could be taken away at a moment's notice.

You've got something mighty good here, mighty good.

I think you and me can help each other.

He became the go -between, the McCullums and all the whites.

He didn't have to have no permission.

He didn't have to ask because he was Dr.

Adams and he was white.

I'm your boss now.

And because of this, Dr. Adams was able to finance his independent political

campaign.

It was a dangerous

game he was playing.

Sure, the money he was taking in from the Bolina racket would help him start

politicking, but the source of that money can never be known to the good

Christian voters of Florida who hated gambling.

Did something go wrong with the numbers, Ruby?

One has to wonder, could there have been an argument about the take, how much

Adams would get, how much the McCollums could get?

It wasn't the numbers.

And if it wasn't about business, it must have been about something personal.

Oh, God!

Oh, God!

Oh, God!

Somebody!

Somebody please help me!

Ruby was kept at Rayford for several weeks, supposedly for her own safety.

One day, her attorney came in and found her lying in a pool of blood.

She had a miscarriage.

She was three months pregnant.

I need a doctor over here!

And as she lay in the blood that just hours ago filled her womb, Ruby revealed

her darkest secret.

It's Dr. Adams, baby.

She'd been carrying Doc Adams' child.

Guard! And not only that, this was the second time she'd been pregnant by him.

Doc Adams was dead.

Shot by Ruby McCollum, that much was clear.

But that's right about where clarity ended.

Because you see, back then in Live Oak, Keeping secrets was often considered the

polite thing to do. In the South, there are two things.

One, what is known, and one is what is talked about.

And what everyone knew and no one talked about was that Ruby had already had one

child by Doc Adams.

Now, Rutherford McGriff could have defended Ruby in court.

But as a black man in 1952, he was all too aware of how a jury might react to

that.

So he brought in a white lawyer to hear Ruby's story.

How did this all happen?

It started five or six years ago now.

Sam McCullough was alleged to be having an affair.

with the schoolteachers who only counted black schools.

Ruby was aware of this, but she ignored it.

You know, I married Sam because I thought he'd be a step up.

In the end, he turned out to be like all the rest.

Oh, my God.

Oh, he done vomited all over Miss Ruby right there now, boy. You ain't gonna

this one down.

I want whiskey for him. Hey, Ruby.

Not on my floor.

Don't get something cleaned up, huh?

No.

But I said clean it up.

No, you clean it up.

Come on, baby.

Get yourself in here. What are you doing?

Stop it.

Years earlier.

Sam and Ruby have a fight.

Ruby will not be subservient to Sam.

And because of that, he beats her up pretty badly.

Ruby didn't marry Sam so she could be like all the other girls she knew.

She wanted a partner.

And nobody ever accused Ruby McCollum of not knowing her own worth.

Then what happened?

Dr. Adams came by the house when Sam was away.

Well, good day, Ruby.

Good day, Dr. Adams. How may I help you? Thought I'd stop in, check on you is

all. Oh, well, I'm fine. Thank you.

Oh, Sam's not in right now.

What was the true nature of their coming together?

Ruby was a very proud woman in her own right.

She was not stupid, and she was no shrinking violet.

I believe, as far as she was concerned, she was entitled to be with the highest

-ranking person she could possibly be with.

I believe.

There is absolutely no way that this intelligent, successful black

woman who was married would have chosen to be with

Dr. Adams.

And to imply that it was an affair, it's like this notion that,

you know, she had as many rights as he did.

From the beginning of slavery in North America, the black people were property.

Those same notions were perpetuated all through the Jim Crow era.

There was an implicit understanding that white

men had the right to do whatever they wanted with black women.

Who started what?

Who made the first overture?

We'll never know.

But for me, I have to wonder, does it matter?

In a world where a woman can't say no, what could a yes possibly mean?

It was like it was his rights to do it.

Nothing she could do about it.

Nothing her family could do about it.

However it may have started, Ruby told Relaford McGriff and her white lawyer

that it didn't take long for things to turn ugly.

Dr. Adams wasn't the man everybody thought he was.

He sure had a temper on him.

I'd say no.

And he'd just take it.

We know from notes that she wrote to her attorneys that he had...

beat her and raped her for years for him sex with

ruby was a way of cementing the relationship it was a way of getting

over her it was a way of getting control over her money dr adams is a shot

doctor and so he took full advantage of that

She stated that he would give her one shot to make her sick and one shot to

her well.

Probably the shots that he gave her were either cocaine or heroin.

Adam was all about control.

And when she asked him, why are you doing this to me? His answer was, it

takes a little of that for you sometimes.

A few years later, Ruby gave birth to little Loretta, Doc Adams' child.

It must have been a slap in the face to Sam.

It certainly was known that Loretta was light -skinned.

But Live Oak was a whispering town.

It did not speak these truths.

I learned long ago that it is futile to try to make sense of someone else's

marriage. All I can tell you is Ruby and Sam stayed married and stayed in

business.

I asked him to fix me so I wouldn't have no more babies by him.

And he said no.

He had me committed to Brewster's Negro Mental Hospital.

If she didn't contain herself...

and behave and do as he told her to do, that he was going to have her sent

to a mental institution.

So she would go away, she would rest, and then she would come home, and then

would not be long before she would be on the doorstep of his office asking to

see him or asking for a fix.

And it just continued to spiral out of control.

Now, I'm not certain, but near as I can figure, by this time, Senator Adams

already had his eyes on the governor's mansion.

Ruby and the Bolita money had served their purpose.

It was time for him to start putting distance between himself and this ugly

chapter in his past.

Ruby, why did you kill Dr. Adams?

Tell us what happened.

I was caught between two guns.

Ruby, why did you kill Dr. Adams?

I was caught between two guns.

Sam and Dr.

Adams.

Ruby found out that she was pregnant with Doc Adams' second child.

I want to get rid of it.

You take care of it or I'll find a doctor who will.

You ain't killing no child of mine.

You kill my baby and I'll kill you.

Then one day, immediately prior to the murder, she opened her bill from Dr.

Adams' office.

There are rumors that on the bill was $116 for a DNC where the

uterus was scraped clean, performing effectively an abortion.

But if indeed that's what the bill was for, and Ruby never did say exactly what

was on it, it couldn't have been Ruby who was the patient. Doc Adams had

to interfere with Ruby's condition.

So then who might have undergone this procedure?

What is this?

What is this?

think i didn't know about the other woman calm down huh calm down get off of

you got no reason you and your white man

you got nothing to say now i tell you this much

you're gonna have another baby by that man you do i swear i can't

So Ruby was cornered.

Every day that baby grew inside of her, she got closer to being killed.

By one man or the other.

And then there was the note scrawled on the bottom of that bill.

Was it the thing that pushed a desperate woman over the edge?

Did you write this?

Sam, you keep this goddamn woman out. Out of my office.

She's gone crazy as a bat.

Get out of my office.

Doc Adams had raped her, addicted her to drugs, forced her to bury his children.

And when she became a political liability, he was casting her aside.

As though she was nothing.

Worthless.

The jury for Ruby McCollum consisted of 12 all -white male jurors, most

of whom had been patients of Dr.

Adams.

This trial shook the foundations of the segregationist South. Here was a black

woman taking the stand in her own defense against being raped by a white

being forced to have his child.

Did Mrs. McCollum have relations with Dr.

Leroy Adams?

Objection, Your Honor.

We are not here to disgrace the legacy of the late Dr. Adams. Donna, this goes

to the heart of our cage. Sustained.

Is Dr.

Adams the father of your child?

Objection. Sustained.

Did Dr.

Adams ever beat you?

Objection. Sustained.

She was not allowed to answer.

37 times.

The judge said this trial will be done fair and in accordance with

the law.

Well, it appears that it depends on the definition of fairness and

whose law.

And this silencing of Ruby, keeping her from telling her side of the story, has

led to speculation that there was something even more duplicitous going

Like maybe Ruby didn't shoot Dr. Adams at all.

I haven't found one black person in Suwannee County who believes she did it

and never did believe it.

There were rumors in Suwannee County, especially in the black community, there

was a law enforcement member himself who shot Dr.

Adams over the Belita operation.

Them black ladies said what he was told to say.

These people saw an opportunity.

Ms. Ruby was a wealthy woman, wealthy husband.

We'll take everything they got.

Everything based on money.

But in the end, it's all just talk.

In the killing of Dr.

Adams, the truth is as murky as the waters of the Suwannee.

She was found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair.

Ruby McCollum spent 18 months sitting in jail waiting to be executed.

Her lawyers fought to get her a new trial and won.

But when that second trial was getting ready to start, the state of Florida

ruled that Ruby had deteriorated mentally.

Sending Ruby to the electric chair would have been more sensational.

It would have attracted more northern press.

So they found a quieter way to deal with Ruby.

She was sentenced to life in a mental institution.

She was given a constant injection of Thorazine and occasional electric shock

therapy.

You don't need a tree to lynch a person.

You can just run them into the ground.

Live Oak is a totally different place now. Black people now have no reason to

believe that they're second -class citizens.

But my daddy taught me, don't get too close to white folks.

And I'm not full of hate.

I just feel I'm wise.

So where does that leave us?

What does it mean to be the richest black woman in town in a time when black

people were barely citizens?

What does it mean to have power when that power can be taken away in the

of an eye?

And what does it mean to defend yourself in a court of law when you aren't

allowed to speak?

It ain't just about women of color. It's a representative of all.

the other things that black women have gone through in this country.

Except she made a choice that she was going to end it on that sunny Sunday

morning in Live Oak, Florida in 1952.

Boo.