Lauren Ritchie:
Author tackles more of Lake’s history.
A 56-year-old fashion-photographer-turned-author used his pen in 2012 to exorcise the curtain of silence over the 28-year reign of notoriously racist Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall with a startlingly honest account that won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Gilbert King searched through never-before-released records to write “Devil in the Grove,” the sickening but true story of the Groveland Four, young black men falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman in a community where they could have no hope of being found innocent — regardless of actual guilt.
While interviewing, King heard the tale of another horrific story of justice perverted, and he was hooked. Five years later, King’s newest book is being released April 24: “Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race and Justice Lost and Found.”
The second tale ironically came from one of McCall’s deputies, who later went on to become sheriff. Noel “Evvie” Griffin was just starting his law enforcement career when a Leesburg society woman was raped in 1957. Though Blanche Bosanquet Knowles told deputies she was attacked by “a husky Negro” who had “bushy hair,” a developmentally delayed white teen who still slept with his teddy bear was locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane for 14 years without ever being convicted.
How could that happen? King’s book details how Blanche’s statements about a black attacker were dismissed after her powerful husband, Joe, returned home from an out-of-town tryst with a mistress and took charge of the case, along with other prominent white men who ran the county at the time. Was it really “better” to be raped by a white attacker in 1950s Leesburg?
Prepare to read “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” more than once — several stories are woven through this meticulously researched nonfiction account of how justice cheated 19-year-old Jesse Daniels.
Beyond Daniels is the story of three women in a male-controlled world and how they endured and even made a difference — Blanche, doubly victimized by a rapist, then by her husband and Leesburg’s warped idea of genteel society; Mable Norris Reese, a courageous newspaperwoman whose fight to free Daniels finally succeeded, and Pearl Daniels, a powerless mother who ceaselessly fought the establishment for her son’s release.
For Lake County readers, there’s a third story here.
In a way, King’s new book takes up where “Devil in the Grove” left off in explaining how so many racial outrages could occur in a single Southern county like Lake. The first book hung a culture of racism and fear squarely on McCall, but in this new one, King delves into how sex, race and corruption shaped the society in Leesburg that allowed such a