Caught Between Two Guns

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On a hot Florida summer day in August, 1952, Ruby McCollum, the wealthy African-American wife of Suwannee County's Bolita King, murdered Dr. C. LeRoy Adams, a beloved white physician and recently elected state senator. The sensational murder trial was widely covered in newspapers ranging from the New York Times to The Times in London, and was the first of its kind since 1855. Now the story of a forbidden interracial love affair gone wrong is recounted by an author who was a neighbor to the McCollum family and delivered by Dr. Adams. Dr. Ellis' odyssey to discover the truth behind the murder began with locating the lost transcript of the trial-which was both manually transcribed and wire recorded. He then published an annotated copy to discredit statements by some scholars that McCollum was not allowed to testify in her own defense. In the Afterword of this book, Ellis now addresses McCollum's most telling statements to her attorneys- "I was caught between two guns," and "I don't know whether I did right or whether I did wrong"-and proposes an intriguing moral alternative to societally defined concepts of "right" and "wrong" for African-Americans who lived in the Jim Crow South.