The Press: Look at Your Own Child

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When five children of Orange Picker Allan Platt first appeared at the white public school in Mount Dora, Fla., Principal D. D. Roseborough suspected that there might be trouble. Skins of some of the children were so brown that pupils and their parents wondered whether the children might be Negroes. Principal Roseborough quickly reassured them: he had checked in Holly Hill, S.C., where the Platts lived last year, found that though they had Indian blood, they were officially listed as white. That seemed to satisfy most everyone—except Mount Dora's beefy, dictatorial Sheriff Willis McCall.

Over the years, Sheriff McCall has built up quite a reputation for himself on the Negro question. In 1951 he made national news by shooting two Negro suspects in the Groveland, Fla., rape case. This fall he took up the cause of the race-baiting National Association for the Advancement of White People, was warmly welcomed by the N.A.A.W.P.'s Organizer Bryant Bowles as an "expert" in race relations. For such an expert, the case of the Platts was made to order. McCall decided to pay them a little visit.

Shape of a Nose. He called on the Platts one night and charged that they were Negroes. Allan Platt had his marriage license and the children's birth certificates to prove the family white. Instead of listening, the sheriff ordered the children to line up for a photograph.

Sometime later he returned, accompanied by Principal Roseborough. The principal tried to be polite, but the sheriff was in no mood for the amenities. He pointed to Denzell Platt, 17, and declared: "His features are Negro." Then he pointed to Laura Belle, 13, and said: "I don't like the shape of that one's nose." After this lesson in anthropology, Principal Roseborough surrendered. The Platts, he said, would have to stay out of school "until the sheriff is satisfied."

"If You Are a Parent . . ." Had it not been for Mount Dora's courageous weekly newspaper Topic, the case might have ended right there. But the Topic's editor Mabel Norris Reese had long been in battle with the bullying sheriff, and in spite of all reprisals—a flaming cross on her lawn, the poisoning of her dog and the smearing of "K.K.K." across her office windows—she was ready to wage war again. The Platts, she told her readers, were of Irish-Indian stock, probably descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh's "lost colony" of Roanoke. "If you are a parent," she wrote, "look at your own child and think what it would mean to you if an adult said: 'I do not like your child's nose and thereby decreed that your child cannot associate with other children." She also lashed out at a visiting lecturer, Bryant Bowles.

Next day Bowles stormed into her office and threatened to get even with her "if I have to stay in [this] county two years." Meanwhile, an unidentified man called on the Platts' landlady, told her she had better get rid of them or "the house might burn down." Race Relations Expert Willis McCall was not impressed by the Platts' ancestry. Said he at an N.A.A.W.P. rally: "There must have been a smoked Irishman in the woodpile."