Definition
Willis Virgil McCall (July 21, 1909 – April 28, 1994) was sheriff of Lake County, Florida from 1944 to 1972, a 28-year tenure during which he became one of the most notorious figures of late-Jim-Crow Florida. He was central to the 1949 Groveland Four case — the prosecution of four young Black men accused on weak evidence of raping a white woman — and in November 1951 shot two of the handcuffed defendants, killing one, while transporting them under court order.
He faced multiple federal investigations across his career, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1972 for kicking a Black prisoner to death, and was acquitted in his criminal trial. The Florida Governor suspended him from office that year. He is a recurring antagonist in the Florida topics of Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns — the local representative of the legal violence that pushed George Starling out of Lake County and onto a northbound train.
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McCall was born in rural Lake County and worked as a fruit inspector and a citrus-industry man before being elected sheriff in 1944. His county was the center of Florida's citrus industry — Black labor picked the oranges, white planters owned the groves, and the sheriff's department enforced the labor discipline that made the operation profitable. McCall's pre-sheriff work for the citrus industry continued in office; his deputies were used to break Black labor organizing, harass the NAACP, and discourage Black voter registration.
The Groveland Four case began on July 16, 1949 when a young white woman, Norma Padgett, accused four Black men — Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Ernest Thomas — of rape. Thomas was hunted down and killed by a posse before he could be arrested. The remaining three were beaten in custody to extract confessions. Greenlee, a 16-year-old, was sentenced to life; Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death. The case attracted Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which won a U.S. Supreme Court reversal in 1951 (Shepherd v. Florida) on the ground of racially biased jury selection.
The reversal required McCall to transport Shepherd and Irvin from Raiford State Prison to Lake County for new trials. On the night of November 6, 1951, McCall — driving alone with the two handcuffed prisoners — claimed they had attacked him on a dark road near Umatilla. He shot both. Shepherd died at the scene; Irvin survived by feigning death and gave a contradictory account: he and Shepherd had been ordered out of the car and shot in cold blood. The FBI investigated; a Lake County grand jury declined to indict. Irvin was retried, convicted, sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life and he was paroled in 1968. He died in 1969.
McCall served twenty more years, surviving repeated FBI investigations, civil-rights complaints, and federal grand-jury inquiries. In 1972 a Black prisoner, Tommy Vickers, died in his jail; McCall was indicted for second-degree murder, suspended from office by Governor Reubin Askew, tried, and acquitted. He retired to a citrus grove and died in 1994. The State of Florida posthumously pardoned the Groveland Four in 2019 and formally apologized.