Beneath a Ruthless Sun by Gilbert King

Author:Gilbert King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Mabel Norris Reese and daughter Patricia, 1959

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Way of Justice

THE SUN WAS JUST BEGINNING to set on December 5, 1959, when Officer Jack Hyde of the Mount Dora Police Department responded to a call regarding a domestic incident in East Town, the black section of the city. A woman named Mamie Lee Floyd, it appeared, had been removing some old furniture from her former home when she’d discovered that an itinerant yard worker named Joe Henderson had been squatting in the abandoned house. He had threatened her, and she had called the police.

To Hyde, a veteran police officer who’d retired after twenty-two years with the overburdened Baltimore Police Department and relocated to tranquil, slow-paced Sylvan Shores, the call seemed to be routine. He was standing with Floyd outside the house and taking down her statement when the front door was flung open, and Joe Henderson fired on Hyde with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Hyde crumpled to the ground, dead.

Within minutes, other patrolmen and the fire department had arrived. Henderson greeted them, too, with his twelve-gauge; one of the shots struck fireman George Hall in the head. Next on the scene was Hyde’s partner, twenty-nine-year-old Tommy “Buddles” Ledford. Grabbing his buckshot-loaded Browning automatic, Ledford ran around to the back of the house. Darting between cars parked in the yard, he crept closer to the house, then took cover behind a ramshackle shed. Henderson spotted him and fired three times from a first-floor window, just missing his target but not the chickens in the coop behind Ledford. Feathers flew. Ledford scooted out of Henderson’s line of fire and was hiding behind a hedge when the back door of the house cracked open. Ledford didn’t hesitate. One shot from his Browning felled his quarry. Warily, he crossed the yard to the back door, put his foot on the barrel of Henderson’s shotgun, and, grabbing the dead man by the collar, dragged him to the street. “I wanted that bunch of niggers to see him,” Ledford remembered.

By the time Mabel Norris Reese arrived on the scene, two dead men lay on the ground in front of the Floyd house, and an ambulance was rushing George Hall to the hospital.

Mabel cornered Ledford. “Did you have to shoot him?” she asked.

Dumbfounded, Ledford replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you try to talk to him?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. He was shooting at me.”

Ledford knew Mabel by reputation as a “hell of a newspaper woman”—but “crazy.” He recalled that “she belonged to the NAACP or something, and she hated Willis McCall with a purple passion.” Indeed, when McCall appeared at the crime scene that evening, the reporter slipped away.

McCall soon heard from witnesses about the heroics of the young policeman who had brought the incident in East Town to an end. “You come work for me,” he said to Ledford. It was more an order than an offer.

Thomas Lloyd Ledford had been born in Missouri to “a poor dirt farmer and sharecropper who got tired of cotton and corn” and decided to give citrus a try.

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