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.”
