You Belong to Me Sex, Race and Murder on the Suwannee River Movie Review

“In Live Oak, in the 50’s everybody knew their role” – Dr. Tammy Evans, Author, The Silencing of Ruby McCollum

February 9^th, 2015:  Originating in Georgia’s Okeefenoke National Wildlife Refuge and coursing 235 miles due south, the majestic Suwannee River with its meandering limestone banks flows unabated through the state of Florida down to the Gulf of Mexico.  And every now and then this fabled river in song gives up old secrets from years gone by that sometimes impacts the local community.  The town of Live Oak in Suwannee County Florida harboured even darker secrets many thought long since forgotten.  Like sands through the hourglass the quaint and tranquil facade of Suwannee County was forever changed when four shots rang out on August 3^rd, 1952.

The painful troubling story of Ruby McCollum occurred during a very defining period in the history of the civil rights movement and the context in which this unfolded conjured both fear and silence down tobacco road.  Black men living in Florida in the 1950s segregated Jim Crow south had the greatest chance of getting lynched here than any other place in the nation.  The Klu Klux Klan between 1920s – 1950s had a strangle hold on the state of Florida where esteemed judges, doctors and lawyers by day became cross-burning Klansmen under the cover of night.  Stark newsreel footage of Klan marches together with graphic eye watering stills depicting the easy with which white faces posed amongst this hanging strange fruit served as effective visual cues of the day.  Anyone trying to convince themselves that lynching like this is a relic of a bygone era . . . think again.  One only need look at the 2011 neo lynching in Texas of James Byrd to reminds us that the Klan is alive and killing.

Knowing the social order of the day was literally a matter of life or death.  Seldom were the words privileged and black rarely if ever found consorting during the heart of the movement.  And yet somehow Ruby, this well-heeled, Fessenden educated mother of two and wife of successful businessman Sam McCollum rose above her station in life to become the wealthiest African American woman in White Oak.  With such a bright future, what would compel Ruby to murder Clifford LeRoy Adams the town’s most distinguished doctor over of all things a medical bill?  “You Belong to Me: Sex, Race and Murder on the Suwannee River” is the tragic story of power, murder, kickbacks and the conspiracy of silence that percolated just beneath the surface of this gentile community.

Director John Cork frames an engrossingly dark journey with a nod to History Channel details.  Live Oak was not without its cadre of small town politics and family influence which Cork painstakingly parallels through the rise of Clifford and Sam careers; the success of which was ultimately predicated on escalating levels of corruption.  Woven in between these competing narratives was the increasingly desperate life of Ruby McCollum.  Redwood in stature, Dr. Adams ancestral pedigree was heavily marked with family scions but as Dr. Don Noble tells it, “everything that Doc Adams did from the time he was first going to Pharmacy School and then to Medical School – he cheated everybody, he lied to everybody.  He got into medical school on false pretences.  He just lied to everybody.”  These assertions of deceit and sway were reinforced by entering into evidence Exhibit A: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs. DR. C. LeROY ADAMS indictment.  This 1949 Federal Grand Jury indictment was but a mere inconvenience for which Adams still beat the rap emboldening him further.  This latest win paved the way for a 1951 state senate seat run which he won in 52.  Think the teflon abilities of John Gotti before John Gotti even existed.