(Zora Hurston image copyright 2008, C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D. All rights reserved)

Dear Web Browser:

This site is devoted to Zora Neale Hurston's coverage of the trial of Ruby McCollum for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1952. McCollum, a wealthy African-American wife, shot and killed her white, physician and state senator-elect lover in Live Oak Florida, rather than yield to his demands to bear his child.

Hurston's interest in the McCollum trial sprang from her earlier research in the timber camps of North Florida, where she encountered the Jim Crow practice of "paramour rights," the unwritten law of the antebellum South that condoned a white man taking a "colored" woman as his mistress and forcing her to bear his children. Hurton commented that McCollum's murder trial furnished an unprecedented forum for a "colored" woman to witness to the paternity of her child by a white man.

Click on the bookcover image below to obtain more information on the lost trial transcripts.

You can contact us at our e-mail address artellis@tampabay.rr.com if you have any questions as we update this site.

Thank you.