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(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.
Additionally, I am proud to announce the upcoming publication of my new book, Zora Hurston And The Strange Case Of Ruby McCollum, to be released on January 12, 2009 by Gadfly Publishing. A press release may be found at www.gadflypublishing.com . This work tells the story of Ruby McCollum in Zora Hurston's voice, and has 36 illustrations that portray the characters and places that she saw when she covered the story for the Pittsburgh Courier.
You can contact me at my e-mail address, artellis@tampabay.rr.com, if you have any questions as I update this site. Thank you.
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Visit the video book trailer at YouTube by searching "Zora Hurston," or by double clicking on: 
