In Florida, and many places in the South from the time the slaves were freed and up until the 1960’s, many communities kept a batch of people on hand for labor purposes. It worked like this in Broward County, Florida: Sheriff Walter R. Clark owned a farm just outside of town where he kept a standing work force. A hobo, a vagrant, a homeless person, a visitor on foot, a jobless person from somewhere else looking for work, would be thrown in the local hoosegow on vagrancy or some other trumped-up charge and sentenced by a judge to 30 days.
The Sheriff’s brother, Bob “Buddy” Clark, would then bail them out and transport them out of town to be locked into the barracks the farm until they worked off the cost of bail. This was all legal. The place had guard dogs and barbed wire fencing around it. The living arrangements were filthy and the food was grits and some vegetables twice a day. The Sheriff and his brother, in cahoots with their cousin and toadies on the county commission, would get no-bid contracts for the construction of all the schools, roads, clearing kudzu out of canals, working at the county refuse dump (also owned by a family member), etc., etc.
There were daily beatings, men were killed or died of malnutrition. Many didn’t work hard enough or exhibited “bad attitudes” and their time on the farm was repeatedly extended at the Sheriff’s whim until he decided the debt for the bail was paid. The judge, a partner in Clark’s gambling and liquour enterprises, would always approve of these decisions.
The year of the investigation, 1948, the postmaster’s wife testified that nine men had died there in captivity that year that she knew of and the ones she saw leave alive looked like skeletons with open sores. Most of the men were black but many were white as well. This sheriff was responsible for three known lynchings.
Dade County had their Sheriff “Smiley” Smith, Desoto County had D. C. Burke, Duvall County had Jerry Rube Atkins. It was the way things were done. The South was a dangerous place for the lone traveler of any means. Running a red light late at night while passing through Ft. Lauderdale in the 1930’s could cost you your life.
Corruption investigations by the Kefauver Committee in 1951 resulted in the arrests of many Sheriffs and there deputies throughout Florida and nealy took out the governor. But this threatened to leave many counties in Florida without any law enforcement at all, so a lot of the charges were dropped and the boys went quietly back to work. The investigation into Clark’s income from illegal bolita parlors alone revealed that he made more than $750,000 (1945 dollars) in two years.
