The Tampa Tribune, 11 October 1951: two reports on the contested Avon Park election

Two sources have carried the story of the 1951 Avon Park election affair: an uncited local-history blog post, and the Florida Supreme Court’s own opinion of 20 November 1951, which recites the pleadings but tells you nothing about the town. This page of the Tampa Tribune is the first contemporary newspaper account known to survive, and it is worth a great deal, because it names people the opinion does not name, records how each councilman voted, and reports what the losing side actually argued.

The page carries two stories side by side: an unbylined wire report datelined Tallahassee, and a longer staff report datelined Avon Park by Tribune staff writer Hayden Williams.[trib-1951-10-11]

What the page is, and how good the text is

The Tampa Tribune, Thursday 11 October 1951, page 17. Both stories carry the previous day’s dateline, 10 October.

The text was recovered from the Internet Archive’s capture, made 27 April 2025, of a Newspapers.com clipping page — the clipping a subscriber had saved under the title “1951 Disputed Mayor’s Race, Avon Park.” Newspapers.com itself is behind a subscription and would not serve the page; the archived copy carries the site’s own embedded OCR of the article.[trib-1951-10-11]

So this is OCR of a 1951 newsprint page, read through an archived copy of a commercial site. It is good enough to be quoted, and the substance is coherent and consistent with the Supreme Court’s later opinion, but individual letters are unreliable: the page’s own column layout interleaves an unrelated Masonic notice and a cigarette advertisement into the OCR stream, and several names come through mangled. Every name below is flagged where it disagrees with the law reports.

The story ran on 11 October, not the 10 October dateline carried within it.

The wire story: the Supreme Court steps in

TALLAHASSEE, Oct. 10 — (By Staff Writer) — The state supreme court today halted proceedings in [a] contested city election at Avon Park pending a hearing before the high tribunal on Monday, Oct. 22. A writ of supersedeas was issued to cancel temporarily an order by Circuit Judge Don Register, who yesterday instructed the Avon Park city council to set aside a resolution declaring O. C. Wilkes elected mayor and Ed Gough and O. E. Wolff were elected councilmen. The attorney for Wilkes and the two others got the supreme court order after Judge Register cited four members of the city council for con[tempt] because they did not “forthwith” comply with his order. Register yesterday denied the application for writ of supersedeas.[trib-1951-10-11]

This is the missing procedural step. The Supreme Court entered a writ of supersedeas on 10 October 1951, set the appeal for hearing on Monday 22 October, and required Wilkes, Gough and Wolff to post a $1,000 bond for costs. The final opinion came on 20 November.[gough-1951]

It also confirms something the opinion never mentions: Judge Register cited four members of the city council for contempt, on 9 October, for failing to comply “forthwith.”

The paper is blunt about the cause, in the language of its time and place:

Negro Votes Critical. Source of the controversy is a group of critical votes in a city hall polling place, for Negroes, which made the difference between victory and defeat for three posts.[trib-1951-10-11]

“A city hall polling place, for Negroes.” The Supreme Court says only that “voting place Number Two was arranged by the city officials.”[gough-1951] The Tribune places it at the city hall.

Where Voting Place No. 2 came from, and what was argued against it

S. C. Pardee, for the ousted men, flew to Tallahassee, argued in the early afternoon and had the supersedeas within hours; he was to fly back to Avon Park the same afternoon with a copy of the writ for the circuit clerk. The Tribune sets out his four grounds:

1. The separate place for Negroes was set up as an emergency action several days before the election. Pardee said there was no emergency.
2. The polling place inspector was appointed by the city clerk rather than the mayor, as required by law.
3. Over half the Negro voters got assistance in voting — some without asking for it — although they were not entitled to aid in marking their ballots.
4. About 400 official ballot slips were not accounted for.[trib-1951-10-11]

The first ground answers a longstanding question: when was Voting Place No. 2 created? The answer, from the mouth of the man attacking it, is as an emergency action a few days before 11 September 1951. Not at the start of the year, not by settled ordinance — days before the poll.

The second ground names the officer: the city clerk appointed the inspector, and Pardee’s case was that the mayor should have. Under section 10 of the city’s charter the City Clerk and Collector was himself elected by the council, not by the people. The mayor at the time was Wiley Sauls, the man the Black vote had elected in 1949 — so Pardee’s complaint is that the appointment did not come from the official whose own election that precinct had secured.

The fourth ground is the ballot-accounting complaint that reaches the law reports as 1,500 ballots delivered, 397 cast, 799 returned unused and 304 unaccounted for.[gough-1951] The Tribune rounds it to “about 400.”

Judge Register’s ruling, in his own words

Register held the city council could not “usurp the judicial function of declaring all ballots cast in polling place No. 2 to be void.” He issued the writ “without prejudice against any proper parties in seeking through proper proceedings such remedies as may be considered available for obtaining proper consideration.” He held that the proceedings had not been brought in such a manner that the court could go behind the election returns to determine the facts.[trib-1951-10-11]

This is the same holding the Supreme Court affirmed, in the circuit judge’s own phrasing, and it makes plain what the courts did and did not decide. Nobody ever decided whether anything improper happened inside Voting Place No. 2. Both courts decided only that a city council is not a court and cannot decide it.

The council named, and how each man voted

The staff story is the more valuable of the two, because it names the men.

The action was taken by the retiring councilmen, Ed Gough, John Delegal, Reason Shivers and Charles Lewiston.[trib-1951-10-11]

And on the vote of 25 September:

On complaint of O. C. Wilkes, defeated mayoralty candidate, that irregularities had been committed in the Negro polling place, Gough, Lewiston and Delegal (Shivers abstained from voting, Kirkland voted negatively) on Sept. 25 rescinded their previous resolution. They found that Wilkes’ complaint was justified. They adopted another resolution throwing out the Negro votes and, based on the returns of the white voters, declared: Wilkes elected mayor; O. E. Wolff and Gough elected councilmen, along with Rush, Thomas and Smith.[trib-1951-10-11]

Three new things follow.

“Lewiston” is Charles Lewiston. The Supreme Court’s opinion records that “Mr. Lewiston” moved the resolution of 15 September, seconded by Mr. Gough, and gives no first name.[gough-1951]

John Delegal was on the council, and the law reports never mention him. He is a name recorded nowhere else.

Reason Shivers abstained, and Mannin Kirkland voted no. Shivers had been elected to the council in 1949, in the election the Black vote decided. In 1951, asked to throw that vote out, he did not vote either way. Kirkland — who stood to lose his own seat by the resolution, and did — voted against it. So the vote to void 397 ballots was three in favor, one against, one abstention, out of a council of five.

The night of 10 October: the councilmen before the judge, and the swearing-in

Judge Register was that week presiding over the Fall term of the Hardee County Circuit Court, at Wauchula, and it was there — not at Avon Park or Sebring — that the four councilmen answered the contempt citation.

The judge in softly spoken words advised them that their city attorney, S. C. Pardee, Jr., had telephoned him Tuesday night and explained their delay in carrying out the court’s orders. “Mr. Pardee assured me that you gentlemen will meet tonight and carry out the instructions of the court. This court has no desire [to] adjudge anyone in contempt of court — unless it is necessary. The only time I have done that is in cases where a father fails to support his wife or family.” The judge smiled as he spoke, and councilmen, apparently relieved, laughed a little. Council President Gough and other councilmen hastened to assure the judge that they would keep [their] promise to meet tonight.

The judge dismissed [them] with: “You will go home, meet tonight and carry out the court’s order.”[trib-1951-10-11]

They did. At 8.15 that evening the retiring council met and rescinded its own resolution of 25 September. Then:

The following winners, as determined by a Sept. 15 resolution, were sworn in by Collyer as a notary public: Mayor Wiley Sauls, Jr., for his second term; Councilmen Lenny Rush, Mark Smith, Clifford Thomas and J. B. Sparks, newcomers to the council, and Mannin Kirkland, reelected. Without a clerk, the new board transacted no business. They agreed to meet at 8 A.M. tomorrow to get the city’s affairs in order. No copy of the supreme court writ had been received here tonight.[trib-1951-10-11]

Sauls was serving a second term, which confirms the 1949 election. Four of the five councilmen were new. And the new board could not transact business because it had no clerk — the same office whose holder had appointed the inspector at Voting Place No. 2.

The contempt citation, the paper adds, “was issued late yesterday on petition of Attorney Keith Collyer,” who told the court the councilmen had failed to meet “forthwith.” The hearing on the merits of the mandamus had been held the preceding Monday, 8 October, at Sebring.[trib-1951-10-11]

Points where this page and the law reports disagree

Point	Tampa Tribune, 11 Oct 1951	Gough v. State ex rel. Sauls
The councilman elected on the second canvass	O. E. Wolff	Oscar Wolff
Kirkland’s given name	“Mannie” in the wire story, “Mannin” in the staff story	M. Kirkland
Pardee	“S. C. Pardee, Sr., of Avon Park, attorney for Wilkes, Gough and Wolff” before the Supreme Court; “their city attorney, S. C. Pardee, Jr.”	S. Colquitt Pardee, Jr., of Avon Park, for the appellants
Who was city attorney	The staff story calls Collyer “City Attorney” in one paragraph and Pardee, Jr. “their city attorney” in another	Not stated

The Wolff and Kirkland differences are ordinary newsprint slips and the law reports should be preferred. The Pardee question is not so simple. There were two S. Colquitt Pardees at Avon Park, father and son, the elder practicing there in the bond litigation of 1928-34. If the Tribune is right that the elder argued in Tallahassee while the younger was the council’s city attorney, then both were in the case. The Supreme Court’s own report names only the younger.[gough-1951]

And the city attorney question matters. Keith E. Collyer acted for Sauls, Sparks and Kirkland — he took out the alternative writ, he petitioned for the contempt citation, and he swore the winners in. If he was also the City Attorney of Avon Park, then the city’s own lawyer went to court against the city’s own council on behalf of the Black precinct’s votes. That would be a remarkable fact, but it is not established: the OCR gives the title, but the same story gives the title to Pardee too.

Why no other newspaper account has been found

No digitized Florida or national newspaper besides this one carries the 1951 election affair. The Tampa Tribune, the Miami Herald and Miami News, the Orlando Sentinel, and the national Black weeklies are none of them digitized for the relevant months of 1951 and 1952, and a full-text search of the newspapers that are digitized for those years turns up nothing.[ca-1951-search] The Miami Times is digitized for parts of 1952 but not for the autumn of 1951.[ca-1951-search] The rest of the coverage — the Tribune for late September and 21 November, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, Jet — survives, if at all, only on microfilm or behind a newspaper subscription service.

References

• trib-1951-10-11 — The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Fla.). Supreme Court Halts Action Contested Avon Park Vote; and Avon Park Council Action Questioned, by Hayden Williams — The Tampa Tribune, 11 October 1951, page 17. 11 October 1951. http://web.archive.org/web/20250427091657/https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tampa-tribune-1951-disputed-mayors/126001630/
• gough-1951 — Supreme Court of Florida, Special Division B (Chapman, J.). Gough et al. v. State ex rel. Sauls et al., 55 So. 2d 111 (Fla. 1951). 20 November 1951. gough-v-state-ex-rel-sauls-1951.md
• ca-1951-search — Library of Congress. Chronicling America full-text search for ‘Avon Park’, calendar years 1951 and 1952. 2 September 2026. newspapers-of-avon-park.md

Related

• Reference: Gough v. State ex rel. Sauls, 55 So. 2d 111 (Fla. 1951)
• Reference: Chapter 12514, Laws of Florida 1927 — the third charter of Avon Park
• Finding: in 1951 the Avon Park city council threw out every vote cast in the Black precinct
• Finding: the record of Black Avon Park is almost entirely missing

Where this comes from

Evidence

single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.

Review

unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.

Rights

society

Sources

1. The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Fla.), Supreme Court Halts Action Contested Avon Park Vote; and Avon Park Council Action Questioned, by Hayden Williams — The Tampa Tribune, 11 October 1951, page 17 (1951)
2. Supreme Court of Florida, Special Division B (Chapman, J.), Gough et al. v. State ex rel. Sauls et al., 55 So. 2d 111 (Fla. 1951) (1951)
3. Library of Congress, Chronicling America full-text search for 'Avon Park', calendar years 1951 and 1952 (2026)

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