The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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In 1951 the Avon Park city council threw out every vote cast in the Black precinct

The Florida Supreme Court’s opinion of 20 November 1951, Gough et al. v. State ex rel. Sauls et al., 55 So. 2d 111, is transcribed and analyzed at Reference: Gough v. State ex rel. Sauls. Everything below that is attributed to the opinion comes from that text.[gough-1951]

1949: a twenty-one-year-old mayor, elected by Black Avon Park

The Atlanta Daily World of 25 September 1949 carried an Associated Negro Press dispatch datelined Avon Park, four days after the election, under the heading “Negroes Swing Mayor’s Election In Avon Park.”[adw-1949-09-25] It reports:

  • 255 of the 297 votes cast by Black voters went to Wiley Sauls Jr., “newcomer to politics.”
  • 317 Black voters were registered; the twenty who did not vote were, some of them, out of town.
  • Sauls “graduated from the local high school in 1946, is only 21, and [works] with his father in the grocery business.”
  • His election “came as a complete shock to the former office holders who had been campaigning for re-election, but only one of whom was retained.”
  • The turnout followed a Junior Chamber of Commerce registration drive — “Don’t Vote, Don’t Gripe” posters put up around the town.
  • Ed Gough, a machine shop operator, topped the poll for the City Council and “also owed his success to a large Negro vote,” as did Reason Shivers, who won the other council seat.
  • The dispatch opens by noting that the town’s founders “chose the site because, among other things, there were no Negroes here.”[adw-1949-09-25]

The man the Black precinct put at the head of the poll in 1949 led the move to cancel it in 1951. E. W. Gough is the first-named appellant in the 1951 case, and the second resolution seated him as a councilman in place of one of the men the Black votes had elected.[gough-1951]

1951: a separate Black voting place, for the first time

The court records something no other source does. Avon Park’s municipal elections before 1951 were “usually conducted at one designated polling place.” For the election of 11 September 1951 the city officials arranged Voting Place No. 2, where “qualified colored voters of the city could go and cast their ballots,” and its inspectors and clerk “were colored voters and had the exclusive supervision and management of the municipal election in Precinct Number Two.”[gough-1951]

So the 1949 election, in which the Black vote made the mayor, was held at one poll. The separate Black precinct — the thing that made a race-specific cancellation arithmetically possible — was created for the election that was then canceled.

The council certified the result, then rescinded it

A mayor and five councilmen were being elected, under section 10 of Chapter 12514, Special Acts of 1927, the city charter.[gough-1951]

15 September 1951. The council canvassed the returns. Its investigating committee found “that there was insufficient evidence introduced to determine fraud or material irregularities which would change the result of the election.” On a motion by Mr. Lewiston, seconded by Mr. Gough, it declared elected: Wiley Sauls, Jr., mayor, 877 votes; councilmen Lenny Rush 1,008, Mark Smith 985, W. Clifford Thomas 913, M. Kirkland 685, J. B. Sparks 642.[gough-1951]

25 September 1951. The same council met again, took a “new complaint,” resolved that there had been “a grave irregularity … sufficiently serious to change the entire results,” rescinded its own resolution of ten days before, and declared “that all ballots cast in voting Place No. 2 be declared illegal and void, and, are not to be counted.” It then declared O. C. Wilkes mayor and seated E. W. Gough and Oscar Wolff in the places of Kirkland and Sparks.[gough-1951]

The court’s own summary of what that resolution did: “it declared the result of the municipal election solely on the white votes cast … for irregularities, fraud and various reasons the City Council threw out the votes of the colored people as by them cast in Voting Place No. 2.”[gough-1951]

The grounds alleged were that the city clerk had appointed W. J. Robinson an inspector without authority and that Robinson, with Calvin Gibbs, Nathaniel Backer and Earnest Sims, had helped voters mark ballots when the city’s Ordinance No. 12 allowed help only to the blind or to those who had lost the use of a hand; that the sheriff testified more than half the voters there were assisted; and that of 1,500 ballots delivered to the precinct, 397 were cast, 799 returned unused, and 304 were unaccounted for.[gough-1951]

The courts

Sauls, Sparks and Kirkland petitioned the Circuit Court of Highlands County for a writ of mandamus, not quo warranto, against the men constituting the council and canvassing board. Judge Don Register denied the council’s motion to quash and granted a peremptory writ notwithstanding the council’s answer, commanding it to rescind the resolution of 25 September and reinstate that of 15 September. The council appealed. On 20 November 1951 the Supreme Court of Florida, Special Division B, affirmed, Justice Chapman writing, with Chief Justice Sebring, Justice Thomas and Associate Justice Walker concurring.[gough-1951]

The holding is narrow and durable: a city council sitting as a canvassing board may judge the returns only. “The Canvassing Board has no judicial discretion. It was without authority to judge the legality or validity of the returns or the votes cast in Voting Place No. 2. These questions are for the judiciary.” The legislature could not have given the council judicial power even if it had tried.[gough-1951]

The council’s lawyers were Sumter Leitner of Arcadia and S. Colquitt Pardee, Jr. of Avon Park. The three elected men were represented by Keith E. Collyer of Avon Park.[gough-1951]

What the court record changes

Against an earlier local-history account of the episode:[byrne-1951-votes]

  1. The council first certified the Black precinct’s ballots and only then reversed itself, over its own committee’s finding. That sequence is worse than a single bad vote, and it is the part no secondary account records.
  2. Five councilmen were elected, not two; three of them kept their seats under both resolutions.
  3. The vote figures do not reconcile. The local account’s precinct numbers (Sauls 514 in the white precinct, 376 of 397 in the Black one) total 890; the council’s own canvass gives Sauls 877. The opinion carries no precinct breakdown, so the precinct figures remain unverified.
  4. The proceeding was mandamus. No contempt proceedings appear anywhere in the opinion — but they happened. The Tampa Tribune reports that Judge Register cited four councilmen for contempt on 9 October 1951 for failing to comply “forthwith,” and that they answered the citation in his chambers the next day.[trib-1951-10-11]
  5. The 397 ballots cast in Voting Place No. 2 is confirmed.

What the Tampa Tribune adds

The Tampa Tribune of 11 October 1951 — not 10 October, as an earlier clipping title had it — carried two reports on the affair, and they supply what the law reports leave out. The page is transcribed in full at Reference: The Tampa Tribune, 11 October 1951.

The council is named, and so is the vote. The retiring councilmen were Ed Gough, John Delegal, Reason Shivers and Charles Lewiston. On 25 September, “Gough, Lewiston and Delegal (Shivers abstained from voting, Kirkland voted negatively)” rescinded the earlier resolution.[trib-1951-10-11] So the vote to void 397 ballots was three for, one against, one abstention. John Delegal is a name that appears in no law report. And Reason Shivers, put on the council by the Black vote in 1949 along with Gough, abstained rather than vote either way.

Voting Place No. 2 was created days before the poll. Arguing for the ousted men, S. C. Pardee told the Supreme Court that “the separate place for Negroes was set up as an emergency action several days before the election,” and that there was no emergency; that its inspector “was appointed by the city clerk rather than the mayor, as required by law”; that over half the Black voters were assisted, some without asking; and that about 400 official ballot slips were unaccounted for.[trib-1951-10-11] This is the closest thing yet to an answer to the question of who made the second polling place and when.

It was at the city hall. The Tribune calls it “a city hall polling place, for Negroes.”[trib-1951-10-11] The opinion says only that it was “arranged by the city officials.”[gough-1951]

The Supreme Court intervened on 10 October, granting a writ of supersedeas that suspended Judge Register’s order, setting the appeal for 22 October, and requiring Wilkes, Gough and Wolff to post a $1,000 bond.[trib-1951-10-11]

And the men elected on 11 September were sworn in that same evening, at 8.15, by Keith Collyer acting as a notary, in a meeting the city attorney publicly doubted was legal because the supersedeas had already issued. “Without a clerk, the new board transacted no business.”[trib-1951-10-11]

Who these men were

Six of the nine white officeholders and candidates have now been found in the federal census of April 1950.[census-1950-avon-park]

Name In the 1950 census
E. W. Gough Edward W. Gough, 56, owner of a welding and machine shop, wife Leila M. keeping his books unpaid — matching the 1949 description of him as “a machine shop operator”
Charles H. Lewiston 68, born Illinois, wife Della, 37 — living in the household immediately before the Goughs on the same page. “Lewiston” is a real Avon Park surname, not a misprint
Wiley Sauls, Jr. 22, unpaid salesman in his father Wiley T. Sauls Sr.’s retail grocery store
Mannin Kirkland Manning W. Kirkland, 33, grocery store owner, separated from his wife Vera
J. B. Sparks Joe B. Sparks, 48, insurance salesman
Reason Shivers 49, foreman picking and hauling fruit for a citrus packing house, two sheets from Gough and Lewiston

Not found in completed household schedules, after targeted searching across every Highlands County enumeration district: O. C. Wilkes, Lenny Rush, W. Clifford Thomas and Oscar Wolff.[census-1950-avon-park] All four men, however, are documented in contemporaneous municipal, judicial, press, and cemetery records (see 1951 Avon Park Election Candidates and 1950 Census Records).

On the other side, the four Black election officials remain far less well documented. The best census candidate for W. J. Robinson is a Willie Robinson, 59, born Georgia, of enumeration district 28-7, not working, living next door to a Black-owned grocery. Calvin Gibbs survives only as a grave: 1925-1993, Lakeview Memorial Gardens, Avon Park — twenty-six years old at the election. Nathaniel Backer cannot be found at all, under that spelling or any near variant, in any Avon Park cemetery or in the town’s Black enumeration districts. And “Earnest Sims” cannot yet be assigned to a man, because Thomas and Maggie Sims of 216 Castle Street had two sons who went by Ernest — Ernest Eldridge Sims, later principal of Hopewell School, and Elihu Ernest Sims, who is the one actually found living in Avon Park in 1950.[census-1950-avon-park]

That asymmetry is itself the finding. Six of the nine white men are identifiable in an afternoon from public records. Of the four Black men who ran the polling place, not one can be identified with confidence.

A city council counted its town’s Black ballots, certified the result, and then ten days later voted to declare every one of those ballots void and to seat the men who had lost. The Florida Supreme Court described what it had done in exactly those terms — it “declared the result of the municipal election solely on the white votes cast” — and stopped it.

References

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. 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)
  2. Associated Negro Press, in the Atlanta Daily World, Negroes Swing Mayor's Election In Avon Park, Atlanta Daily World, 25 September 1949, page 3 (1949)
  3. Jason Byrne, Florida History Blog, Avon Park City Council Throws Out All Black Votes in 1951 Election (2022)
  4. 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)
  5. United States Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950, Population Schedules, Florida, Highlands County, Avon Park enumeration districts 28-2, 28-5, 28-6 and 28-8 (1950)

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