The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Avon Park election of 1951

Avon Park voted on Tuesday 11 September 1951, for a mayor and five councilmen. For the first time in the town’s history there were two polling places: the usual one, and a second, opened for the town’s Black voters and run entirely by Black election officials. Three hundred and ninety-seven ballots were cast there.

Four days later the city council counted them, found no fraud worth the name, and declared the winners. Ten days after that the same council met again, resolved that every ballot cast at the second polling place was “illegal and void,” and declared the election “solely on the white votes cast.”

It took a circuit judge, a contempt citation and the Supreme Court of Florida to put it back.

This report draws on three kinds of source: the Supreme Court’s own opinion; the Tampa Tribune of 11 October 1951; and the federal census of April 1950, which puts most of these men in houses on named streets fifteen months before the election.

Before: how Black Avon Park came to matter

Avon Park in 1950 had 4,612 people, of whom 1,293 were Black. They lived wholly in Commissioner’s District 2, east of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad, on South Verona Avenue, Second Street, Fairfield Avenue, Castle Avenue, Carolina Avenue and Woodrow Avenue, and in the numbered blocks beyond them.[census-1950-avon-park]

In 1949 they decided a city election. The Atlanta Daily World of 25 September 1949 reported it under the headline “Negroes Swing Mayor’s Election In Avon Park.” Three hundred and seventeen Black voters were registered; 297 voted, and 255 of those votes went to Wiley Sauls, Jr., a twenty-one-year-old who had left the local high school in 1946 and was working in his father’s grocery. He became mayor. Two council seats went the same way, to Ed Gough, “a machine shop operator,” who topped the poll, and to Reason Shivers.[adw-1949-09-25]

The turnout, the paper said, followed a Junior Chamber of Commerce registration drive — “Don’t Vote, Don’t Gripe” posters put up around the town.[adw-1949-09-25] No trace has been found of the NAACP, the Florida Progressive Voters League, or Harry T. Moore at Avon Park, then or later.

The same dispatch noted, without comment, that the town’s founders “chose the site because, among other things, there were no Negroes here.”[adw-1949-09-25]

The charter that made it possible

Avon Park was governed under Chapter 12514, Special Acts of 1927 — its third charter in fourteen years. Three of its provisions shaped what happened in 1951.

Section 7 put a mayor and five councilmen on two-year terms, and elected the councilmen “from the city at large until such time as the city shall be divided into wards.” Section 9 allowed a division into four wards, but only on a majority vote of the electorate, and no evidence has been found that any such vote was ever held. So the whole council was elected at large by the whole town, and — as the Supreme Court found — the town voted at one polling place.[lof-1927-12514]

Section 59 left the rules of the town’s elections entirely to the council: “The City Council shall by ordinance prescribe the rules and regulations under which all general and special City elections shall be held, which ordinance shall fix the qualifications of the voters therein.”[lof-1927-12514]

Two ordinances made under that power were argued over in 1951:

Ordinance No. 12, section 19, on assisting voters:

Any elector applying to vote who by reason of blindness or the loss of the use of the hand, or hands, is unable to prepare his ballot, may have the assistance of the inspectors who shall retire to the booth or compartment and there prepare the electors ballot so as to indicate the elector’s choice of candidate as to each office to be filed without suggestion or interference from the inspector and in all cases, any elector before retiring to the booth may have the clerk read over to him the title of the office to be filled and the names of the candidates thereof.[gough-1951]

Ordinance No. 43, section 5, on accounting for ballots:

When the said polls had been closed, the inspector shall proceed to count the votes and to make out their returns in duplicate, which shall be signed by the inspectors and clerk, one copy of which shall be delivered to the President of the Town Council within 24 hours after said election; the other copy of said return, together with tally sheets, ballots, ballot stubbs and memoranda in connection with said election shall be placed in the box used as a ballot box.[gough-1951]

And section 24, an omnibus grant of municipal powers running to several pages, contained, buried between a paragraph on licensing drays and a paragraph on confirming appointments, the sentence the council would rely on: “Said City Council shall judge the election and return of its own members, and prescribe rules for the determination of contested election.”[lof-1927-12514]

Voting Place No. 2

The Supreme Court recorded the fact plainly:

Municipal elections held by the city prior to 1951 were usually conducted at one designated polling place in the city where the voters cast their ballots, but in the September, 1951, municipal election voting place Number Two was arranged by the city officials where qualified colored voters of the city could go and cast their ballots. The Inspectors and Clerk of Precinct Number Two were colored voters and had the exclusive supervision and management of the municipal election in Precinct Number Two.[gough-1951]

The Tampa Tribune adds two facts the court leaves out. It was at the city hall: “a city hall polling place, for Negroes.” And it was created in a hurry — arguing to overturn it, the attorney 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.[trib-1951-10-11]

Nobody has yet found the council minute or the order that did it, or the name of the official who decided. What is known is that the City Clerk appointed the precinct’s inspector, and that Pardee’s case was that the mayor should have done it — the mayor being Wiley Sauls, the man that precinct had elected.[trib-1951-10-11] Under section 10 of the charter, the City Clerk and Collector was himself an appointee of the council, not of the people.[lof-1927-12514]

The four Black election officials the council later accused by name were W. J. Robinson, the inspector, and Calvin Gibbs, Nathaniel Backer and Earnest Sims.[gough-1951]

11 September: the poll

A mayor and five councilmen were chosen. Three hundred and ninety-seven ballots were cast at Voting Place No. 2 — the one figure on which every source agrees.[gough-1951]

15 September: the council certifies

The council canvassed the returns. Its own investigating committee reported

that there was insufficient evidence introduced to determine fraud or material irregularities which would change the result of the election as to be sufficient in itself to cause a rejection of all votes cast in Voting Place No. 2.[gough-1951]

On a motion by Mr. Lewiston, seconded by Mr. Gough, it declared elected:

Office Name Votes
Mayor Wiley Sauls, Jr. 877
Councilman Lenny Rush 1,008
Councilman Mark Smith 985
Councilman W. Clifford Thomas 913
Councilman M. Kirkland 685
Councilman J. B. Sparks 642

These remain the only official Avon Park election figures for 1951 anyone has seen.[gough-1951]

25 September: the council reverses itself

On the complaint of O. C. Wilkes, the defeated candidate for mayor, the same council met again. It resolved that there had been “a grave irregularity in said election sufficiently serious to change the entire results,” rescinded its own resolution of ten days before, declared “that all ballots cast in voting Place No. 2 be declared illegal and void, and, are not to be counted,” and declared elected Wilkes as mayor and, as councilmen, E. W. Gough and Oscar Wolff in the places of Kirkland and Sparks.[gough-1951]

The court’s own summary: “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 division is now known. The Tampa Tribune: “Gough, Lewiston and Delegal (Shivers abstained from voting, Kirkland voted negatively) on Sept. 25 rescinded their previous resolution.”[trib-1951-10-11]

Three votes in favor. One against — Mannin Kirkland, who lost his seat by it. One abstention — Reason Shivers, who had himself been put on the council by those voters two years before.

The grounds the council pleaded were that the city clerk had appointed Robinson an inspector without authority; that Robinson, Gibbs, Backer and Sims had gone into the booth with voters who had neither asked for help nor were entitled to it under Ordinance No. 12; that Highlands County Sheriff Broward Coker, who was in personal attendance at Voting Place No. 2, had testified that more than half the voters there were unlawfully assisted (see Sheriff Broward Coker and the City Clerk in the 1951 Avon Park election); and that of 1,500 ballots delivered to the precinct, 397 were cast, 799 returned unused, and 304 unaccounted for.[gough-1951]

October: the courts, in eleven days

Date What happened
Mon 8 Oct Hearing on the alternative writ of mandamus, at Sebring, before Circuit Judge Don Register[trib-1951-10-11]
Tue 9 Oct Register grants a peremptory writ, ordering the council to rescind the 25 September resolution “forthwith,” and denies the council a supersedeas; when it does not comply, he cites four councilmen for contempt[trib-1951-10-11]
Wed 10 Oct, morning The councilmen answer the contempt citation in the judge’s chambers at Wauchula, where he is presiding over the Fall term of the Hardee County circuit court[trib-1951-10-11]
Wed 10 Oct, afternoon In Tallahassee, the Supreme Court of Florida issues a writ of supersedeas, suspending Register’s order, setting the appeal for Monday 22 October, and requiring Wilkes, Gough and Wolff to post a $1,000 bond[trib-1951-10-11]
Wed 10 Oct, 8.15 p.m. The retiring council meets, rescinds its 25 September resolution, and Wiley Sauls, Jr. and the five councilmen of the 15 September canvass are sworn in[trib-1951-10-11]
Tue 20 Nov The Supreme Court of Florida affirms[gough-1951]

The scene in chambers is the only glimpse anyone has of these men as people:

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.[trib-1951-10-11]

That evening’s meeting seated the winners, but it could do nothing else: “Without a clerk, the new board transacted no business.”[trib-1951-10-11]

What the Supreme Court decided, and what it did not

The court read the charter narrowly. The council’s power to “judge the election and return of its own members” reaches the returns and no further:

The Legislature was without authority to confer on the City Council of Avon Park judicial powers then vested in the Judicial Department of our government under the Constitution of Florida. … 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 and the Court below, in its order, left the door wide open for those desiring to litigate further to enter and be heard by an appropriate tribunal.[gough-1951]

Judge Register had said the same thing in his own order: the council could not “usurp the judicial function of declaring all ballots cast in polling place No. 2 to be void.”[trib-1951-10-11]

So nobody ever decided whether anything improper happened at Voting Place No. 2. Both courts decided only that a city council is not a court. The door was left open for a proper election contest; Wilkes was reported to be planning one; nothing has been found to show he ever brought it.[trib-1951-10-11]

The men on each side

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

Name In April 1950
Edward W. Gough, council president 56, owner of a welding and machine shop, working 55 hours a week; wife Leila M., 51, his unpaid bookkeeper. Later life unfound
Charles H. Lewiston, councilman 68, born Illinois, wife Della, 37; the household immediately before the Goughs on the same census page. Very probably the Charles H. Lewiston, 1884-1963, buried at Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park[findagrave-officeholders]
Reason Shivers, councilman 49, born Georgia, foreman picking and hauling fruit for a citrus packing house; two sheets from Gough and Lewiston. A Reason “Pete” Shivers, 1900-1975, buried at Ashburn, Georgia, fits the age and birthplace but names a different wife; unconfirmed
Wiley Sauls, Jr., mayor 22, unpaid salesman in his father Wiley Lester Sauls Sr.’s retail grocery store. Married Kathryn Ann Gaddis in Ohio on 29 June 1952, resigned as mayor in summer 1952, moved to Van Wert, Ohio, where he became President of Union Quarries, Inc., and later retired to Bradenton, Florida[vw-times-bulletin-1952-07-01][vw-times-bulletin-1973-05-16][sunbiz-blue-bird-ranch]
Manning W. Kirkland, councilman 33, born Georgia, grocery store owner, separated from his wife Vera, who kept their two children on Prospect Avenue. Confirmed: Mannin Kirkland, 15 August 1916 – 21 August 1985, Bougainvillea Cemetery, with Vera Belle Knowles Kirkland, 1922-2012[findagrave-officeholders]
Joe B. Sparks, councilman 48, born Georgia, insurance salesman
Oscar E. Wolff, seated by the second resolution Not in the 1950 census under that name; probably the Oscar E. Wolff, 1883-1971, buried at Bougainvillea with his wife Madge[findagrave-officeholders]

John Delegal, the fourth man who voted to void the precinct, appears in no law report and has not been traced. A John Leopold Delegal Sr., 1893-1957, and a Jewel B. Delegal, 1896-1966, lie at Bougainvillea Cemetery, which held both white and Black sections; whether either is the councilman’s family is not known.[findagrave-officeholders] O. C. Wilkes, Lenny Rush, W. Clifford Thomas and Oscar Wolff are not in the 1950 census of Highlands County under completed household listings, after targeted searching of every enumeration district.[census-1950-avon-park] All four men, however, are established in contemporaneous municipal, judicial, press, and cemetery records (see 1951 Avon Park Election Candidates and 1950 Census Records). Wilkes, at least, was no newcomer to the office he claimed: the town’s own list of mayors elected has O. C. Wilkes elected mayor on 9 September 1947 and Wiley Sauls Jr. elected in his place on 13 September 1949, so that the man the council declared mayor in October 1951 was the mayor whom Sauls had displaced two years before.[maxwell-1976]

Against that, the four Black men who ran Voting Place No. 2:

  • W. J. Robinson, the inspector. The best candidate is a Willie Robinson, 59, born Georgia, of enumeration district 28-7, not working and not looking for work, with his wife Mary D., a maid in a private home — an older man of the kind a town appoints to sit at a poll. The middle initial does not match and the identification is not made.[census-1950-avon-park]
  • Calvin Gibbs. Not found in either of Avon Park’s Black enumeration districts. A grave at Lakeview Memorial Gardens gives 1925-1993 — twenty-six years old at the election.
  • Nathaniel Backer. Not found under that spelling or any near variant — but Avon Park’s Black cemetery holds Nathaniel Packer Sr., 1918-1996, born at Perdido, Alabama, died in Highlands County, whose Social Security record places him in the town; he would have been thirty-two at the election. “Packer” for “Backer” is the kind of slip a court clerk makes. A candidate, not an identification.[findagrave-packer]
  • Earnest Sims. Thomas and Maggie Sims of 216 Castle Street had at least seven sons, and two of them went by Ernest: Ernest Eldridge Sims, later the principal of Hopewell School and the only Black educator for whom Avon Park has named a street, and Elihu Ernest Sims, a crate-mill hand who is the one actually found living in the town in 1950.[census-1950-avon-park]

The asymmetry is the point. Six of the nine white men were identified from public records in an afternoon. Of the four Black men who ran a Florida polling place in 1951 — an extraordinary thing for four Black men to be doing in a segregated town — not one can be identified with confidence.

The lawyers

Three lawyers argued the case, and all three were local men.

Keith E. Collyer of Avon Park acted for Sauls, Sparks and Kirkland — for the side of the Black precinct.[gough-1951] He took out the alternative writ, won the peremptory writ at Sebring, petitioned for the contempt citation when the council delayed, and swore the winners in himself as a notary public on the night of 10 October.[trib-1951-10-11] The Tribune calls him the City Attorney of Avon Park — which, if right, means the city’s own lawyer went to court against the city’s own council. The same page also calls S. C. Pardee, Jr. “their city attorney,” so the point is not settled.[trib-1951-10-11] He stayed in Highlands County practice through the 1950s and 1960s, and came back to election law within three years, in Droit v. State ex rel. Long, 71 So. 2d 259 (1954), another mandamus to compel certification of a Highlands County result.[courtlistener-bar]

S. Colquitt Pardee, Jr. of Avon Park acted for the council.[gough-1951] He was already an established Avon Park attorney: he was sole counsel for the City of Avon Park in City of Avon Park v. Giddens, 158 Fla. 130, 27 So. 2d 825, decided 15 November 1946.[courtlistener-bar] His father, S. C. Pardee the elder, had practiced at Avon Park through the 1930s, and was counsel in the city’s bond and annexation litigation of 1932-34; in 1934 he also appeared in State ex rel. Landis v. Gifford, 114 Fla. 872, a Frostproof voter-registration mandamus, on the side seeking to widen the franchise.[courtlistener-bar]

Which Pardee argued in Tallahassee on 10 October 1951 is genuinely unclear. The Tampa Tribune says “S. C. Pardee, Sr., of Avon Park, attorney for Wilkes, Gough and Wolff,” and the Supreme Court’s own caption in November says “S. Colquitt Pardee, Jr.”[trib-1951-10-11][gough-1951] Either the newspaper was wrong, or both men were in the case. It is recorded here unresolved.

Sumter Leitner of Arcadia was the council’s second counsel, brought in from outside the county.[gough-1951] He was born at Fort White, Columbia County, on 26 April 1892, died at Arcadia on 16 October 1968, and is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery there.[findagrave-leitner] He had practiced at Arcadia in the family firm of Leitner & Leitner since at least 1940, and served as an Assistant Attorney General of Florida between about 1944 and 1949, appearing under that title in reported Florida Supreme Court cases before returning to private practice.[courtlistener-bar] The council, in other words, hired a former state law officer.

Circuit Judge Don Register, who decided the case at Sebring and heard the contempt at Wauchula, remains almost entirely unidentified. CourtListener’s database of judges holds no record of him at all; its coverage of 1950s Florida circuit judges who never reached an appellate bench is empty.[courtlistener-bar] That he was sitting the same week in both Highlands and Hardee counties shows he rode a multi-county circuit, but which one, and when he was appointed and by whom, are unknown.

How the case survives in the law

Gough v. State ex rel. Sauls is not a forgotten case. It is cited to this day. What has been forgotten is what it was about.

At least nine Florida authorities between 1959 and 2016 cite it, and every one of them cites it for the same rule of statutory construction — the sentence, quoted from the middle of the opinion, that “the language of a statute may be so plain as to fix the legislative intent and leave no room for construction.” They are: State v. State Racing Commission, 112 So. 2d 825 (Fla. 1959); Dade County v. Eastern Air Lines, 207 So. 2d 13 (Fla. 3d DCA 1968); State v. Egan, 287 So. 2d 1 (Fla. 1973); In re Grand Jury Investigation, 287 So. 2d 43 (Fla. 1973); Florida Attorney General Opinions 75-242 (1975), 79-45 (1979) and 84-79 (1984); and Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence, Inc. v. SPV Realty, LC, 212 So. 3d 419 (Fla. 3d DCA 2016).[courtlistener-bar]

None of them mentions Avon Park, or a polling place, or the votes. A decision that stopped a Florida city council from annulling its Black citizens’ ballots has survived in the reports as a canon-of-construction citation with its facts stripped out.

The silence afterwards

No coverage of the affair survives in Chronicling America’s full run of “Avon Park” mentions for 1951 and 1952.[ca-1951-search] That is a fact about digitization, not about news: none of the papers that would have carried the story is digitized there for those months, and Chronicling America holds no Highlands County paper for this era at all. The Tampa Tribune survives only because a Newspapers.com subscriber clipped one page and the Internet Archive happened to save it.[trib-1951-10-11]

And at Avon Park, according to one uncited local account, no Black person was elected to anything in Highlands County until Robert Britt took a seat on the Avon Park city council in 1973 — twenty-two years after the town’s Black voters had their ballots declared void and put back by a court. The same account says the county’s first Black voter did not cast a ballot until 1946.[byrne-toney] Britt is real: he was the town’s second Black police officer, from about 1957, partner to Fred Conner, whom the council appointed in April 1955 on the petition of the Black churches’ Progressive Civic Club — see Entity: Fred L. C. Conner. The 1973 date and the “first” still rest on the one uncited account.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida, page 212: Mayors of Avon Park Elected (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  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. 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)
  4. 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)
  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, 28-7 and 28-8 (1950)
  6. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12514 (No. 709), Laws of Florida 1927, Special Acts: the charter of the City of Avon Park (1927)
  7. Library of Congress, Chronicling America full-text search for 'Avon Park', calendar years 1951 and 1952 (2026)
  8. Free Law Project, CourtListener opinion search: reported Florida decisions naming Keith E. Collyer, S. C. Pardee and Sumter Leitner as counsel, 1940-1980, and decisions citing 55 So. 2d 111 (2026)
  9. Find a Grave contributors, Find a Grave memorial 48912554, Sumter Leitner (1892-1968), Oak Ridge Cemetery, Arcadia (2026)
  10. Find a Grave contributors, Find a Grave memorials at Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park: Mannin Kirkland 19119852 (1916-1985), Charles H. Lewiston 27437257 (1884-1963), Oscar E. Wolff 35724673 (1883-1971), Wiley T. Sauls Sr. 26475175 (1896-1957) (2026)
  11. Find a Grave contributors, citing the Florida Death Index, Find a Grave memorial 68456568, Nathaniel Packer Sr. (1918-1996), Lakeside Historical Cemetery, Avon Park (2026)
  12. Jason Byrne, Florida History Blog, Mary Toney was a bus driver turned six-term politician (2022)
  13. Van Wert Times-Bulletin, Miss Kathryn Ann Gaddis Married to Wiley Lester Sauls Jr. at First Methodist Church, Van Wert Times-Bulletin, 1 July 1952, page 5 (1952) · newspaper
  14. Van Wert Times-Bulletin, Wiley Sauls, President of Union Quarries Inc., Issues Challenge for MYCA Building Campaign, Van Wert Times-Bulletin, 16 May 1973, page 1 (1973) · newspaper
  15. Florida Department of State, Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations, Charter G14558 (Blue Bird Ranch Investments, Inc., Wiley L. Sauls, Bradenton, Florida) (1987) · official

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