- Crime and Prosecution - Page 8

Two

Cinderella’s Castle, in the Magic Kingdom of the Disney World resort, stands nine miles due south of the scene of the crime, across a stretch of scrub and citrus groves.  In geographic terms it is not a great distance—-the drive back to the main gate of the resort is nearly as long—but Disney’s charm and prosperity did not bridge the gap.  Winter Garden’s population, about six thousand, had hardly changed since the end of World War II.  While the rest of Orange County rode a sustained boom, the several small communities at the west side of the county remained rural, agrarian, and stagnant.

The west side had always seemed a little different.  It even had its own proper-name designation: to the Orlando Sentinel Star and to almost everyone else, it was West Orange, a scruffy place apart.

“Redneck City, Crackerville,” is how one native of the county described West Orange to me in 1991, with a sort of smirk; then he added: “But don’t use my name—those people would kill me.”

This was not the East Coast Florida of palm trees and sweeping beaches, nor the sultry, laid-back Florida of the Gulf Coast.  Winter Garden was almost a generic Southern town, with a one-crop economy that depended on cheap labor and good weather.  Its public schools mixed the races by decree, but otherwise segregation was the rule, by practice if not by law.  Most of Winter Garden’s blacks—perhaps a third to half of its residents—lived in near squalor in a section of town known as the Quarters, the boundaries of which were unmarked and without legal foundation, but unfailingly observed.  In this way, too, Winter Garden and the rest of West Orange were typically Southern, closer in spirit to Selma than to Miami.

In the picking season, thousands of migrant workers, mostly black, filled the labor camps that were tucked away in groves surrounding the town.  The most notorious of the camps was one known as Harlem Heights.  At the outskirts of town, too, was an empty field known as the Stomping Grounds, where local Ku Klux Klansmen flogged their victims.

Stetson Kennedy, a Floridian who researched the Klan for more than forty years, has written that several klaverns thrived in West Orange at least into 1960.  How long they survived after that is a matter of debate.  In almost every other important way, though, the Winter Garden of ‘75 was the Winter Garden of ‘55.

In the meantime, much of Orange County was being transformed into the world’s most popular playground.  Twelve miles to the east, Orlando was a boomtown, and the Sentinel Star was one of its giddiest boosters.  The afternoon of the murders, the top story on page one was the rush of tourists that forced Disney World to close its gates for only the second time in its three years of existence.