Willis V. McCall is the sheriff of Lake County, Florida (where George Starling’s hometown of Eustis is located). He is a notorious racist and segregationist, and he frequently abuses and murders Black suspects throughout his long tenure (1944 to 1972). In the 1940s, he uses a vagrancy law as an excuse to arrest, fine, and torture Black men at random, and in 1949, he becomes nationally famous for killing two Black rape suspects in cold blood. Later, he goes to extreme lengths to oppose federal school integration laws, and he manages to keep many services segregated into the early 1970s—among the latest in the nation. He gets investigated for misconduct 49 times, but he never faces any legal consequences for his actions. He finally loses reelection in 1972, after kicking a developmentally disabled Black man to death. His reign of terror epitomizes not just the brutality of Jim Crow, but also the way that the state officially sanctioned and sustained it.
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Willis V. McCall Character Timeline in The Warmth of Other Suns
The timeline below shows where the character Willis V. McCall appears in The Warmth of Other Suns. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part Two: The Awakening
...forcing them to work for weeks to pay off the fines. After Eustis’s local sheriff, Willis V. McCall , arrests a citrus picker and beats him unconscious, the picker’s whole family escapes to...
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Part Four: The Other Side of Jordan
...by Moore and the NAACP. But on the eve of their trial, the county sheriff, Willis V. McCall , shot and killed them, claiming self-defense. Moore began publicly calling for an investigation into...
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Part Four: The Prodigals
...for the train to refuel. One day, he even briefly runs into the notorious sheriff Willis V. McCall at the train station.
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Part Five: In the Places They Left
...choosing to discipline a Black boy who gets in a fight with a white boy. Willis V. McCall personally comes after the Black student, but Black parents protest and stop him. McCall, the...
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Part Five: Redemption
...Now that the orange grove owners who wanted to kill him and the brutal sheriff Willis V. McCall are all dead, George Starling finally decides to go visit Eustis. He has dinner with...
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