Deep South, Deep Trouble : In Little Cross City, Fla., the Shooting Death of a Black Man Has Stirred a Maelstrom of Charges and Countercharges Over Racism and Small-Town Politics

CROSS CITY, Fla. —  The Classic Tiffany Lounge is a fancy-sounding name for a smoky, wood-frame bar and package store in the black section of this Deep South town, and it was here five months ago that Jody Akins fired the loudest gunshots ever heard in Dixie County.

One shot not only killed a man, but dragged this country hamlet of 2,500 residents out of the piney woods and into a national debate in which some local blacks and not a few outsiders are raising questions about Southern-style justice and the state of race relations.

Akins, 29, who is white and the son of a prominent local contractor and former city councilman, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of a 24-year-old black man named Terrell Royce Rutledge. Akins’ trial is scheduled to begin Monday.

But within days of the shooting, five black men who were in a crowd outside the lounge that night were also arrested and charged with third-degree murder, riot, felony criminal mischief and battery. Prosecutors allege they took part in a riot that led to the fatal shooting.

Many black residents--about a fifth of the town’s population--consider the charges against the men unjustified. The men, now known as the Cross City Five, are locked up in two neighboring county jails under $50,000 bond each.

Akins, meanwhile, is being held without bond in the Dixie County Jail, which is across the street and just yards from the front door of his house. He has been made a trusty, with privileges to work outside the twice-condemned, 14-cell jail, and to ride along with a deputy on the daily food run to the nearby prison. On a recent Monday, a reporter watched Akins, in street clothes and unsupervised, cut the grass behind the sheriff’s office.

“Cross City looks like it was lost in time, like the civil rights struggle passed it by,” says Junis Wilson, an organizer with a Chicago-based group called the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, which has led two small but unprecedented protest marches down the main street here. “But this place could go down in history as another Selma.”

Resident Deborah Mitchell became so incensed about what she perceived as a racist double standard that she called Geraldo Rivera, the NAACP and civil rights groups in Atlanta and Washington with unanswered pleas for help. Then she met Wilson and became president--and virtually the only member--of the Cross City chapter of the Uhuru Movement.

“What this is all about is justice, plain and simple,” says Mitchell, 32, a widow with three young children.

“There is a lot of fear here in the black community, and I understand that fear. It’s always been that way. Older people say, ‘Quiet down; whites gonna do what they gonna do.’ My own mother says, ‘I’m scared for you.’

“But this case is a start. We have to start somewhere. So I’m starting here.”

To understand life in Cross City, you have to know just how small, and how remote, this area is. Most of the highway traffic here is logging trucks. The road kills are armadillos. In all of Dixie County there is no movie theater, no public swimming pool, no bowling alley. The closest shopping mall is in Gainesville, an hour away over two-lane blacktop.

About 100 miles south of Tallahassee off to the side of U.S. 27, Cross City is the largest town in what is Florida’s poorest county, where the median household income barely tops $15,000 a year. Cross City was founded by lumber barons in the early 1900s. Its chief employment opportunities remain logging and sawmill work, two nearby state prisons, and, for some blacks, seasonal work in the watermelon fields.

“Dixie County is 100% Southern,” says deputy sheriff J. C. (Shorty) Rolling, who is white. “That means we are close-knit--the whole county. Everybody knows everybody.”

Although, as Rolling says, blacks and whites know each other here, they live separately. As in many Southern towns, the black neighborhood, on one side of the railroad tracks, is still called the Quarters by most whites. On a web of paved and dirt roads that wind around the moss-draped live oak trees, the people live jammed up together in a motley collection of small frame houses, dilapidated trailers and some 1960s red-brick apartments, called “the projects.”

On the other side of town, whites live not opulently but better, in brick-front, ranch-style homes and in larger, wood-frame two-stories. They have grassy yards; some have satellite dishes.

It is not unusual to see white men in the Quarters at night, according to neighborhood residents, and Jody Akins in his black and silver Chevy S-10 pickup was certainly no stranger. Exactly what happened early on that cold Jan. 11 morning, however, remains in dispute.

Some of the 30 or more people standing around outside the Classic Tiffany Lounge say that Akins, a beefy man who pumped gas at the local BP station, had returned to the neighborhood because the crack cocaine he paid $20 for earlier in the evening turned out to be soap. When he demanded his money back, a fight broke out, and the windows of Akins’ truck were smashed with an ax.

Contradicting statements of at least two companions, Akins denies he either bought or smoked cocaine. He says he drove into the Quarters to see a woman and ended up being beaten by several men. He ran to his truck and grabbed a .22-caliber rifle, he said, and from the truck’s cab fired randomly into the crowd. “All I was doing was trying to kill me some niggers,” he told police later that day.

One of the several shots he fired from the semi-automatic rifle ripped through Rutledge’s arm and lodged in his chest. Rutledge, described by everyone as an innocent bystander, died an hour later after what many witnesses say was a long delay before the ambulance arrived.

Akins fled in the truck, crashed into an embankment several miles outside of town, ran into the woods to hide, and was eventually hunted down by bloodhounds brought over from the Cross City Correctional Institute.

He admitted the shooting and subsequently told police: “I’m gonna go to prison and I’m gonna tell you the . . . truth.

“I saw three or four of them . . . and I tried to kill them.”

Last week, Akins’ attorney, public defender Baya Harrison, moved to have those statements withheld from the jury, arguing that Akins was drunk and was led to believe he would not be prosecuted if he talked to officers. The motion was denied.

The others arrested in the aftermath of the killing are Tommy Lee Carter Jr., 26; Michael J. Carter, 22; Eugene M. (PeeWee) Carter, 30; Gary K. Washington, 28, and Bennie Lee Walker Jr., 20. After being indicted by an interracial county grand jury, the men are being prosecuted under a Florida law that says someone who commits a felony that plays a role in a killing can be charged with third-degree murder. Conviction carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. (Akins faces a life sentence with a mandatory 25 years in prison. Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty.)

Two of the Cross City Five are the sons of the town’s suspended police chief, Tommy Lee Carter Sr., who is awaiting trial on perjury charges unrelated to the killing. A third man is Carter’s brother, and a fourth is a Carter cousin. Washington is a nephew of the acting police chief, Marcellus Dawson.

The former chief, who has been given a make-work job patching potholes in the roads while awaiting his day in court, says the five were framed as part of a conspiracy between Dixie County Sheriff Sammy Woodall and Carter’s successor, Dawson. “They want to keep me out of the system forever,” says Carter, 47. “This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice I’ve seen in my 18 years of law enforcement.”

Dawson, who also is black, responds this way: “He got himself in that predicament. He put himself in a deeper hole than he ever anticipated.”

Says Woodall, who is white: “He’s lucky he’s not suspended without pay.”

Angela M. Ball is the assistant public defender appointed to represent the Cross City Five. A former county prosecutor, this is the first murder case Ball, 33, has handled as a defense attorney. While she calls the murder charges against her clients “an injustice . . . and not warranted by the facts as I understand them,” Ball stops short of calling the charges racially motivated:

“When a white person goes into a black area of a small town, and admits firing a gun, and a black person ends up dead, and other blacks wind up being charged, it seems inconsistent. That’s where the perception of injustice comes from. But I also understand the legality of it, and I see where the charge could be made.”

Others don’t.

Mitchell and Wilson of the Uhuru Movement say they have no confidence in Ball, and have begun raising money to hire another attorney. Ball admits she is disappointed in her failure to win a bond reduction that could free her clients, but says the men have not asked for a different attorney.

Ball adds she is stung by the the suggestion that she is racist, and charges the Uhuru Movement’s tactics are harmful to the defense: “Hey, my position is that these guys have admitted certain things. Their position is, ‘Hey, this is total racism.’ ” The trial of the Cross City Five is likely to begin next month.

Meanwhile, Wilson and Mitchell have asked Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles to order an investigation into the shooting. They also continue to distribute literature accusing acting police chief Dawson of being an “Uncle Tom” and a “traitor” who is terrorizing the black community with threats of imprisonment. One recent leaflet likened the forces at work in Cross City to the “white lynch mob justice system” in Simi Valley that found the officers accused in the Rodney G. King beating not guilty on all but one charge.

Wilson, who lives in St. Petersburg, admits that her attempts to get residents into the street to protest have been largely unsuccessful: “People in Cross City lower their heads, like in most Southern towns. Whites have a hold over people economically. Blacks are at the mercy of the system.”

For a small town, Cross City seems to have had--and perhaps still has--a particularly flourishing drug trade, as well as a disproportionately high number of black men who have gone to prison on cocaine charges.

Rickey Dawson, son of the acting police chief, is serving time as a habitual drug offender. Tommy Lee Carter Jr., one of the Cross City Five and the suspended chief’s eldest son, recently did 42 months on drug charges. In April, the former owner of the Classic Tiffany Lounge was convicted of a cocaine conspiracy charge.

Tommy Lee Carter Sr., the suspended chief, agrees that to find a young black male in Cross City who has not been arrested for a drug offense, “you almost have to go to the ones who aren’t old enough to go to prison yet.”

Police deny that blacks are singled out for prosecution.

“Color don’t mean anything to law enforcement,” argues Rolling, who investigated the Akins shooting. “Outside groups have come in here and made out like we’re racists and it’s just wrong. It offends me. I work just as hard to put the bank president in jail as the man who cuts pulp wood, and it’s not because he’s white and he’s black.

“It wasn’t an issue until this come up. Most blacks and whites get along real good and have for years. But the more you stir something, the more it stinks.”