I didn’t set out to write about sheriffs. I was working on a history of a 1933 murder that began with the beating, robbery, and death of a white shopkeeper in the tiny town of Pompano in Broward County, Florida, and ended with the 1940 United States Supreme Court decision known as Chambers v. Florida. That decision, which ex-Klansman turned Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black read over the radio on Lincoln’s birthday, determined that confessions extracted through the use of terror were inadmissible. It was one of the building blocks that led to the Miranda rules and to legal limits on what law enforcement officers can do to a suspect.
It was clear that Broward’s long-serving sheriff, Walter R. Clark, had his fingerprints all over the Chambers case. Clark took charge of the search for the murderer, authorized warrantless searches of Black farmworkers’ homes, supervised the violent interrogation of two dozen Black men and one boy, and the weeklong torture of four men who, just a month later, were sentenced to death based on their forced confessions. The sheriff also operated the jail where those violent interrogations took place, maintained the whites-only jury rolls, and barred Black people from the courtroom except as defendants or witnesses. As a letter of complaint to the governor put it, “A colored man’s life isn’t worth a plug nickel in Broward County, under the dictator-ship of Sheriff Walter Clark.”
Clark was simultaneously the owner of illegal slot machines and a bolita racket (a sort of illegal lottery) and he was in business with some of the nation’s most famous criminals. And yet Clark was also an elected official, a politically powerful politician, and the source of patronage dollars that flowed into Broward County from the state and the nation’s capitals.
An elected county official for most of 1933 to 1950, Clark was removed from office by two different governors for failing to enforce anti-gambling laws: the first time, the vote of one state legislator returned him to power; the second time he died soon after his removal. Clark seemed invulnerable to criticism until a long-running federal investigation into his role in illegal gambling put him in the limelight. His racist policing, which the FBI also investigated, got far less attention.