Leroy Bradwell

Case summary

Incident

On February 4, 1946, 52-year-old Mary McCray Bradwell of Gadsden County, Florida, wrote a letter to President Harry S. Truman. She explained that several weeks earlier, on January 7, police arrived at her home in Midway, Florida, to question her son Leroy about a letter written in his name to a white woman. Leroy was 26 and had recently been discharged from the U.S. Army after fighting in Europe during World War II. Bradwell wrote that the officers took Leroy away in handcuffs and later told her they released him at the county line. She had not heard from him since. “I fear they have killed my child,” she wrote.

Aftermath

Mary Bradwell’s letter prompted an investigation involving the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Florida state and local law enforcement agencies. According to an April 25, 1946, FBI report, the “obscene” letter to the white woman, allegedly written by Leroy Bradwell, was determined to have been written by another man, who signed Bradwell’s name in order to get him in trouble. The report said that the two officers who had taken Bradwell had determined he had not written the letter, but left him at the county line for his own safety, telling him to not come back or his presence would inflame racial tensions. The FBI report said there was no evidence that Leroy Bradwell had come to any harm at the hands of the two officers – Gadsden County Sheriff Otho Edwards and Deputy Sheriff Emory Maples.

Citing a confidential informant, the FBI referenced multiple editorials in national magazines criticizing Governor Millard Caldwell and the sheriff of nearby Madison County over a lynching there the previous year. Per the informant, Caldwell expressed concerns that an “open investigation would tend only to cause friction between the white and colored people in this section and possibly produce a race riot.” The same FBI report stated that handwriting analysis and interviews with Leroy Bradwell’s sister and brother-in-law, Reginer and Arthur Hendley, determined that the letter that led to Bradwell’s detainment was likely written by a rival neighbor courting the same woman as Leroy, and who forged Leroy’s name. The federal investigation never confirmed precisely what happened to Bradwell or located any evidence of his activity or whereabouts. Rumors that he left town could not be corroborated. In a September 1946 letter to Florida NAACP executive secretary Harry Moore, assistant U.S. attorney general Theron Caudle wrote that “In the absence of information as to [Bradwell’s] whereabouts or relative to what eventually happened to him after his arrest, it is felt that it would be inadvisable for the Department to order prosecution. We shall, however, keep the case under consideration.”

No trace of Leroy Bradwell was ever found.