Old Florida 1950s:
Hot Catfish and Cars
Hot Catfish and Cars is a story about a family running from the Klan in Georgia and starting a new life in Florida. A story about how strong family relationships and friendships created a new incredible life of honor, respect, and faith in God.
Taking The Back Road
Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation Award
Their Story
All I know is what they told me. They told me it happened in Pinehurst Georgia around the mid-1940s when Oliver Lee Granville was a sharecropper. They said he worked that old farm all year, took the harvest to the mill, and waited for the landowner to pay him. The landowner put 37 cents in his hand saying that’s all I owe you, then called him that contemptuous term for Blacks. God knows what happened. I believe Oliver beat him; because the Klan was hunting him. He told his wife to run to her brother John Richard (JR) Davis in Oviedo. Marie piled clothes, children, and her dog in the car, then shot off to Florida like greased lighting; if the Klan caught them, they all would been gone.
Marie waited for Oliver, and worry started to creep up. Oliver was ‘something else’, he was a well-dressed man with a center crown fedora and a farmer. Well, he finally showed up after walking days from Sanford. “Old Florida 1950s: Hot Catfish & Cars” is about their new life in Oviedo Florida.
"They believed God would fix it."
