Biography
Izell Chambers, also recorded as Isiah Chambers, was a Black tenant farmer arrested in the May 1933 roundup after the killing of Robert Darsey in Pompano, Florida. Police held the defendants incommunicado and used beatings and threats of lynching to obtain confessions. Chambers pleaded not guilty and was convicted by a jury; the other three defendants pleaded guilty. All four were sentenced to death on June 17, 1933. Simuel D. McGill and Leon A. Ransom argued their appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the convictions in Chambers v. Florida on February 12, 1940. Chambers was diagnosed with mental illness at Raiford and transferred to the state psychiatric hospital at Chattahoochee. He died there in 1954.
Documented early custody chronology
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Chambers v. Florida places Chambers, Williamson and Woodward among those arrested and confined in Broward County jail within the twenty-four hours following Charlie Davis’s arrest on the night of May 13, 1933. This narrows the event to late May 13–14 but does not give each man an individual arrest or booking day. The opinion explicitly records Chambers and Williamson being taken to Dade County jail in Miami about 11 p.m. on May 15 and returned to Fort Lauderdale the following day. These were transfers during custody, not releases. The February 12, 1940 reversal also does not itself establish physical release.
Source: Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227, 229–230, 242 (1940). Existing partial admission dates and later case outcomes are preserved.
Family background and continued confinement
Richard Brust’s dissertation describes Chambers as a 22-year-old Blount farm worker who shared a two-room home in Pompano’s Quarters district with Walter Woodard and Jack Williamson when he was arrested in May 1933.
After the Supreme Court reversed the convictions, Judge Curtis E. Chillingworth dismissed the original indictment on December 11, 1940 because African Americans had been excluded from the grand jury. Palm Beach deputies rearrested the defendants on the same charge when they were due to be released. A new indictment followed on March 11, 1941, and the Florida Supreme Court upheld it on November 4.
The criminal case ended with a directed acquittal on March 9, 1942. Chambers’s later confinement followed a different course: authorities transferred him from Raiford to the state psychiatric hospital at Chattahoochee, where he died in 1954. Brust found no date for that transfer.
Source: Richard Brust, The Pompano Boys (University of Florida, 2022), pp. 39–40, 95–96 and 254–257.
