Biography
Jack Williamson was a Black tenant farmer arrested in the May 1933 roundup following the robbery and killing of Robert Darsey in Pompano, Florida. Police held him without access to counsel and used beatings and threats to obtain a confession. Williamson pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to death on June 17, 1933. Simuel D. McGill and Leon A. Ransom argued the defendants’ appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions in Chambers v. Florida on February 12, 1940. Williamson remained imprisoned while prosecutors pursued a new indictment. On March 9, 1942, Judge Curtis E. Chillingworth directed an acquittal, and Williamson was released.
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 Williamson as 19 at his May 1933 arrest. He and his brother-in-law Walter Woodard came from Screven, Georgia. Both worked on the Blount farm and shared employer-provided housing with Izell Chambers.
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.
Williamson, Woodard and Davis were acquitted and released from court on March 9, 1942. Williamson and Woodard told the Fort Lauderdale Daily News that they intended to return to their family homes in Georgia. Brust found no records of their subsequent lives.
Source: Richard Brust, The Pompano Boys (University of Florida, 2022), pp. 39–40, 95–96 and 254–257.
