Allen Platt never did go along with integrating the races when his children were small.

"My dad always said blacks had their place," the 83-year-old Platt said.

Like most whites in the 1950s, he firmly believed that.

But in October 1954, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, the staunch sentinel of all racial barriers, came to Platt's Mount Dora home. People had been complaining about his children, McCall said. The Platt family's skin was too dark, their hair too curly. McCall was convinced that they had "nigra" blood.

Back then, just a tiny fraction determined whether you could be accepted into white society: one-eighth black and you were out; one-sixteenth, and you were in. That was the law.

So McCall told Platt he should keep his children out, that he should not send his five youngsters back to the white Mount Dora school until the race of his children was settled.

During the next 11 months, the sheriff, School Board attorneys, the governor and the FBI launched investigations to determine the composition of the fruit picker's blood line.

Platt said he was Cherokee Indian and Irish, not black, and he fought back. Eventually, he won in court, but the case disrupted the county's tranquility.

For the Platts, the case brought night riders to their homes, threats, and at least one attempt to burn them out. To this day, Platt's children refuse to discuss the case, Platt said.

For another local Indian family, the case brought the Ku Klux Klan to their doorstep and a warning to get out of town, a warning they heeded.

For all of Lake County, it brought national notoriety as one of the hotbeds of racial violence.

Still, the case changed many people's racial attitudes. Even Platt - who had once vowed that he would not send his children to school at all if he had to send them to a "Negro school" - concedes he had more respect for blacks after his ordeal.

Countywide, many white people for the first time seriously questioned segregation, an institution they had accepted without thought.

"That segregation was wrong never occurred to us," said Linda O'Connor, a Eustis High School cheerleader and prom queen at the time. "We were more interested in our Capezio shoes and whether to roll our jeans into three cuffs or four cuffs. That case probably was the first time any of us really thought about things like that."

The case started unfolding just five months after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled segregation illegal. Most Southern states, including Florida, refused to integrate until the court handed down an implementation order.

Platt was a tough-talking grove worker, the father of nine children. He and his family had lived on a small, family-owned cotton farm in Holly Hill, S.C., before he moved to Mount Dora.

In South Carolina - a state no less wedded to segregationist law than Florida - the Platts went to white churches, married white people and went to a school that had whites and Indians. They lived in an Indian community, but the state classified them as white.

The mayor of Holly Hill once told Florida investigators Platt was a "sober, hard-working, honest man."

Platt moved to Mount Dora in September 1954 because the federal government had cut the acreage allotment so much that he no longer could make a living off cotton.

Platt moved to Mount Dora to look for grove work. He wanted to be near a brother who had lived here for several years and had been sending his children to white schools for years without question.

Three or four weeks after school started, McCall paid Platt a visit.

"He said, 'You don't belong here,' " Platt said. "He said, 'You are trying to mix with white people.' Well, I told him, 'I'm as white as you are and come from better stock.' "

McCall remembers it differently.

"I just told him it would be better if the children didn't go back to the school until we get this straightened out."

McCall said people had been complaining - he was just carrying out the law, trying to keep the peace during a difficult period of transition from segregation to integration.

To this day, he says he only suggested that they stay out of school - that they had Negro blood and features that justified his action.

The School Board agreed with McCall.

School wasn't the only place where the Platts were unwelcome. At home, their landlady made them leave, not because she disliked them but because someone had threatened to burn the home.

They moved to Apopka, where Platt tried to enroll his children in Orange County schools, but he said Orange wouldn't admit them until the Lake controversy was settled.

In the meantime, Mount Dora Christian Home and Bible, a private, white school, agreed to teach the children at the Platt home for free.

Platt wrote letters to then-Gov. LeRoy Collins asking for help. After a brief investigation, Collins wrote a letter expressing sympathy for Platt, but he said the matter was a local issue.

His investigation had concluded that some of Platt's ancestors were part Croatan Indian. McCall had produced a dictionary definition that said Croatan was a disparaging term for a group of people of mixed Indian, white and Negro ancestry.

That definition brought a Eustis family of Croatan Indians into the controversy in January 1955. Although this family had been sending their twin sons to Eustis schools, McCall had never raised a question.

But the Ku Klux Klan did raise it when the Platt case surfaced. A mob of men paid a midnight visit to the family and warned them to leave. The next day, the father lost his fruit-picking job. The family fled south.

In March 1955, Platt filed suit against the School Board in Circuit Court to regain entrance to Lake schools.

"People started driving by our house and yelling all sorts of things at us and telling us to go back where we came from," Platt said.

"They even tried to burn us out. We were all in the house at the time. I went back into the kitchen, and the outside wall was on fire. The girls went to squalling," he said. "My baby son (a 13-year-old) grabbed a gun and started firing at them."

The fire did little more than scorch the wall. He still doesn't know who set the fire. But from then on, he was constantly on the alert.

"I stayed around the house with my 16-shot 30-30 for several nights," Platt said.

By then, the Platt case had caught national attention.

"Life magazine was at our School Board meetings for weeks and weeks," former Superintendent C.A. Vaughn Jr. said.

People from all over the country started sending contributions to a legal fund for Platt that eventually netted $1,309, including a $25 contribution from former Gov. Fuller Warren.