Thomas LeRoy Collins
10 March 1909 – 12 March 1991
Thomas LeRoy “Roy” Collins was born to Marvin Collins and Mattie Brandon Collins. The family, consisting of four sons and two daughters, lived in Tallahassee for his whole life. In the 1920s, while Collins attended Leon High School, he met Mary Call Darby, who later would become his wife. Collins was a model student and worked at T. B. Byrd’s grocery after school. After high school, he attended Eastman College of Business Administration in New York and returned to Tallahassee to work as a teller. He then attended the Cumberland University in Tennessee to get his law degree, passing bar exams for Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida.[1] Upon his return to Tallahassee, he began courting Mary Call Darby, and they married on June 29th, 1932. They began their family at the same time that Collins began his political career, as he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1934, the same year his son LeRoy Collins Jr. was born. He was later elected to the Florida Senate.
LeRoy and Mary Call Collins purchased Call-Collins House and surrounding property in 1942. They purchased the property from Reinette’s cousins, John W. Ford and Josephine Alger, who had acquired the property from Reinette in 1940 following her passing. They focused on restoring the home and land throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He briefly volunteered for duty at the end of World War II and returned to Tallahassee in 1946 to resume his law practice and was reelected as Senator. In 1954, LeRoy Collins was elected Governor of Florida. He would serve from 1955 to 1961. During this time, the family lived at the historic Governor’s Mansion for a short time, but moved back to the Call-Collins House when the original mansion was torn down for a new one to be built. They moved into the new Governor’s Mansion, still in use today, in 1957.[2]
Education reform and racial unrest were of the most notable issues that LeRoy Collins addressed during his years as governor of Florida.[3] Taking a moderate position in support of expanding civil rights, he urged Floridians to reconsider their opposition to desegregation, arguing that it was neither a Christian nor democratic ideal. After his time as Governor ended, Collins held several national roles before he was Director of the Community Relations Service, a federal agency created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act that was to help expand civil rights for African Americans and diffuse racial tension. This took Collins to Selma, Alabama in 1965 as chief negotiator between Alabama law enforcement and civil rights protestors led by Martin Luther King, Jr following the events of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. Collins ran for the United States Senate in 1968, but ultimately lost the election due to his stance on civil rights. Retiring shortly after, LeRoy Collins and his wife returned to The Grove, where he continued his law practice and his professional life until his death in 1991.[4]
