"In response to an attempt by African Americans to exercise their legal and democratic right to vote, at least 50 African Americans were murdered in a brutal massacre in Ocoee, Florida on Nov. 2, 1920 in what is now called the Ocoee Massacre."
From the Zinn Education Project
A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes by
I know Florida. I was born in Florida during the reign of Jim Crow and have lived to see black astronauts blasted into the heavens from Cape Canaveral. For three quarters of a century I have lived mostly in Florida. I have seen her flowers and her warts. This book is about both. People of African descent have been in Florida from the arrival of Ponce de Leon in 1513, yet our presence in the state is virtually hidden. A casual glance at most Florida history books depict African Americans primarily as laborers who are shown as backdrops to white history. The history of blacks in Florida has been deliberately distorted, omitted and marginalized. We have been denied our heroes and heroines. Our stories have mainly been left untold. This book lifts the veil from some of these stories and places African Americans in the very marrow of Florida history.
The Beast in Florida by
A symbolic embodiment of racial violence and hatred, “The Beast” openly prowled the nation between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. The reasons it appeared varied, with psychological, political, and economic dynamics all playing a part, but the outcome was always brutal--if not deadly. From the bombing of Harriette and Harry T. Moore’s home on Christmas Day to Willie James Howard’s murder, from the Rosewood massacre to the Newberry Six lynchings, Marvin Dunn offers an encyclopedic catalogue of The Beast’s rampages in Florida. Instead of simply taking snapshots of incidents, Dunn provides context for a century’s worth of racial violence by examining communities over time. Crucial insights from interviews with descendants of both perpetrators and victims shape this study of Florida’s grim racial history. Rather than pointing fingers and placing blame,The Beast in Floridaallows voices and facts to speak for themselves, facilitating a conversation on the ways in which racial violence changed both black and white lives forever. With this comprehensive and balanced look at racially motivated events,Dunn reveals the Sunshine State’s too-often forgotten-or intentionally hidden-past. The result is a panorama of compelling human stories: its emergent dialogue challenges conceptions of what created and maintained The Beast.
Emancipation Betrayed by
In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations--secret societies, women's clubs, labor unions, and churches--to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz's eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.
The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida by
"The Ku Klux Klan was at least as violent in Florida as anywhere else in the nation, and the sheriffs, juries, judges, politicians, press, and citizens, for the most part, as culpable in its murderous history. [Its Florida history] is told for the first time in Michael Newton's informative account."--David Chalmers, author of Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan In vivid, comprehensive, and often grim detail, Invisible Empire charts 130 years of Ku Klux Klan activity in Florida, one of the Klan's most violent and enduring realms. Beginning with the chaotic days of Reconstruction, when Klansmen killed more than 150 victims in a single county, this important history describes the organization's influence on Florida politics and its links to modern law enforcement. From the KKK's heyday during the 1920s and 1930s, its alignment in the 1970s and 1980s with a growing crop of neo-Nazis and other cultists, and its emergence in the 1990s on the fringe of the "right-to-life" movement, Florida Klansmen have waged a constant war against progressive society. Their crimes range from petty vandalism to assassination and destruction of entire communities. Florida governors have courted Klan ballots, and high-ranking lawmen collaborated with the Klan in campaigns of arson and murder. In addition to recounting tales of violence, Newton addresses the critical question of how the hooded night riders continue to survive--a bitter, marginalized extremist movement that is still marching in what is arguably the Deep South's most progressive and ethnically diverse state. He also discusses how to curb guerrilla warfare before the Klan and its allies inaugurate a new century of terror. Michael Newton is a professional writer whose recent works include Racial and Religious Violence in America: A Chronology; The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers; and The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia, which received honorable mention awards from both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch project. He lives in Nashville, Indiana.
Florida's Minority Trailblazers by
"Saves a piece of Florida political history by narrating the personal stories of the state's 'minority trailblazers' from the civil rights movement to the present day."--Richard E. Foglesong, author of Immigrant Prince: Mel Martinez and the American Dream "Captures Florida's ongoing political transition from a 'yellow dog,' lily white state to one where diversity is beginning to make an impact on Florida politics."--Doug Lyons, former senior editorial writer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel Once one of the South's poorest and least populated states, Florida experienced a population surge during the 1960s that diversified the state and transformed it into a microcosm of the nation, but discrimination remained pervasive. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the opportunity to participate in government was finally open to previously silenced voices. Drawing primarily from personal interviews, Susan MacManus recounts the stories of fifty-one trailblazers--the first minority men and women, both Democrat and Republican--who were elected or appointed to state legislative, executive, and judicial offices and to Congress since the 1960s. She reveals what drove these leaders to enter office, how they ran their campaigns, what rewards each found during their terms, and what advice they would share with aspiring politicians. What emerges is an in-depth rendering of personal struggles--guided by opportunity, ambition, and idealism--that have made Florida the vibrant, diverse state it is today. A volume in the series Florida Government and Politics, edited by David R. Colburn and Susan A. MacManus
African Americans Confront Lynching by
This book examines African Americans' strategies for resisting white racial violence from the Civil War until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and up to the Clinton era. Christopher Waldrep's semi-biographical approach to the pioneers in the antilynching campaign portrays African Americans as active participants in the effort to end racial violence rather than as passive victims. In telling this more-than 100-year-old story of violence and resistance, Waldrep describes how white Americans legitimized racial violence after the Civil War, and how black journalists campaigned against the violence by invoking the Constitution and the law as a source of rights. He shows how, toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, anti-lynching crusaders Ida B. Wells and Monroe Work adopted a more sociological approach, offering statistics and case studies to thwart white claims that a black propensity for crime justified racial violence. Waldrep describes how the NAACP, founded in 1909, represented an organized, even bureaucratic approach to the fight against lynching. Despite these efforts, racial violence continued after World War II, as racists changed tactics, using dynamite more than the rope or the gun. Waldrep concludes by showing how modern day hate crimes continue the lynching tradition, and how the courts and grass-roots groups have continued the tradition of resistance to racial violence. A rich selection of documents helps give the story a sense of immediacy. Sources include nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of lynching, courtroom testimony of Ku Klux Klan victims, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman's 1907 defense of lynching, and the text of the first federal hate crimes law.
Rope and Faggot by
In 1926, Walter White, then assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story of an especially horrific triple lynching in Aiken, South Carolina. Aiken was White's forty-first lynching investigation in eight years. He returned to New York drained by the experience. The following year he took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope and Faggot. Ironically subtitled "A Biography of Judge Lynch," Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and is based on White's first-hand investigations. It was published in 1929. The book met two important goals for White: it debunked the "big lie" that lynching punished black men for raping white women and protected the purity of "the flower of the white race," and it provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of the lynchings. Presenting evidence of white females of all classes crossing the color line for love?evidence that white supremacists themselves used to agitate whites to support anti-miscegenation laws?White insisted that most interracial unions were consensual and not forced. Despite the emphasis on sexual issues in instances of lynching, White also argued that the fury and sadism with which mobs attacked victims had more to do with keeping blacks in their place and with controlling the black labor force. Some of the strongest sections of the book deal with White's analysis of the economic and cultural foundations of lynching. Walter White's powerful study of a shameful practice in modern American history is back in print with a new introduction by Kenneth R. Janken.
Without Sanctuary by
Gruesome photographs document the victims of lynchings and the society that allowed mob violence.
Talk That Music Talk by
Learning to play by ear is a unique part of becoming a musician in New Orleans. This life history and photography project explores the traditional methods of teaching brass band music in the city that gave birth to jazz. Through in-depth interviews, the bands, social and pleasure clubs, schools, churches, and other neighborhood institutions that have supported the music, and the spirit embodied in it, come to life.
African American Sites in Florida by
African Americans have risen from the slave plantations of nineteenth-century Florida to become the heads of corporations and members of Congress in the twenty-first century. They have played an important role in making Florida the successful state it is today. This book takes you on a tour, through the 67 counties, of the sites that commemorate the role of African Americans in Florida's history. If we can learn more about our past, both the good and the not-so-good, we can make better decisions in the future. Behind the hundreds of sites in this book are the courageous African Americans like Brevard County's Malissa Moore, who hosted many Saturday night dinners to raise money to build a church, and Miami-Dade's Gedar Walker, who built the first-rate Lyric Theater for black performers. And of course also featured are the more famous black Floridians like Zora Neale Hurston, Jackie Robinson, Mary McCleod Bethune, and Ray Charles.
Strong Inside by
Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we've come to expect from the genre. Perry Wallace's unusually insightful and honest introspection reveals his inner thoughts throughout his journey. Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended "separate but equal." As a 12-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville's lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 16, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee's first integrated state tournament--the same day Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game. The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined. On campus, he encountered the leading civil rights figures of the day, including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Kennedy--and he led Vanderbilt's small group of black students to a meeting with the university chancellor to push for better treatment. On the basketball court, he experienced an Ole Miss boycott and the rabid hate of the Mississippi State fans in Starkville. Following his freshman year, the NCAA instituted "the Lew Alcindor rule," which deprived Wallace of his signature move, the slam dunk. Despite this attempt to limit the influence of a rising tide of black stars, the final basket of Wallace's college career was a cathartic and defiant dunk, and the story Wallace told to the Vanderbilt Human Relations Committee and later The Tennessean was not the simple story of a triumphant trailblazer that many people wanted to hear. Yes, he had gone from hearing racial epithets when he appeared in his dormitory to being voted as the university's most popular student, but, at the risk of being labeled "ungrateful," he spoke truth to power in describing the daily slights and abuses he had overcome and what Martin Luther King had called "the agonizing loneliness of a pioneer."
Ocoee!: a novel by
"Ocoee!" is a powerful coming-of-age story that bears witness to an event that occurred in a small town near Orlando, Florida during the 1920 Presidential election. In response to African Americans attempting to exercise their right to vote, a mob of white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members went on a rampage through a black neighborhood, killing a number of people and burning many homes. The survivors, nearly 500 of them, fled, never to return. For more than 60 years, Ocoee became a white-only town.This fictionalized account chronicles the massacre and the events surrounding it as seen through the eyes of a spirited, young white girl, Georgia Kambel. Her diary brings to life the community and the many people involved. Her great granddaughter, Cassie, who is writing a thesis about what happened, supplements the entries with her own research, connecting the distant past to our times. What emerges is a poignant tale, filled with love, laughter, anger, violence, heartbreak and tears, and painful realizations about the deep divide of racial relations in the rural South nearly a century ago. But "Ocoee!" doesn't merely document a distressing chapter of American history. Ultimately, it is about the power of forgiveness, understanding and healing that points toward the possibility of a better future for all of us today.
Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands by
Here is one of those rare and remarkable debuts that herald the appearance of a major new talent on the literary scene. Inspired by real events, Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands is a wise and luminous story about a northern family, a southern town, and the senseless murder that sparks an extraordinary act of courage. To this day, my family is in disagreement as to precisely when the nightmare began. For me, it was the morning Daddy and Luther discovered Marvin, beaten, shot, and dying, in the Klan’s stomping grounds off Round Lake Road. My brother Ren disagrees. He points to the small cluster of scars that begin just outside his left eye and trail horizontally across his temple to the top of his ear. Ren claims it started when the men in white robes took the unprecedented step of shooting at two white children. Others say it was when Mr. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP and Mr. Hoover’s FBI came to town. Mother and Daddy shake their heads. In their minds, the real beginning was much earlier....
"NAACP Eleventh Annual Report for Year 1920"
"Yesterday, This Was Home: The Ocoee Massacre of 1920"
"Legacy of Bloody Election Day Lingers in Florida Town"
"1920 Ocoee and Beyond: Paths to Truth and Reconciliation"
"Remembering the Victims of the Ocoee Massacre"
