The History of Florida (97 page)

In some places, such as at Groveland in 1949, violence prevailed. As a testa-

ment to his character, Governor Ful er Warren sent the Florida National

Guard to Groveland at the NCAAP’s request, and, from the incident, Lake

County sheriff Willis McCall entered the realm of infamy. Four suspects in

Florida’s African American Experience: The Twentieth Century and Beyond · 463

an alleged rape of a white woman were beaten badly in his custody, while

two of the men were shot by McCall under circumstances suggesting a per-

sonal execution attempt. County voters subsequently endorsed their sheriff

by reelecting him to office every four years until 1972.

One important initiative especial y stirred racial passions. This occurred

beginning in 1949 when five black students, basing their actions on recent

and expected U.S. Supreme Court decisions, sued for admission to various

schools and colleges at the University of Florida. Virgil Hawkins, who de-

sired to study law, persisted hardest and longest despite the adamant refusal

of the Supreme Court of Florida to recognize his cause. Attempting to derail

Hawkins’s case, the state even created a law school at Florida A&M College

(raised to university status in 1953). Hawkins refused to be sidetracked by

all such diversions and for nine years fought to gain admission at Gaines-

ville. In 1958 federal district judge Dozier De Vane ordered all University

of Florida graduate programs opened to qualified black applicants, but the

law school refused Hawkins as being, in its judgment, unqualified. George

H. Starke, however, was admitted for the fall semester, and the home of the

Gators began to come to grips with the U.S. Constitution and the civil rights

era.

Unfortunately, the price in blood to be paid for the free exercise in Flor-

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ida of constitutional rights by African Americans by no means had been

satisfied by tragedies such as had occurred at Groveland. Tragical y, activist

Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette V. Moore, discovered this fact on

Christmas night 1951. Ku Klux Klansmen planted dynamite under the bed-

room floor at their home in the Brevard County community of Mims, and

with its explosion their lives abruptly were forfeited. The brutal murders

understandably shocked black and some white Floridians; yet, in doing so,

the heinous act created obstacles of abject fear on the part of many when it

came to participation in further civil rights activities.

Fear notwithstanding, the NAACP endeavored to reinvigorate the state’s

civil rights movement following the Moore murders, doing so in further-

ance of a plan to utilize Florida and Mississippi as forums for trying out

and perfecting civil rights initiatives. To head operations, the organization

tapped Tampa native Robert W. Saunders as its Florida executive director.

Saunders and his allies thereafter encountered repeated and steep hurdles

that obstructed their movement forward, even after the famous 1954 and

1955 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decisions in the case of

Brown
v.
Board
of
Education
of
Topeka,
Kansas
. The most notorious of the hurdles, except perhaps the Ku Klux Klan itself, involved the infamous Johns

464 · Larry Eugene Rivers

Committee, named after Senator and Acting Governor Charlie Johns of

Starke. A witch-hunting legislative panel that aimed to destroy the NAACP

by seizing its records and membership lists, the committee in 1957 smeared

civil rights activists as Communists and Communist dupes. Saunders and

others stonewalled the committee’s probes at the risk of their freedom but

sent all Florida records to New York for safekeeping.

Meanwhile, rights crusaders elsewhere were gaining surer footing and

pioneering new organizational structures, especial y Dr. Martin Luther

King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. One SCLC

founder was Tal ahassee’s Rev. Charles Kenzie Steele, who also associated

closely with the Florida NAACP. When in 1956 Florida A&M University

students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson refused to give their seats

on a city bus to white patrons, they were arrested and Steele found himself

in a position to help organize and sustain community protest. The Tal ahas-

see Bus Boycott followed, setting a model for action and achieving, over the

next year, a signal victory for civil rights activists in need of a win.

In the years that followed, Floridians witnessed sit-ins and public beach

wade-ins, among a myriad of other activities aimed at pushing back dis-

criminatory barriers. Highlighting the struggle, in 1960 protesters at Jack-

sonvil e’s downtown’s Hemming Park endured basebal -bat attacks at the

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hands of Klansmen. Mayor and later governor Haydon Burns had absented

himself from the city, and white policemen stood by as the violence flared.

Four years afterward, at St. Augustine, the battles resumed, but this time

they were featured throughout the nation on the televised nightly news.

The city’s quadricentennial celebration turned into a vividly panoramic

presentation of protests demanding constitutional rights being countered

by the immense power of prejudiced state and local government officials,

hate-fil ed Klansmen, and their sympathizers. Most commentators accept

that the experience contributed to passage in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act

and, the next year, of the Voting Rights Act. Those measures and the federal

authority they brought to bear final y and truly began to turn the corner

forever on Jim Crow discrimination and racial segregation.

Although the Voting Rights Act effectively nurtured registration and

voter turnout efforts, it did not assure the election of black men and women

to public office. By the time of its passage in 1965, only a very few victories

had been achieved. Worthy of remembrance, in 1962 Frank Malcolm Cun-

ningham, a Riviera Beach attorney, became the first black candidate elected

to a previously white city office (city commissioner in his case) since the

city council election at Palatka four decades earlier. Safety Harbor voters

Florida’s African American Experience: The Twentieth Century and Beyond · 465

fol owed two years later by placing Wil iam Blackshear on their commis-

sion. Although not in an elected office, James W. Matthews meanwhile re-

ceived appointment as assistant United States attorney for South Florida.

Four more years would elapse before Joe Lang Kershaw, the grandson of a

Reconstruction-era AME minister and community leader, became in 1968

the first black legislator since 1889. Gwendolyn Cherry took honors as the

first African American woman to sit in the Florida House in 1970. A dozen

years then passed before Carrie P. Meek entered the Florida Senate. A de-

cade more saw Meek, Corrine Brown, and Alcee Hastings elected to the U.S.

Congress, following in the path last trod for Florida by Josiah Wal s in 1876.

African Americans also began to serve in statewide offices, although they

initial y did so by appointment rather than election. Joseph W. Hatchett thus

claimed a seat on the Supreme Court of Florida in 1975 thanks to Governor

Bob Graham; one year later he kept the seat, however, becoming the first

black candidate to win election to that tribunal. In 1979, Justice Hatchett

achieved yet another distinction, becoming the first black judge to sit on a

federal court of appeals in the South. Jesse J. McCrary the previous year had

accepted the position of secretary of state, while former FAMU law profes-

sor Leander Shaw joined the Florida Supreme Court in 1983. He served as

chief justice from 1990 to 1992. Governor Lawton Chiles, in the latter year,

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additional y designated Doug Jamerson as state commissioner of educa-

tion. Jonathan C. Gibbs, his immediate African American predecessor, had

served during 1873–74 in the administrations of Governors Ossian Bingley

Hart and Marcel us Stearns.

The gains scored by Florida’s African Americans during the civil rights

era, as mentioned previously, came at a cost. The destruction of segrega-

tion barriers took a heavy toll on black businessmen and destroyed thriving

black business districts in cities of consequential size. The deterioration of

federal y financed housing projects, urban renewal, and the construction

of the interstate highway system contributed to breaking up historic urban

centers of African American life and culture. The changing dynamics of

the agriculture industry had purged most black owners and workers, leav-

ing migrant workers—often of foreign origins—to capitalize on the need

for seasonal manual labor required on the farm. Attempts to secure true

integration of public education in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought

resistance and, in more than a few places, violence onto their campuses and

into school corridors. Governor Claude Kirk boldly manipulated such con-

ditions for his political advantage, actual y seizing control of the Manatee

County school system until a federal judge convinced him to rethink his

466 · Larry Eugene Rivers

Florida’s first African American Supreme Court justice, Joseph W. Hatchett, of Pinellas

County, poses with his family prior to taking the bench for the first time, 2 September

1975. Hatchett resigned from the court four years later in order to accept an appoint-

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ment to the Federal Court of Appeals.

ill-advised action. Passions and frustrations simmered within much of the

African American community, and they boiled over from time to time in

the cities. Most notoriously, Overtown and Liberty City in Miami exploded

in 1980 into what has been called one of the worse race riots in United States

history.

At the twentieth century’s turn and into the twenty-first century, the

picture for Florida’s African Americans remained a complicated one. Black

entrepreneurs possessed the opportunity to enjoy the generous fruits of free

enterprise, and a solid middle class lived a version of the American dream in

every part of the state. Gone were the shackles of Jim Crow discrimination

and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan. The law no longer limited advance-

ment. Stil , the picture evidenced less desirable aspects. To a community

struggling to find rewarding employment opportunities, the first decade of

the new century brought two recessions, the second of which approached

conditions of the Great Depression and devastated the Sunshine State’s

economy. Thousands lost their homes through defaulted mortgages; others

Florida’s African American Experience: The Twentieth Century and Beyond · 467

through killer hurricanes. Meanwhile, within the state a political revolution

had occurred in the late 1990s that ushered in a Republican Party ascen-

dency in state government and the subsequent marginalization of black po-

litical strength on the statewide level. Local, state, and national budget cuts

raised the costs of education and training by considerable and, for many,

prohibitive amounts. The election of a black president, Barack Obama, in

2008 brought joy, as did the fact that Florida added its electoral votes to his

total. However, the reaction to President Obama by some whites in Florida

and other southern states brought to the surface what many saw as renewed

racism.

Looking forward, the community yearned for better understanding of

its heritage, its successes, the price that had to be paid for what should have

been guaranteed by law and constitution, and its enormous potential. In a

sense, the gist of the thinking of many in 2010 reflected that of a Jacksonville

man in 1901. Writing of the upcoming state fair, he had this to say about

achievement, understanding, and ambition: “A large number of creditable

exhibits in the colored department of the Florida State Fair wil prove to

the public that the large population of this people in Florida are more than

dependents, void of a knowledge of the means of honorable livelihood,

without industrial ambition, simply a mass from which numerous public

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evils emanate.” He added hopeful y, “The fairest dealing will be given every