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chapter one The Illusion of Moderation A Recounting and Reassessing of FloridaÕs Racial Past Marvin Dunn Scholars and laypersons alike have argued that the civil rights movement in Florida was neither as violent nor as attenuated as it was in other states of the Old South. It is also generally accepted that the “Yankee factor” and the leadership of Governor LeRoy Collins (1955–1961) were major factors in the “relatively minor” white resistance to racial integration in the Sunshine State. What most people often overlook, however, is that blacks actually died in the Sunshine State as a consequence of white resistance to racial progress and that Florida’s state and local leadership may not have been as moderate as is generally recorded in the literature. Perhaps the civil rights struggle in Florida did not produce sustained headlines in the national media, but it did, nevertheless, reflect pioneering black actions and troubling racial issues that scarred neighboring Deep South states in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, a premise of this recounting of Florida’s racial past is that white resistance to desegregation, often including violence and stalling tactics, ran deep and long in Florida’s past and that blacks largely overcame that burden through homegrown leadership and grassroots movements. A further premise of this study is that white reactionaries in the Sunshine State seldom “saw the light,” as has been often portrayed in the histories of the era. Rather, civil rights momentum characteristically resulted from black activism and resistance arising within the state, particularly in the period after the Second World War. The movements were often stimulated by both local issues and external forces, such as decisions from federal illusion of moderation 23 courts, national civil rights measures, and, possibly, the arrival of northern whites (the “Yankee factor”) from more progressive regions of the country, especially to the central and southern sections of the peninsula. However, even as Florida became less Old South in habits and, presumably, more New South in values, Jim Crow patterns persisted in the state. In this light, the sweeping generalization that Florida was a “moderate” state, notably dissimilar from the other states of the region in the era of civil rights, is problematic and invites a reassessment. North Florida politicians, who controlled the state political machine during the Jim Crow era, kept the Sunshine State a true son of the Confederacy. Indeed, they opposed racial integration in any form until compelled to yield by homegrown activism or by federal authority. Although far removed from the other population regions and assumed segregation centers of the state, North Florida typified the full range of Jim Crow mentality and measures that rang throughout Florida. It is often presumed that Florida’s regionalism (Pensacola is almost as far from Key West as it is from Chicago) and its particular brand of constitutional government, combined with the presumed Yankee factor, worked historically to temper the Sunshine State’s endemic racism. The actual historical record of this former Confederate state and its much-vaunted “moderate” leaders like LeRoy Collins may well belie that notion. As civil rights protests swept the country in the 1950s, Governor LeRoy Collins walked a tightrope between the North Florida conservatives, often-reactionary politicians termed “Pork Choppers,” and the growing regional internal and external pressures to move Florida into a more progressive profile. Collins must have recognized the looming death of Jim Crow in the state. In his first race for governor in 1954, against the archetypical racist Charley Johns, Collins declared his own commitment to segregation. He triumphed over Johns in the “lily-white” Democratic primary, and then trounced his Republican opponent with nearly 80 percent of the vote, most likely because of his image as a progressive candidate calling for a modernization of his state.1 For Collins, modernization was a complex subject, but it did not include dismantling Florida’s racial divides. Consequently, from the Panhandle to Tampa Bay through Central Florida and into the rapidly growing MiamiFort Lauderdale regions, the national civil rights movement found few public partisans in the Sunshine State, including high-profile, “progressive” Gov. Leroy Collins. In the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools, most public officials in Florida either ignored the Court mandate or openly defied it. In Tallahassee, Collins himself declared that, “Florida was just as determined as any other Southern state to maintain segregation.” He labeled Brown “a cruel hoax on the...

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