OLD SOUTH, NEW SOUTH, OR DOWN SOUTH?: FLORIDA AND THE MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments The subject of these essays has long intrigued me. For over twenty years I have explored, taught, and written about Florida’s complex history, and throughout that time the “big question” addressed in this volume has loomed over my collective work: How did a state with such a profoundly racist and violent past emerge in the modern civil rights era with a “moderate” reputation among its one-time Confederate peers? Certainly, Florida’s history of race relations was sometimes at variance with those of its neighbors, but just as assuredly, the Sunshine State embraced, manifested, and perpetuated all the insidious practices associated with white supremacy. Indeed, it even surpassed other southern states in expressions of Negrophobia such as lynching. How, then, I asked, did the proverbial Sunshine State surmount this burden of history following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954? As this drive began to consume my intellectual endeavors, I came to realize that a comprehensive re-contextualizing of Florida’s racial “images, illusions, and realities” demanded a collective rather than individual effort. While I could produce a volume testing and rethinking the model, I could not alone imbue that study with the richly textured local and state experiences needed to produce both macro- and micro-examinations of the subject. As a result, this book brings together the musings of a group of scholars on selected locales and actions. The contributors present findings that transcend the ability of a single historian to discuss Florida’s remarkable geographic focus. Admittedly, there are more settings and issues (gender, for example) of the expansive Sunshine State that need to be discussed. The Introduction establishes the theoretical framework for this volume and briefly traces some of the significant events and interpretations contributing to Florida’s often presumed exceptionalism (in both the relevant scholarship, and vernacular and journalism of the state). It is not my intention to reinforce or debunk conventional understanding, ii winsboro but rather to establish a fresh and richer perspective of the Sunshine State’s racial legacy. I propose that a people’s memories of past events may sometimes be at odds with the conventional narratives of those events. Readers of this anthology must be aware that image, illusion, and reality work both individually and collectively to influence memories and the recording of events. Building on this foundation, Professor Marvin Dunn traces the Sunshine State’s Old South racial habits and violence through the post-World War II era. Dunn, author of Black Miami in the Twentieth Century, presents an important and sometimes provocative perspective on the indelible role that white supremacy and black agency played in molding Florida’s racial character, even as the transforming events of modern civil rights swept the rest of the nation. In Dunn’s words, “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 reassessment.” Abel A. Bartley, a scholar of Pan-African studies, documents and describes the same sort of subjugation, violence, and stonewalling of the civil rights agenda on a local level in Jacksonville. In particular, Bartley probes Florida’s propensity towards racial violence by exploring the 1960 and 1964 race riots in Jacksonville, disturbing events that heretofore have largely escaped analysis within the context of the civil rights struggle. Bartley concludes, “Florida’s African Americans suffered the same racial prejudice [and violence] that other black southerners faced.” “It changed it all,” a black teacher in Lee County proclaimed when recalling the new federal powers growing out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My essay puts under a microscope the little-discussed “brotherhood of defiance” exercised by the state leaders in Tallahassee and the local jurisdictions across the state regarding the desegregation of public schools. Using Lee County as a case study, I provide a window on the depth and breadth of the state-local interaction in efforts to prevent desegregation of the county’s public schools. Indeed, Lee County did not implement total and meaningful desegregation until 1969, and then only under federal court order. The ruses that Tallahassee fashioned and Lee County adopted worked all too well for all too long. While this type of event played out in many localities of the Sunshine State, Lee County provides one felicitous example of just how effective the Down South brotherhood of stonewalling was. The “hidden” tragedy of this is the fact...