The History of Florida (96 page)

Simuel D. McGil , Daniel Webster Perkins, and others—all the while con-

tinued to press the race’s causes in court, a fact that threatened white leaders

seriously enough to generate a sustained, although unsuccessful, effort in

the mid-1910s to prohibit blacks from practicing law. Meanwhile, in 1909 the

proof

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had

coalesced.

The organization eschewed southern involvements at first, but this did

not forestall inquiries from Florida. By November 1915, an NAACP branch

had opened at Key West with former Monroe County sheriff Charles H.

Dupont as its president. The next year Florida-born James Weldon John-

son took over national NAACP executive duties with the aim of southern

expansion. In 1917 he opened branches at Jacksonvil e and Tampa—with

others coming in the next several years—that, at first, promised to become

centers for effective outreach. World War I ensued, however, and key lead-

ers such as Tampa’s D. W. Perkins entered the service. NAACP adherents

continued valiant efforts, but, by the late 1920s, the organization essential y

had become moribund within the state.

Into the gap stepped courageous individuals and, in particular, black

journalists. Florida had spawned scores of race newspapers since the 1870s,

even a daily at Jacksonvil e in the mid-1890s run during its brief life by James

Weldon Johnson and businessman/Republican leader Milton J. Christo-

pher. Into the late 1910s, Pensacola’s
Florida
Sentinel
, founded at Gainesville

in 1887 and published by Matthew M. Lewey, ranked particularly high in

Florida’s African American Experience: The Twentieth Century and Beyond · 459

terms of influence and reach. The opening in 1914 of the
Tampa
Bul etin
by

AME clergyman Marcel us D. Potter and his wife, Mary Ellen Davis Potter,

nonetheless marked a turning point. In building a newspaper recognized

national y for its quality, the Potters strove to represent and defend the race

vigorously and, often, courageously. Future civil rights leader Edward D.

Davis lauded Potter as “Florida’s foremost and most distinguished Negro

journalist and publisher” and cal ed the
Bul etin
“a bril iant tribute to his

genius, ability, integrity, and worth.” Davis added: “The road that he trav-

eled was by no means strewn with roses. Buffered by hostility on the one

hand, indifference and disloyalty on the other; confronted many times with

threats, intimidation, and attempted bribery, he steered a straight course; he

never wavered.”12

If Potter and other men and women like him had not been of extraordi-

nary character and capacity, conditions would have broken them. Despite

the honorable and even heroic service of thousands of black Floridians dur-

ing World War I, the Ku Klux Klan quickly entered the state with the peace

and set an agenda of race hatred under their banner of “100% American-

ism.” Thus, when July Perry and friend Mose Norman, both property own-

ers, attempted to vote at Ocoee near Orlando in November 1920, Klansmen

occupied the town, lynched Perry, likely killed Norman, burned a good part

proof

of the black community, and drove out black residents so effectively that, ac-

cording to report, no African American lived at Ocoee for the next sixty-one

years. Added one correspondent from the scene, “The white men who kil ed

[Perry] are well known, but have not been arrested.”13 All told, the Ocoee

Riot claimed the lives of two whites and at least six blacks, and it signaled

worse trouble to come. At Perry in 1922 and at Rosewood the following year,

mob violence tragical y produced needless deaths, painful dislocations, and

wanton destruction of property. Many city and county governments all the

while pursued stringent measures of racial discrimination including efforts

to ban African Americans from residence. In one il ustration, Miami as

early as 1917 had barred blacks from driving automobiles within the city

limits. When a white man’s chauffeur broke the law, locals dynamited the

Odd Fellows Hall in retribution. By 1925 the
Chicago
Defender
had labeled

fast-growing Miami as the “Hel -Hole of America.” The city was, the
De-

fender
insisted, “Where to Be Right One Must Be White.”14

In the 1920s and following decades, Klan influence extended deeply into

law enforcement and judicial circles. Consequently, as a Polk County his-

torian explained, “Increasingly, black fugitives refused to surrender and,

instead, chose to fight it out with policemen and deputies.”15 Even in police

460 · Larry Eugene Rivers

custody, black suspects might be subjected to torture of various kinds. An

incident of considerable significance arose at Pompano in 1933 where Isiah

Chambers and three other men endured three days of extremely rough

treatment at the hands of law enforcement authorities. Chambers, who

maintained his innocence but was found guilty based upon confessions

beaten from his fel ow suspects, was sentenced to death. Attorneys S. D.

McGill and Robert Crawford pressed to save Chambers’s life, only to face

rebuke from the Supreme Court of Florida. Justice Armstead Brown alone

protested that the confessions were not “freely and voluntarily made.” Even-

tual y, NCAAP attorneys Leon Ransom and Thurgood Marshall aided Mc-

Gill in taking Chambers’s cause to the U.S. Supreme Court. That tribunal’s

landmark 1940 ruling in
Chambers,
et
al.
v.
Florida
reversed the conviction

and barred the use in court of confessions derived from police torture. “We

are not impressed by the argument that law enforcement methods such as

those under review are necessary to uphold our laws,” Justice Hugo Black

wrote. “The Constitution proscribes such lawless means irrespective of the

end.”16

By the time Justice Black delivered his stinging rebuke of Florida law en-

forcement practices, the Sunshine State’s atmosphere had begun to change

insofar as the wil ingness of some black Floridians to risk everything by

proof

standing up and fighting for their cause was concerned. In 1929, at a low

point, S. D. McGill had found it essential to inspirit Florida A&M gradu-

ates confronted by desperate times. “The world which will confront you is

not an ideal world by any means,” he acknowledged. “There is much to be

done.” Stil , McGil insisted to the young men and women that they pre-

pare for bringing a better day. “Education has furnished the beacon light

of reason which is essential,” he instructed them, “to the progress of any

race.”17 Four months later, Black Thursday commenced the economic and

social slide of the Great Depression. On the other hand, for many Floridians

tough conditions had been the fact of life since 1926 if not before so they

did not feel as hard a new blow as did much of the rest of the nation. Some

segments of Florida’s economy, such as citrus, phosphate mining, and even

tourism, actual y thrived over much of the decade that came after the crash.

The novel problem confronting resident African Americans, as also was

true of state and local leaders, involved men and women, black and white,

flooding to the state for warmth and a taste of relative prosperity. Then,

with the coming in 1933 of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration,

circumstances for most slowly began to improve. The president’s New Deal

programs, though they might have been segregated by race, extended their

Florida’s African American Experience: The Twentieth Century and Beyond · 461

benefits to the black man as well as to the white. Plus, the programs brought

to black Floridians essential facilities on a scale previously unknown. The

opening at Tampa in 1938 of its new $117,000 Clara Frye Hospital, for in-

stance, launched a new era as far as improvements in black community

health standards were concerned.

Within the more optimistic atmosphere of the New Deal era, certain

black leaders endeavored once more to bring into being a statewide net-

work to afford a united front against racism and discrimination. The Odd

Fellows and the Knights of Pythias continued playing significant roles, but

the Florida State Teachers Association emerged—particularly after Edward

D. Davis of Tampa and Ocala became its president in 1935—as the most

dynamic central organizational point. Aided by teachers Harry T. Moore

and John Gilbert of Brevard County and Noah Griffin of St. Petersburg,

Davis and his allies moved to confront laws and practices that denied equal

opportunity to education for black children including equal pay for teach-

ers. Their most effective weapon proved the lawsuit, with Griffin filing the

first “equalization” suit in Pinel as County during 1937. Rejected by Florida’s

courts, the plaintiff found himself fired by the Pinel as school system.

The disappointing result of the Griffin suit led to other disappointments,

but it also furthered a separate but not unrelated effort then ongoing that

proof

would aid the cause immensely. In 1934, inspired by the sordid horror of

the
Chambers
case, Harry T. Moore and John Gilbert had breathed life into

a Brevard County NAACP branch with Moore as president. Through their

efforts, S. D. McGill was employed to represent Chambers. Now, in 1938, the

NAACP contacts led to a second equalization suit, this one filed on Gilbert’s

behalf as principal of Cocoa Junior High School. This was the first such suit

filed in the Deep South by the NAACP and served as a model for future ac-

tion. Gilbert lost as had Griffin, but a subsequent 1940 action on behalf of

Washington High School principal Vernon McDaniel of Pensacola forced a

compromise settlement. Other school boards began to recognize the inevi-

table, and district after district over the next decade found itself compelled,

voluntarily or otherwise, to address equalization.

The Escambia County victory in turn propelled Florida’s civil rights ad-

vocates to take a second unique step as far as the NAACP was concerned.

Nine branches then served the state’s residents, and it occurred to most

backers that coordinated, if not united, action was necessary. Through an

informal agreement at first, the Florida State Conference of Branches came

into being. The conference was the first of its kind in the nation. Formal

organization came in October 1941 at St. Petersburg’s Bethel Metropolitan

462 · Larry Eugene Rivers

Baptist Church. With national executive secretary Walter White having

blessed the conference’s aims, delegates selected Harry T. Moore as their

state president.

Meanwhile, actions were occurring on the local level that were breaking

ground for future advances. Peninsular towns and cities had continued to

grow, with Miami emerging as the state’s largest city. There, the Ku Klux Klan

openly strove to exercise its imposing strength. From within the Republi-

can Party, local businessmen Samuel B. Solomon and Otis Mundy, with the

Reverend John E. Culmer, in 1939 organized a black voter movement that

brought nearly 1,000 individuals to the pol s. As Miami chronicler Marvin

Dunn explained, “[This marked] the first time in Miami’s history that blacks

had made a concerted effort to register and vote.”18 Four years later, as many

thousands of Florida’s African American residents served their country in

World War II, Solomon again broke new ground. This time, as publisher of

the
Miami
Whip
, he ran for the Miami city commission as a Republican. He

lost the election but gained two-thirds of his votes from whites. Meanwhile,

attorney L. E. Thomas had put himself forward with a bid for justice of the

peace, as had Stanley Sweeting for coroner.

Others soon would fol ow the examples set by Solomon, Thomas, and

Sweeting, but mostly they did so as Democrats. The reason was a 1944 de-

proof

cision by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of
Smith
v.
Al wright
that

found the Democratic white primary to be unconstitutional. Wasting no

time, Harry T. Moore and other NCAAP officials quickly organized the

Progressive Voters’ League and launched registration drives. After state of-

ficials had blustered and fumed for a while, Attorney General J. Tom Watson

declared in November 1945 that the Florida party must comply. Arthesa D.

Griffin and S. H. Bragg thereupon entered electoral politics as candidates,

ultimately unsuccessful ones, for the Dade County school board.

Each year thereafter into the early 1950s, black voter access grew, at least

in most major towns and cities. This could be credited in part to the ac-

tions of Dade County Senator Ernest Graham, father of future governor

Bob Graham, and Senator Spessard Hol and of Polk County, who in 1937

performed what many thought of as a political miracle and achieved re-

peal of the poll tax. But, as the frequency of African Americans exercising

political and other rights grew, so, too, did opposition and racial tensions.