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WORK TITLE: Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://tamekabradleyhobbs.com/
CITY: Hollywood
STATE: FL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.fmuniv.edu/staff/dr-tameka-bradley-hobbs/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/tameka-bradley-hobbs-7064395/ * http://www.youbelongtome.net/tameka-bradley-hobbs-phd/ * http://upf.com/book.asp?id=HOBBS001 * http://jacksonville.com/entertainment/literature/2015-11-28/story/book-review-democracy-abroad-lynching-home-racial-violence
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Live Oak, FL.
EDUCATION:Florida A&M University, B.A.; Florida State University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Researcher, teacher, and historian. Teacher at Florida A&M University; Virginia State University in Petersburg, VA; and John Tyler Community College, in Chester, VA; Florida Memorial University, Miami Gardens, FL, assistant professor of history, 2011-, interim chair of the Department of Social Sciences; John G. Riley Museum and Center of African American History and Culture, Tallahassee, FL, Director of Projects and Program.
AWARDS:Florida Book Award for Florida Nonfiction, Bronze; and Florida Historical Society’s Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Award, both for Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Researcher, historian, consultant, and teacher Tameka Bradley Hobbs writes about Reconstruction and lynchings in Florida. She is assistant professor of history at Florida Memorial University, and has taught American, African American, oral history, and public history at Florida A&M University; Virginia State University in Petersburg; and John Tyler Community College, in Chester, Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history and historical administration from Florida State University. Hobbs has also worked as a researcher, writer, and consultant on various oral history projects in Florida and Virginia, including the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. She was also Director of Projects and Program for the John G. Riley Museum and Center of African American History and Culture, located in Tallahassee, Florida.
In 2014, Hobbs wrote the afterward for After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-era Florida. The book collects twenty-three autobiographical articles on the life of African American publisher, editor, and journalist, T. Thomas Fortune, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born a slave in Florida, Fortune writes about his childhood; disillusion with post-Civil War Florida; Jim Crow-era racial discrimination and violence; his founding of the National Afro-American League, the predecessor to the NAACP; and his role in encouraging the Great Migration of blacks out of the South.
Hobbs next wrote the 2015 Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida, winner of the Florida Book Award for Florida Nonfiction, Bronze, and winner of the Florida Historical Society’s Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Award. The book traces the Civil Rights movement in Florida using four cases of lynchings as catalysts. Although considered progressive and culturally diverse, Florida had the distinction in the Jim Crow era as having the most number of lynchings per black resident in the Deep South. Hobbs analyzes anti-black violence that culminated in the 1940s and explores reasons for why Florida had the most lynchings, especially when the number of lynchings were decreasing elsewhere.
Ironically, during World War II, when America was trying to broaden and promote the ideals of democracy abroad, it failed to provide legal protection to its own African American citizens at home. As Americans heard about America’s goal of defeating fascism and protecting democracy abroad, lynching at home became an embarrassment that undermined democratic values. Eventually, the voices of protesters were heard, and calls to condemn lynching and prosecute lynchers in newspaper editorial pages and national media were beginning to be heard in Congress. Surprisingly, it was white shame and embarrassment that led to the reduction in lynchings, rather than the moral belief of justice for all citizens, and idea that perpetuates the ideology of white supremacy.
Hobbs chronicles this shifting political viewpoint through the lynchings of four African American men and boys in Florida, between 1941 and 1945: Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne. Writing in Journal of Southern History, Mari N. Crabtree noted: “Hobbs also provides valuable insights into the devastating impact of lynching on African American families and communities over the past seventy-five years. With so much of the literature on lynching focused on white southerners, her interviews with African American survivors provide a poignant and, at times, gut-wrenching glimpse into the intergenerational trauma of lynching.” On H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Brandon T. Jett commented that Hobbs’ book “is an important contribution to the field of legal history. While previous scholars have suggested that extralegal justice gave way to formal and institutionalized methods of due process by the 1930s, Hobbs reminds readers that this transformation was not ubiquitous.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Mari N. Crabtree, review of Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home, p. 950.
ONLINE
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (August 7, 2017), Brandon T. Jett, review of Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home.
Tameka Bradley Hobbs Website, http://tamekabradleyhobbs.com/ (August 1, 2017), author profile.*
TAMEKA BRADLEY HOBBS, PH.D.
“I am Tameka Bradley Hobbs. I am a professor of history as Florida Memorial University, but I was born and bred in Live Oak, Florida in Suwannee County.”
“It was in the 1930’s that the Florida state legislature officially adopted Stephen Foster's "Way Down on the Suwanee River/Old Folks at Home" as the state song of Florida.”
“Songs like Stephen Foster's song kind of play into that idea that when you have, as depicted in the lyrics of that song, an old black man in his later years wishing and longing for his days on a plantation, that is very self-serving on the part of the of the white society here in the state of Florida. Uh, and we see that being repeated time and time again. In Virginia, the state song is "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," which has some of these same, themes in it.”
“So I think it is very disingenuous, very self-serving for these state governments to adopt these songs and place them before the public as something that celebrates an inaccurate depiction of the past.”
“I do believe that African Americans find this painful. There's been several campaigns to try to remove that song and make it so that it is not the official state song of Florida, replace it with something that would be more amenable and less painful to African Americans.”
“You have a state song, what it says when the legislature is endorsing the lyrics of this song, and the lyrics of that song romanticize a period in time when men and women were bought and sold like animals at auction, how can you reconcile that? How is that okay? How can we continue to live under a situation like that?”
"White decimate the all-black township of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 following a false accusation of rape made by a white woman. Lynching is at its height. An African American living in Florida had the greatest chance of getting lynched of any black person in the nation. It is a very difficult time to be black in Florida."
“Ruby McCollum stood on a pedestal, and that pedestal was built on bolita money. That was a very precarious position to occupy.”
“Ruby McCollum had things that very few black women in the South had. She had education, she had financial stability, and she even had prestige. But none of that mattered in that courtroom. All of her achievements, all of her hard work faded away the moment that she decided to take that gun into her hands and shoot Doc Adams.”
“The lifestyle that Ruby McCollum was able to enjoy was remarkable for a woman of her race. While many other African American women had no choice but to work in the fields, or to work in other peoples' kitchens, or to wash white folks' dirty clothes, this woman was able to live in a fantastic house with fine furnishings. She was able to buy the best and latest clothing for herself and her children. She was able to send her son, Sam Jr., to be educated at UCLA in California. All of these things put her high upon a pedestal, all of which was provided by both the legal and illegal income streams generated by her husband, Sam.”
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“The jury was not simply judging Ruby McCollum for the crime of murder. There was a larger scandal that they would have been thinking about that day. Ruby McCollum was responsible for throwing the lid off something that most Southerners had tried to keep secret, and that was despite all the pronouncements about white superiority and black inferiority, that it was common knowledge that there were relationships, friendships, sexual and otherwise, that crossed this color line.”
“And the revelations in that courtroom, all because of Ruby McCollum's actions, were challenging that and bringing into the open air Southern hypocrisy.”
“This is a huge story. How is it that the negro, who is known to be involved in the illegal bolita racket, is able to walk around, flaunting his wealth, and escape being arrested. The white power structure in Suwannee County is livid, and they answers. And specifically, they want answers from Sheriff Howell. How is it that he has not yet arrested Sam McCollum? How is it that he has not yet arrested Bolita Sam?”
“A larger question here is were whites involved in bolita? It's hard to imagine that a black man would have been able to operate at such a high level and not have any support from the white establishment in the city. And one of the names that keeps coming up over and over again is the name of Dr. Clifford Leroy Adams.”
“There's a link between Bolita Sam and Doc Adams. That common link happens to be Charles Hall. Charles Hall is known to work as a driver for both men, and it's also well-known that Charles Hall is deeply involved in the bolita operation along with Sam McCollum.”
“Who was the other fellow that was supposed to pay the other part of that bill? Every witness remembers Ruby asking that question, but the prosecution never asked about it.”
“Even though Ruby was being moved out of Suwannee County for her own safety, that did not end the trouble. It was common practice in situations like this that when white mobs couldn't get their hands on their main target, that they would turn around and victimize the African American community. Sam McCollum knew this, and he knew he had to get his small children out of town for their own safety and protection. He was able to go into the home, by what means we're unsure, but he is able to leave with a suitcase full of money, his children and some clothes for them. And he takes off, out of Live Oak.”
“Back in Live Oak, every black person feared retaliation.”
“Rumors began to swirl in the days after the murder. People insinuated that it was more than a doctor's bill that was at the base of this controversy. A renowned African American writer is going to come in an attempt to get to the bottom of this case.”
“Meaning, that when enslaved black women gave birth to children who may have been fathered or were fathered by free white men, those children still held the status of slaves.”
“During the period that we're looking at, it would have been incredibly difficult for a black woman to press charges against a white man for rape. And historically looking at this, from the Antebellum time period forward, legally there was no such thing as the rape of a black woman. She was property.”
“There had been for generations mixed-race children with very bright skin, white skin, some of them able to pass for white who had cropped up in various neighborhoods and various communities across the South. This situation I think would be a little different in the fact that, first and foremost, Loretta by all accounts looked a lot like her father, so just visually it was very difficult for anyone to escape or deny that this was Doc Adams' child."
Tameka Bradley Hobbs
Interim Chair, Department of Social Sciences, Assistant Professor of History, Florida Memorial University
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I interviewed a candidate yesterday and can't get him out of my head. He wasn't a rock star, purple squirrel, or any other absurd term. He didn't wow me or change my world view. He did, however, leave an impression. He was forthcoming, honest, articulate, and lit up when he talked about the things he was passionate about. He seemed very genuine to me. When I was filling out the interview forms, I began to compare him to others that I've interviewed and in turn to doubt myself about whether or not to push him forward. After talking with one of the other interviewers (Stephanie Hinten), we came to the same conclusion: he's not earth-shattering, but there's something there. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it will become. I don't know if I made the right decision with pushing him forward. But my gut tells me he's special. We had him meet with a director and that director felt it (or something like it) too. So we offered him the job. We don't know how this will turn out, but we know he's worth a shot and possibly much more. We have to stop putting people side by side and instead let them stand alone. We have to see them for who they are outside of what we want them to be. We need to be willing to take chances on people. I'm excited to see if we're right about him.
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Florida Memorial University
Interim Chair, Department of Social Sciences
Company NameFlorida Memorial University
Dates EmployedAug 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs
University Press of Florida
Author, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida
Company NameUniversity Press of Florida
Dates EmployedAug 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs
Hobbs unearths four lynchings that are critical to the understanding of the origins of civil rights in Florida. The oral histories from the victims' families and those in the communities make this a valuable contribution to African American, Florida, and civil rights history."--Derrick E. White, author of The Challenge of Blackness
"A compelling reminder of just how troubling and violent the Sunshine State's racial past has been. A must read."--Irvin D.S. Winsboro, editor of Old South, New South, or Down South?
Florida is frequently viewed as an atypical southern state--more progressive and culturally diverse--but, when examined in proportion to the number of African American residents, it suffered more lynchings than any of its Deep South neighbors during the Jim Crow era.
Investigating this dark period of the state's history and focusing on a rash of anti-black violence that took place during the 1940s, Tameka Hobbs explores the reasons why lynchings continued in Florida when they were starting to wane elsewhere. She contextualizes the murders within the era of World War II, contrasting the desire of the United States to broadcast the benefits of its democracy abroad while at home it struggled to provide legal protection to its African American citizens.
As involvement in the global war deepened and rhetoric against Axis powers heightened, the nation's leaders became increasingly aware of the blemish left by extralegal violence on America's reputation. Ultimately, Hobbs argues, the international implications of these four murders, along with other antiblack violence around the nation, increased pressure not only on public officials in Florida to protect the civil rights of African Americans in the state but also on the federal government to become more active in prosecuting racial violence.
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Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: University Press of Florida
Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: University Press of Florida
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Florida Memorial University
Assistant Professor of History
Company NameFlorida Memorial University
Dates EmployedAug 2012 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs
LocationMiami Gardens, Florida
I instruct classes in African American History, United States History, and Women's History.
Documentary "You Belong To Me: Sex, Race, Murder, in the South"
Narrator
Company NameDocumentary "You Belong To Me: Sex, Race, Murder, in the South"
Dates EmployedJan 2014 – Dec 2014 Employment Duration12 mos
August 3, 1952. Live Oak, Florida, the heart of the Jim Crow South.
11:34 AM.
Ruby McCollum, age 42, shoots State Senator-elect, Dr. Clifford LeRoy Adams, firing her .32-caliber revolver four times into his body, before going home and warming a bottle of milk for her baby daughter. What began as a bizarre murder case quickly turned into a bright light on the rotting underbelly of the Old South.
Ruby McCollum was the wealthiest black woman in Suwannee County, Florida. She lived in one of Live Oak's finest homes. Her husband, Sam, ran the local numbers racket, owned several farms, and sat on the board of Florida's largest black life insurance company. They were church going, upstanding members of the community. Their eldest son had been accepted to UCLA. Murdering the most powerful white man in the town over a doctor's bill would seem the least-likely crime she might commit.
With unprecedented cooperation from the McCollum and Adams families, some speaking on the record for the first time, along with several of Florida and Live Oak's civic leaders, historians and academics, You Belong To Me explores and rips the veil off hidden practices. The film exposes the truth of what it meant to be an African American in the Jim Crow South and the long road to healing.
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Florida Memorial University
Visiting Professor of History
Company NameFlorida Memorial University
Dates EmployedAug 2011 – Jul 2012 Employment Duration1 yr
I instruct classes in African American History, U. S. History, and Women's History.
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Education
Florida State University
Florida State University
Degree Name M.A., Ph.D. Field Of Study History
Dates attended or expected graduation 1999 – 2004
Activities and Societies: President, Black Graduate Student Association
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
Degree Name BA Field Of Study History/Anthropology
Dates attended or expected graduation 1993 – 1996
Activities and Societies: Student Senate
Accomplishments
Tameka Bradley has 6 publications6
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Publications
Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida Opinion: Can Live Oak Overcome Its History of Racism? Opinion - Throwing Shade: How Black Women Use Social Media to Deflect Pain After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-Era Florida Contributor, Afrikan American Women: Living at the Crossroads of Race, Gender, Class, and Culture Junebug and the Gumbo Garden
Tameka Bradley has 2 projects2
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Florida Memorial University Archival Development Project Shaping the Constitution
Tameka Bradley has 1 organization1
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Organization
Association of Black Women Historians
Dr. Tameka Bradley Hobbs
Dr. Tameka Bradley HobbsDr. Tameka Bradley Hobbs is a native of Live Oak, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University where she earned her doctoral degree in United States History, and Historical Administration and Public History. She has taught courses in American, African American, oral history, and public history at Florida A&M University, Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia, and John Tyler Community College, in Chester, Virginia. In addition to her teaching experience, she has served as a researcher, writer, consultant, and director for a number of public and oral history projects in Florida and Virginia, including the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. Her professional experience includes serving as Director of Projects and Program for the John G. Riley Museum and Center of African American History and Culture, located in Tallahassee, Florida. After relocating to Virginia, between 2006 and 2007, Hobbs worked as the historian and coordinator of the Valentine Richmond History Center’s Richmond History Gallery Project.
From 2007 to 2011, Hobbs worked as Program and Education Manager for the Library of Virginia, where she coordinated the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. In 2011, she authored a children’s book about the Library of Virginia entitled To Collect, Protect, and Serve: Behind the Scenes at the Library of Virginia.
Hobbs joined the faculty of Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens, Florida, in August of 2011. In 2012 and 2013, she participated in the “Route to Our Roots: The Power of a Greater Vision” Lecture Series, sponsored by the John G. Riley Center and Museum of African American History and Culture and the Florida Humanities Council for the Viva Florida 500 observance of the state’s quincentennial. Her book, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida will be published by the University Press of Florida in August 2015.
About Dr. Hobbs
home / about dr. hobbs
Tameka Bradley Hobbs is a graduate of Florida A&M University (B.A., History) and Florida State University, where she earned her doctoral degree in United States History, and Historical Administration and Public History. She has taught courses in American, African American, oral history, and public history at Florida A&M University, Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia, and John Tyler Community College, in Chester, Virginia.
In addition to her teaching experience, she has served as a researcher, writer, consultant, and director for a number of public and oral history projects in Florida and Virginia, including the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. Her professional experience includes serving as Director of Projects and Program for the John G. Riley Museum and Center of African American History and Culture, located in Tallahassee, Florida.
After relocating to Virginia, between 2006 and 2007, Hobbs worked as the historian and coordinator of the Valentine Richmond History Center’s Richmond History Gallery Project. From 2007 to 2011, Hobbs worked as Program and Education Manager for the Library of Virginia, where she coordinated the African American Trailblazers in Virginia History Program, a statewide educational program focused on celebrating African American History. In 2011, she authored a children’s book about the Library of Virginia entitled To Collect, Protect, and Serve: Behind the Scenes at the Library of Virginia.
Hobbs joined the faculty of Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens, Florida, in August of 2011, and currently serves at Interim Chair of the Department of Social Sciences and as University Historian. Her book, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida was published in August 2015 by the University Press of Florida.
Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida
Mari N. Crabtree
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p950.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida. By Tameka Bradley Hobbs. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. xiv, 273. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6104-7.)
Time and again the American public has been moved less by moral appeals and the plight of the disempowered and more by political expediency. In the Jim Crow era, the families of lynching victims understood the difficulty of reaching the nation's conscience, as did antilynching activists who spent decades unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to pass federal antilynching legislation. On the cusp of World War II, however, the scales of public opinion tilted, and calls to condemn lynching and prosecute lynchers finally issued from the White House, the national press, and even the editorial pages of southern newspapers.
In Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida, Tameka Bradley Hobbs argues that the geopolitical context of World War II accounts for not only the shift in public opinion on lynching but also the decline in the number of lynchings. As the United States waged a war abroad ostensibly to defeat fascism and protect democracy, more Americans came to see lynching as an embarrassing anachronism that undermined the democratic values of the United States as well as the war effort. Hobbs traces this shifting political landscape through the lynchings of four African American men and boys in Florida, all killed between 1941 and 1945: Arthur C. Williams, Cellos
Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne. Even in wartime, well-worn lynching tropes cropped up again--false accusations of rape, the need to keep African Americans in their "place," and claims that the courts were too lenient on black criminals. However, with reports that Japanese and Nazi propagandists were using lynchings to expose the hypocrisy of American democracy, Florida governors grudgingly gave in to national pressure to investigate lynchings in the state. Communities where lynchings took place went through the motions of investigations, grand juries, and trials, but white juries and local residents continued to insulate negligent sheriffs and suspected lynchers from serious punishments. Rather than eliminating racialized violence against African Americans, this outside pressure drove lynching deeper into the secretive realm of private mobs and gave rise to "legal lynchings" of African Americans (p. 203).
Hobbs also provides valuable insights into the devastating impact of lynching on African American families and communities over the past seventy-five years. With so much of the literature on lynching focused on white southerners, her interviews with African American survivors provide a poignant and, at times, gut-wrenching glimpse into the intergenerational trauma of lynching. These interviews also give expression to a countermemory of lynching that challenges the tendency of white southerners to silence this history.
Hobbs's work on Florida largely confirms what W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jonathan Rosenberg, and others have argued regarding the domestic and foreign policy factors that caused lynching to decline after the 1920s. However, Hobbs makes these arguments without delving into what it means for a nation, founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and justice, to be guided by political expediency instead of those principles. When white shame and embarrassment rather than a commitment to justice animate social change, the underlying ideology of white supremacy remains intact. Moreover, this historical moment between 1941 and 1945 remains particularly prescient today. As the United States struggles over a spate of highly publicized police shootings involving African American victims, the unheeded lessons of the past return to haunt us, for this nation will never escape this progression from one mechanism of racial oppression to another until collectively the value of black lives and racial justice propel social change.
MARI N. CRABTREE
College of Charleston
Crabtree, Mari N.
Jett on Hobbs, 'Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida'
Author:
Tameka B. Hobbs
Reviewer:
Brandon T. Jett
Tameka B. Hobbs. Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 288 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-6104-7.
Reviewed by Brandon T. Jett (University of Florida)
Published on H-Law (February, 2016)
Commissioned by Michael J. Pfeifer
Lynchings in Florida in the 1940s
Lynchings occurred with frightening frequency throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as white mobs ranging in size from a few individuals to thousands of onlookers tortured, shot, hung, and burned thousands of African Americans for challenging their subordinate status throughout the United States. By most accounts, lynching essentially ceased or at the very least significantly declined by the 1930s; however Tameka Bradley Hobbs demonstrates that in North Florida lynchings continued well into the mid-1940s. By documenting the lynchings of Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne, the author illustrates the longevity of lynchings in Florida, argues that World War II and the emerging Cold War shaped the response to these lynchings, and most interestingly, demonstrates how the narratives and memories of these events continue to affect black communities in these regions.
As previous scholars have demonstrated, Floridians lynched black Americans with as much frequency as many of their counterparts in neighboring states, but Hobbs stresses that lynchings continued in Florida much longer than almost everywhere else in the country.[1] Despite the persistence, the nature of lynching had changed. Florida lynch mobs in 1940s looked different than the spectacle lynchings of the turn of the century. According to Hobbs, “the extralegal murders of Williams, Harrison, Howard, and Payne confirm trends about the decline and change in extralegal violence during the mid-twentieth century” (p. 201). Each of the lynchings was carried out in the middle of the night by secretive and small assemblages of local whites. While lynching in the 1940s looked much different from mob violence at the turn of the century, the results remained the same. African Americans who challenged white supremacy or violated southern customs of etiquette were denied due process and died at the hands of white lynch mobs.
Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home is not so much a study of the causes of lynching in 1940s Florida, but is instead more concerned with the reactions, both local and national, that each lynching garnered. By placing her study in an international context, Hobbs contributes to the emerging trend within the historiography that seeks to understand lynching and mob violence in relation to global trends.[2] “The new international aims of the U.S. government,” Hobbs claims, “dramatically impacted the ability of vigilantes in the South to continue to abuse and subjugate African Americans with impunity. The nation, and the world, was watching, and these realities demanded change if America was to claim the mantle of the world’s greatest democracy” (p. 4). Following America’s entrance into World War II, lynching proved a startling contradiction as the government attempted to portray itself as the defender of democracy while southern whites denied that right to African Americans at home. After each of these lynchings, local whites continued to support the actions of the mobs, but it was the public outrage from places around the country and threats of federal investigations of these vigilante actions that Hobbs believes is most significant. Following the lynching of Jesse James Payne in 1945, for instance, agents from the Department of Justice and the FBI investigated the circumstances surrounding the abduction of Payne from local authorities. Although the investigation closed and no one faced prosecution, federal intervention, Hobbs contends, “sent a clear message that the federal government would involve itself in the fight to stamp out lynching violence” (p. 173). Due to the change in national perception of lynchings and the federal government’s newfound interest in thwarting mob violence, lynchings in Florida came to an end.
While Hobbs’s contention regarding the change in national perception of lynching is well supported, the impact of those broader changes on local and state officials needs to be better explicated. Although people across the country denounced the lynching of Jesse James Payne in 1945 and the federal government opened an investigation into the lynching, Governor Millard F. Caldwell did not remove local law enforcement officials from office and even refused to acknowledge that Payne had been lynched. As Hobbs writes,, “all of the news articles, telegrams, phone calls, and other expressions of outrage and appeals for justice came to naught” (p. 174). The federal investigation never brought charges against anyone, local law enforcement officials remained in their positions of power, and, according to a contemporary observation in the Tampa Tribune, Governor Caldwell “enjoys today much higher esteem, confidence, and respect from the people of Florida than he did in the early days of his administration” (p. 186). While the decline of lynching and the change in national perception of the America’s role in the world were clearly related, in each of the case studies examined by Hobbs no members of the lynch mobs or local officials faced punishment; outside of one failed investigation in 1945, the federal government did little to combat mob violence; and the families of the victims received no form of compensation. While the language used to discuss and combat lynching may have changed due to the United States’ new role in international politics, for black and white residents of these rural counties in North Florida, what changed?
Hobbs is at her most compelling when discussing the ways African American communities in North Florida continue to grapple with the lynchings she examined. Despite reports in the white press and in local legal proceedings, Hobbs suggests that African Americans maintained and circulated their own interpretation of the lynchings, often crafting a narrative that maintained the innocence of the black victim. She states, “Despite attempts to suppress discussions of [lynchings] in the African American community, blacks kept these stories alive, sharing and retelling the tale in churches, in living rooms, and in schools, on front porches, and in the fields” (p. 150). While far from adequate justice for the atrocities these victims faced, black narratives allowed the African American community to “exercise control over, and extract cultural value from, the memory of instances of white brutality” (p. 218). She also speaks to the continuing fear and suspicion that permeate black communities that witnessed a lynching. Hobbs located relatives of lynching victims and conducted interviews with some of them, while others remained uninterested in conjuring up these past family tragedies. Her impressive efforts in documenting the effect of racial violence on black families and communities into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries emphasizes the “long-lasting climate of fear” that white violence perpetuated (p. 219). To better understand many African Americans’ distrust and suspicion of the American criminal justice system, Hobbs correctly asserts that we must understand how lynchings and other forms of racial violence contributed to this view. If, as Hobbs asserts, “more attention to the long-term psychological and social effects of lynching, racial violence, and unequal protection under the law in the United States is necessary,” then her book is an excellent example of how historians can contribute to this understanding (p. 220).
In all, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home is an important contribution to the field of legal history. While previous scholars have suggested that extralegal justice gave way to formal and institutionalized methods of due process by the 1930s, Hobbs reminds readers that this transformation was not ubiquitous.[3] In North Florida, adherents to extralegal violence, or “rough justice,” held sway over the operation of the local criminal justice system well into the 1940s, as small mobs continued to lynch African Americans, white residents refused to condemn the actions of vigilantes, and local law enforcement proved unwilling or unable to stop them. Hobbs’s most important contribution, however, rests in her examination of the short- and long-term effects of lynchings on black communities, and how World War II fundamentally shaped many Americans’ and the federal government’s response to lynchings. In all, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home is a welcome and valuable contribution to the growing field of lynching and mob violence studies.
Notes
[1]. Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Walter T. Howard, Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995); Margaret Vandiver, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
[2]. William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).
[3]. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Elizabeth Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=44841
Citation: Brandon T. Jett. Review of Hobbs, Tameka B., Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. February, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44841
By Michael Hoffmann
Book Review: 'Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida' by Tameka Bradley Hobbs
Lynchings of African-Americans — mostly men, but also a few women and adolescents — were the scourge of the South from the end of Reconstruction until after World War II. Florida had the third-highest state total (331) and the highest per-capita rate of lynchings (79.8 per 100,000 blacks). Author Tameka Bradley Hobbs, a historian who teaches at Florida Memorial University in Miami-Dade County, characterizes the level of terror in Florida as among the worst in the South.
Forty-four of Florida’s 67 counties recorded one or more lynchings from 1882 to 1951. Lynchings peaked nationally between 1890 and 1910, when an average of 100 African-Americans were lynched annually. There followed a slow, uneven pivot away from lynching leading up to World War II, when the United States was locked into an all-out war against racist totalitarian states. Lynching, Jim Crow laws and a segregated military came under increasing criticism from the public and the press, here and abroad.
Florida experienced the “Big Bang” during World War II, when the state was militarized (from 7 to 172 military installations); its population began to skyrocket, and the state urbanized. As long as blacks were disenfranchised, there was little they could do to protect their communities from lynchings and other extralegal forms of violence and intimidation. After the Supreme Court outlawed the all-white Democratic Party primary in 1944, black Floridians increasingly registered to vote — hitting 30 percent of eligible black voters in 1950. The bold and sometimes bloody black voter registration campaign in Florida is the reason that most Florida counties did not fall under the Voting Rights Act pre-clearance test after 1965.
As extralegal methods of maintaining white supremacy declined, legal methods increased in Florida and the South: “The rate of blacks executed or sentenced to long prison terms increased,” the equivalent of “legal lynchings,” according to Hobbs. Between 1924 and 1964, Florida executed 196 felons, more than 60 percent of whom were black, although African-Americans were from 34 percent (1920) to 18 percent (1960) of the population in this same period. Forty-three men were executed for rape — only two were white.
An important insight of “Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home” is the long-term psychological damage suffered by blacks who experienced white violence during the Jim Crow era. The families of victims frequently fled after a lynching, afraid of further violence. They gave up whatever economic stake they had earned, and sometimes lost touch with family and friends forever. African-Americans were reluctant to discuss their oppression with anyone, even family, internalizing their experiences with damaging, long-term consequences similar to PTSD, according to Hobbs, who has familial roots in Suwannee County.
One important cause for this self-imposed silence was the complicity or indifference of law enforcement and the criminal justice system to their plight, which Hobbs argues has created in the black community an “inherent distrust of the American legal and judicial system.” Of the five lynchings that occurred in Florida during World War II — all in North Florida — police, judges, grand juries and elected officials put states’ rights, “rough” justice and protection of the “purity” of white women ahead of due process and equal protection for the black victims and their families and friends.
No one knows for sure how many blacks have been murdered with impunity by whites. Beginning in the 1880s, African-Americans such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Florida’s T. Thomas Fortune and James Weldon Johnson collected and publicized lynching statistics. Later, organizations such as the white Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), the NAACP, Tuskegee University, the black and white Committee for Interracial Cooperation and Florida groups such as the black Anti-Lynching Crusaders (created in the 1920s and led in Florida by Eartha M.M. White and Mary McLeod Bethune) did yeoman’s work in putting the spotlight on lynching.
In December 1940 when leaders from the major groups met to define lynching — so as to differentiate it from “non-racial” murders of blacks by whites — the ASWPL was successful in keeping out of the statistics incidents involving law enforcement. Yet, the majority of lynching victims in Florida during the 1930s and 1940s were taken from police custody or from jails. This collusion or indifference to lynching by law enforcement was true throughout the South.
Michael Hoffmann is a historian who lives in Duval County.