Gilbert King - Once Again Revealing Florida's Dark Underbelly

Two young black men are refused use of the bathroom at Starbucks and the police are called. A black doctoral student at Yale falls asleep in the common room and the police are called. A Nigerian woman is refused her paid for seat on a United Airlines flight and escorted off the plane because of her body odor. Where, you might ask, will these and the hundreds of other indignities perpetrated on people of color in the United States ever end?


After reading Pulitzer Prize-winner ("Devil in the Grove") Gilbert King's latest account of racism, injustice, and corruption in Florida, I'm afraid that I've come to the conclusion that these incidents will never end as long as we live among our disturbingly incomprehensible fellow human beings. "Beneath a Ruthless Sun" moves from the late ' 40’s to the ‘50’s, ‘60’s, and even the ‘70’s, when you might believe that the situation would have improved for the black population of central Florida. But you would be wrong.

 


King’s primary subject is the notorious Sheriff Willis McCall, who oversaw a reign of terror for over twenty years before a new governor, Reuben Askew, finally removed him from office. McCall had been brought to trial many times, implicated in the torture and murder of young black men, but with the state’s attorney general in his pocket and the fear of God in potential jury pools, nothing every stuck.

Still there are plenty of heroes to go around in this true tale of a young white man with cognitive disabilities who, forced by McCall at gunpoint, confessed to a rape he did not commit. Jesse Daniels was shipped off to the Florida Hospital for the Insane in Chattahoochee without benefit of legal representation even though the victim, Blanche Knowles, wife of a prominent citrus baron, reported that her attacker had been a hefty black man. This man actually admitted to Blanche that he had been paid five thousand dollars to kill her but just couldn’t follow through when he saw that her baby was sleeping nearby. Her statement was never released to the public.

If this sounds like the complete inverse of traditional southern injustice where innocent black men were usually  the ones falsely accused, then just wait. The reasons for Jesse’s railroading, a perverse incident of racial and economic prejudice, will take years to uncover. In fact, for fourteen years Jesse’s mother, fueled by the passion of newspaper owner and journalist Mabel Norris Reese Chesley, fought to uncover the truth behind the travesty visited upon her gentle son who still slept with his teddy bear. Reese and her husband were hounded by the Ku Klux Klan, a cross burned on their front lawn, and eventually their unpopular editorial stance resulted in a loss of advertisers. Their publication, The Mount Dora Topic, was forced to close its doors.

Once again King, as evidenced by over twenty pages of meticulous notes, succeeds in exposing the outrageous corruption among too many judges, lawyers, and police officers, that flourished throughout central Florida even long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. This haunting account serves as a timely reminder that, those of us who dream of a  post-racial world, may be waiting a very long time.