Citizen Journalist (2): Scouring The Whitewash
On the idylls of history and what to do about it. (The second of a series on the responsibilities of the citizen journalist.)
November 5, 2015
I.
As one who has thrown his hat into the citizen-journalist ring, it’s my job to make the conversation inclusive. What you read should be what Mount Dora is. Is it a complete picture? No; it never has been, and now it’s only beginning to re-form. The slowly forming network of news about our city has been taking shape for several years. Some of that news has been trustworthy, some of it has not. In this new age of the citizen journalist, where fundamentals get so easily lost to passion, politicized rhetoric too often passes for fact. It’s up to citizens to demand their local news is true.
And more than that, citizens need local news that is complete. All Mount Dora voices should be included, all neighborhoods, all interests. How else can citizens make informed choices about what is best for the entire city?
As I’ve started writing about my home town of the past twenty years, my conception of it has changed. So much I didn’t know, just living the good suburban life in what was accidentally Mount Dora! (Disconnection is the mantra of too-modern living.) I didn’t know what pipes ran under the streets, what water I drink, that the city had a plan for its future, that there’s a forest park behind the library, that a storm blew down all of the city’s mightiest old oaks in 1993 or that a commercial district, if properly managed for the next five years, will blossom on the city’s fringe for the better of what collectively will be harder either way.
Some of that knowledge has come at a cost. As I’ve heard some stories, my understanding of the city has tempered some. This city’s vibe is idyllic, but it’s history is not. It would be immature to think so — or simply uninformed.
When my wife and I moved up here in 1996 from Orlando, everything about this town was idyllic. House built in 1923, spacious neighborhoods, traffic quiet as a mouse after 7 p.m. Our first night we listened to owls and a Baptist choir from somewhere nearby. And the stars — universes we had never seen before.
Into that quaint space we sort of disappeared into the usual suburban life, commuting to work in Orlando, enjoying brunch on the upper deck, walking down to Lake Dora and back. Sometimes we wandered through the various festivals, or ate at this or that restaurant: but we always defaulted back to home, home cooked meals, old movies on Turner Classics, cats curled somewhere near our feet.
I’ve kept my job and we’ve made enough to afford this modest life, so twenty years have passed in a sort of comfortable, blind stasis. You can life in Mount Dora that way for a long time.
And according to people who’ve lived here much longer, Mount Dora has always been that way. A neighbor once told me about growing up here in the ’50s and ‘60s:
Growing up in Mount Dora was great. We had freedom to roam around town on foot or bicycle at will, and our parents had no need of keeping close tabs on us. The Princess theater was a frequent weekend diversion, admission 25 cents, candy 5–10 cents, popcorn 10 cents. I walked to school or rode my bicycle nearly every day of my school life, rode my bike or walked to all athletic team practices, walked to all medical appointments, did not have to be taxied around. My fond memories have very much to do with why I still have a house there.
He got that. I got this. For that, I’m grateful for both of us.
Only now — as I have learned about the city’s history — do I slowly come to understand that there was a cost to our receiving it, paid by others in this town. Now, when I can barely afford the little middle class Mount Dora life I’ve enjoyed so sweetly until now, do I begin to see how destructive privilege — no matter how innocent — can be.
I thank Gilbert King’s 2012 non-fiction book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America for starting the work of unmasking my fraudulent sense of the idyllic. The Pulitzer award-winning account of brutal Jim Crow ways in and around this town 50 years ago told me that there have always been at least two Mount Doras, white and black. (And yes, there are more Mount Dora stories than just that: compare nights in blue-collar Pistolville with the monied, sprawling-oak comforts of Sylvan Shores.)
Reading the book was like taking an acid bath that peeled away with abrasive prose my narcotized sense of entitlement to an edgeless life. Privilege is something you take for granted when you’re born and raised in it, when those who aren’t privileged are out of sight, when the brutalities of their existence are kept tidily out of my sight. Doesn’t happen on my street, and as long as it’s kept quiet, I don’t care. My living on for decades the way I have is the strongest evidence of that.
Reading Devil in the Grove showed me another Lake County than the one I was told was truth simply for existing so prevalently in the middle. White men in full boil over the thought of black outrage of the flower of the South — a young white woman — shot up and burned down houses in the black parts of Groveland. Black people did as they always must; they hid in the forest. Four black men were rounded up and accused, two against their word and two against the laws of gravity (they had been nowhere around that night). Confessions were beaten out of two with lead-filled hoses while they were standing on broken glass, there in the basement of the Lake County Courthouse. Sheriff McCall was charged with keeping order and providing Lake County shelter from the winds of change. He did a very good job.
Mabel Norris Reese, the feisty Yankee editor of The Mount Dora Topic, had been initially supportive of Sheriff McCall, but when she found out through a guilty state’s attorney how twisted the news was being presented to her by McCall — the true criminal at the center of this case — she became a tireless defender and advocate of civil rights, no matter how costly that was for her and her family. (And it cost them plenty. Ask Mabel’s daughter Patricia.)
The grove economy, not that much different from the plantation economy except for how it called its workers, required black acquiescence. Grove owners needed black labor but only when it worked in slave conditions (seven days a week, 7 cents an hour). It was 1949. The citrus industry was booming with the development of frozen orange juice. Demand was incredibly high. But Negroes were getting uppity. They wanted to make more money, they wanted to vote in state elections, it looked like they might soon attend white schools
The grove owners got black acquiescence, thanks to the support of Sheriff McCall and his brutal deputies. But more than that, they got it because white acquiescence would not budge from its entitled middle.
Some things never change, until they do. By the mid-’60, there was finally enough support from some of the dominant white families of Mount Dora to see that black children would finally attend white schools. And they did.
But that first step did not lead to many others. The black community lives far apart from white Mount Dora, even though my house is just blocks away from what is now called the Northeast Community (formerly Easttown). It’s said that the black community likes it that way; perhaps they do.
Or will, as long as some things in white Mount Dora never change.
II.
Devil in the Grove wasn’t popular at first — it got positive crucial reviews, but author Gilbert King had heard it would be remaindered after its first year out.
Then came the Pulitzer for non-fiction in 2013. Surprisingly, DITG beat out heavyweight competition that included Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. The Pulitzer jury called it “a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice in the Florida town of Groveland in 1949, involving four black men falsely accused of rape and drawing a civil rights crusader, and eventual Supreme Court justice, into the legal battle.”
King spoke here in the Mount Dora Community Center in 2013 to a packed house that included a number of family members of the Groveland Four still grieving their loss. Not much else happened in Mount Dora after that, but around the nation came Ferguson and Baltimore and Black Lives Matter.
Entwining with those events, Devil in the Grove has become a focusing lens for race relations in Lake County and a growing sense that something needs to be done to account for the sins of the past. Florida state senator Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, is trying to get a bill onto the floor of Legislature to posthumously clear the four men. A University of Florida student organized an online petition asking Florida Governor Rick Scott to exonerate the men, and almost 6,000 signatures have been collected. A Facebook page, Clear The Groveland Four, has been started by local writer and historian Gary McKechnie. In a recent op-ed by Lauren Ritchie of the Lake Sentinel, she chastises inaction by Lake County legislators who have inherited this awful legacy and done nothing to remedy it for their constituents..
Devil in the Grove will also remain on our horizon because Lionsgate is supposedly moving ahead with a film version of the book, and King says he is working on another book about race in Lake County some ten years after the events of DITG.
I recently interviewed King for the Mount Dora Citizen, and you can read it here.
In “A Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ lengthy essay that printed in Atlantic Magazine in June 2014, Coates states that American democracy is frozen due to “a compounding moral debt” — two hundred fifty years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate and unequal. After making a lengthy and convincing argument that the American economy is racist to the core — from the capitalist ambitions of slave-holders to current federal housing standards — he states that American democracy is inherently flawed at its very roots:.
To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates will suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
From this Coates comes around to reparations — “to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built” — a concept that has been in the American discussion since the 1970s. Reparations, he argues, could help close the astonishingly wide wealth gap between white and black Americans.
Reparations puts my nice white middle class life into crosshairs of self-examination that are exceedingly uncomfortable, for it has never been in question. Reparations fills out my history with all that has been excluded:
Black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge — that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
“Dare not acknowledge” — as Mabel Norris Reese knew in 1954 that there was no way to talk about the wrongs of segregation in Mount Dora, and so instead took issue when the county Sheriff declared some children not white enough to attend school. The chalk line on the sidewalk was there, with the words on either side, “white folks” and “nigger lovers.” Mabel’s editorials pleading for justice for the Platt children brought bombs and burning crosses to her front yard. Rains have long washed all that away, but something indelible of it remains in this town.
When I spoke with one of Mount Dora’s long-term black residents, I was told, “there are many stories in this town that should be told.” Our local history is incomplete. Our great little small town with its historic charm and vaguely northeastern vibe was built on partial history. Did you know when the town was first settled, black and whites worked side by side in unusual harmony? And that when someone figured there was good money in catering to rich vacationers, all the blacks were booted out to live in what was then called East Town but still has the same boundaries today? That a white man from Pistolville could ask a black woman to dance in the jazz halls on Grandview, but when a black man asked a white woman to dance, the KKK rode through the city’s streets in outrage? Or when a black man talked with a grove-workers union organizer, he was beat by Mount Dora police so badly that Mabel Norris Reese was horrified?
Long time ago, perhaps. The grove industry in Lake County has largely been frozen out by Mother Nature. The grove owners are sitting on vast land parcels that are ripe for development. Whatever black bodies are buried in the groves will some day be covered in suburban asphalt, and history will move on.
I don’t think so. Outrage against a single outraged black man rises now with each occurrence. Yet no one in Washington even whispers of reparations. Gun violence spirals out of control. Yet our Congress cannot act to limit the supply of guns or bullets. Comparisons with the Syrian Civil War are wrong-headed, but paralysis in the face of a downward spiral into madness occasions the same feelings when I think of what’s wrong with race relations in America.
And when I think of what’s wrong with American democracy, I wonder if it can be about anything else until the country airs its bad history of race relations.
Mount Dora certainly has its reckoning to do.
III.
Writing history is difficult. It takes time to let things settle enough to see them with a clear backwards lens. Some people have to die first. Hardened memories require softening and distilling. The will to read and understand history has to grow.
Mount Dora’s history has been written at different times, and each reflects a different take and audience.
James Laux’s 2000 A Short History of Mount Dora is a good contemporary account. Laux, who lives in Waterman Village, says he pored over archives of the Mount Dora Topic for much of his material. Having a newspaper of record is vital for a proper city history.
The city’s black community has said on numerous occasions that the real Mount Dora story isn’t found in those histories. Or that some important element, chapter, consideration isn’t found there. The Mount Dorans by Vivian Owens, also published in 2000, is subtitled “African American History Notes of a Florida Town” and it is that, a fascinating compilation of notes gathered from those who lived and flourished in an area of Mount Dora that has been at best ignored by the city’s white population.
Local authors Gary McKechnie and Nancy Howell are now completing a new history of Mount Dora, to be released in January 2016. It’s been fifteen years since the last history has been written, and Mount Dora has changed a lot. Also there are things in the past that needed some filling in.
Then there is the issue of textbook history. In an essay in Atlantic Magazine, Alia Wong argues that that officially taught histories whitewash events like the Civil War, insinuating that states’ rights and not slavery was the primary reason for the war.
McGraw Hill recently found itself in the center of controversy when one of its textbooks printed in Texas stated about immigration, “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Immigration? Work? The language softened out the entire impact of slavery. “It’s that nuance of language,” one woman said. “This is what erasure looks like.” It’s no wonder that homeschooling among black families are on the rise; schools rob children of the chance to learn about their own culture. Instead of teaching history, she argues, schools should be teaching historiography, the study of how histories come into being.
Indeed, history is one of the most poorly taught disciplines, with the fewest teachers possessing post-secondary degrees teachers, with textbooks that have in recent years been unduly influenced by the conservative state Texas school board.
It should be noted that white Mount Dora did a much better job of growing up when desegregation came to town in 1966. A number of the city’s prominent families supported the move, to a far greater degree than any other Lake County community.
And when Gilbert King in the Mount Dora Community Center in 2013 to talk about Devil in the Grove, many whites in attendance asked how such things could have happened, although voices protective McCall and his justice could still be heard.
And so our historical record continues to be brought into focus. If you’re a history buff, the books make for fascinating reading. If you’re a typical 21st century reader, you get your news on the fly. At the Citizen, we bring you that history in installments, piecemeal, whether it’s the city’s history with its trees or simply getting the background of a water utilities project or the relatively new history of the Lakes of Mount Dora neighborhood.
What history teaches me is that the more you know of it, the less your cherished vision of things matters. History is not clean, but it is durable. And what you learn from history matters immensely when considering future steps.
And when history tells you that some things have been broken for too long a time? Then at some point you stop avoiding history and embrace the change.
Reparations, Coates argues, injects a spiritual concept into notions of American democracy: humility. He writes,
Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is — the work of fallible humans.
Having read Devil in the Grove, I learned something about the intoxication of hubris. You can only read it that way in reverse. In February the orange groves used to blanket the county in a sweet, sexual, thrilling scent — everything a frostbit Northerner needs to console his monied soul. Once we moved the city’s darker citizens to its edges, Mount Dora became the fruit we offered him.
Now the fruit’s gone sour. Blame it on the freezes or the citrus greening, or blame it on Honkey Tonk Freeway for showing this town’s true colors, or on the Wekiva Parkway for destroying, some day, the city’s small-town charm. Blame our nasty national politics for dripping venom into local bloggers’ mouths. Blame it on global warming or our slowly dirtying and dimming national brand.
Or maybe, just maybe, the fruit is sour because we failed to speak up when the pestilence of white privilege still lingers in our minds. Whitewashing is a peculiarly form of racism, a way to paint over the past with an idyllic vibe that distances the present from its responsibilities to the past. I see it as akin to the popularity of Ben Carson among conservatives — he washes away notions that they closet racists who have no compassion for the poor. (However, as Nicholas Kristof points out, while Carson may have life lessons of great value to the American people, his policy ideas for the country are most damaging to the very people he inspires.) Whitewash is saying that every life matters — why focus on one wronged group? It’s the capitalist brand at work, pillaging the earth to keep the money coming in.
Writing about how Mount Dora lost its newspaper got me interested in citizen journalism and learning the local story. Reading Devil in the Grove showed me how high the bar must go.
