Citizen Journalist: Memorial Day in Mount Dora, 2016
Two Lake County veterans who won’t vote this year are Walter Irvin and Sam Shepherd—the Florida laws that killed them also left them disenfranchised
Summer has come back in, Florida-style, with hot-blooming days and strolling booms of afternoon thunderstorms. This is the part of summer which is most delicate and delectable, when the softness of the air on the skin feels like breath and a watermelon chunk fills the mouth with cold sweetness. Fire up the grill and boil me some corn, Ma, summer’s here.
On this three-day Memorial Day weekend as before, Mount Dora seems emptied-out, the traffic on Donnelly and Fifth Avenues hollow, a distant drone (although I hear downtown was cranking on Saturday). Maybe the neighborhoods have cleared out, everyone headed for the beach, the last snowbird stuck in a security checkpoint waiting to fly back north. When summer comes to Florida, everyone gets the hell outta Dodge. Summer is for enduring, and we who remain gird ourselves for months of searing heat and storms, the roaring chirr of crickets and the bloody whine of mosquitoes in the ear.
Before air conditioning came to Mount Dora, living through the summer was more of a marvel than a feat. In 1955 only building was air conditioned, the First National Bank. Folks who worked there complained of the oppression of such ice in summer. Living in such blanketing heat (author U.R. Bowie, who grew up here, says it lingered in houses until 1 or 2 a.m.) was a war waged of necessity by those who could not afford to go anywhere else. There would be no booming single-family home development as we see all around us today were it not for air conditioning and that illusion called credit which offers the means to pay for it.
Memorial Day picnics will fill Gilbert Park, and it’s one of the few holiday celebrations in Mount Dora where black residents come out in numbers. (There’s nothing more white than the July 4 parade in Mount Dora — except, maybe, every festival).
In Pine Forest Cemetery, there are markers for Mount Dora citizens who fought for their country overseas, as far back as the First World War (Sgt. Fernando Meyer, died Oct. 21 1918). For Mount Dora’s African-American vets, the markers are harder to find because the segregated cemeteries they were forced to be placed in eventually fell into neglect. In the Mt. Carmel-Simpson graveyard restored in 2010 there’s a stone for Rufus Knight, who served during World War I and died in 1960. And in the abandoned cemetery next to the Country Club of Mount Dora there’s a nearly-toppled stone for Elmo Mills, who also served in the First World War and died in 1943. Mills’ his wife Laura, who died in childbirth in 1933, may be buried nearby, but the tangle of overgrowth has hidden most of the graves there. Another black vet who is said to have died during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 is supposed to be buried in that cemetery, but until the area is cleared out and restored, we can’t know.
Mount Dora will celebrate Memorial Day was most of the country will, attempting to wave solemn flag before diving into the burgers — a happy enough time, no major war conflicts (we’re staying out of the Syrian slaughter), the 2016 presidential campaign now waiting for the conventions in June to start the march in earnest. It’s peacetime, as much as anything is peaceful anymore: and the sound of it is welcome, even though it casts a hollow drone …
It looks like Rick Scott is not going to posthumously pardon the three black men who were convicted of the fictitious rape of a 17-year old Groveland girl in 1949. (The fourth Groveland “boy,” Ernest Thomas, was shot beyond recognition while attempting to flee capture by a posse led by Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall.) As Gilbert King exhaustively proved in his 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove, the rape never happened,, confessions from two of them were produced through torture, an all-white jury was unsympathetic and convicted all three, sending two to death row (the third, Charles Greenlee, was a minor and had received life in prison); and, after the Supreme Court overturned the verdict and demanded a new trial, Sheriff McCall and his deputy James Yates shot two of the convicts while transporting them back from Raiford, killing one. The surviving convict Irwin and Greenlee were tried again by an all-white jury in Marion County and found guilty; Irwin had been offered a plea deal, receiving a life sentence in return for pleading guilty, but throughout he maintained his innocence and was sent to death row again, and Greenlee continued serving his life sentence. In 1955 new governor LeRoy Collins commuted Irwin’s death sentence to life in prison. Greenlee was paroled in 1960 at age 27, and Irwin was paroled in 1968 at age 39 and died a year later under mysterious circumstances while visiting a relative in Lake County.
Since the publication of Devil in the Grove, Florida State senator Geraldine Thompson has been trying to get a bill through the Florida state legislature asking Gov. Scott to exonerate the records of the Groveland Four. The bill failed to make to the floor of the legislature last year, and this past March it failed again to clear the required three committees. After that, Lake County Commissioners tried to pressure Governor Scott to exonerate the four anyway by issuing a proclamation calling the 1949 convictions a travesty and injustice; the city of Groveland issued a similar proclamation.
But last week when Lake County representatives met with the assistant counsel to Gov. Scott, they were told the Governor’s office was not enthusiastic about doing so, stating that only one pardon had been issued by the state: for Jim Morrison, singer of the doors convicted on a morals charge in 1968. In an article in the Leesburg Commercial, Groveland mayor Tim Loucks (one of the county representatives) said the counsel told them that it was a “lengthy and drawn-out process to exonerate the men, and he did not encourage it.” Instead, the counsel suggested instead a formal apology from Scott.
Precedent may be sticking in the Governor’s craw another way. Florida is only one of three states in the country which imposes a life-long disenfranchisement ban on felons (Iowa and Kentucky are the others); restoration of voting right, the right to serve on a jury or run for office requires a decree from the Governor. Florida’s practice dates back to after the Civil War, when there were more freed slaves than whites, and the state had to come up with a way to keep Florida from becoming “niggerized.” “Black Codes” — laws to regulate the behavior of African Americans — were passed, and felon disenfranshisement laws to keep as many African Americans from the ballot box. (Other forms of intimidation became popular in the Jim Crow era.)
Currently 1.5 million Florida felons have no civil rights, including about 20 percent of the African American community.
Gov. Bush fought reenfranchisement of black Florida felons (see Mother Jones article here), but he ended up restoring the rights of 77,000 (a list which studiously avoided African Americans). Democratic Governor Charlie Crist attempted to end the practice of gubernatorial granting of rights in Florida, decreeing that the rights of many felons be automatically restored to felons who had completed their sentence — 155,315 in his 4-year term.
But the Tea Party-backed Gov. Scott eliminated that practice, introducing new rules that required people convicted of non-violent crimes to wait 5 years before applying for restoration of rights, and 8 years for those convicted of violent crimes.
So far, in eight years in office, Scott has restored the rights of just 1,866 felons.
Florida’s 1.5 million disenfranchised felons is a wildly disproportionate share of the 5.6 million disenfranchised felons nationwide — and yet, as The Intercept noted in Dec. 2015, “not a single national or state-wide organization is working to address the problem.” That may finally be changing. Just this past week, U.S. representative Alan Grayson introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to automatically restore the voting rights of felons after release from prison (the only exception being convicted of murder, manslaughter and sex crimes).
“It’s a bill about redemption,” Grayson said. “It’s about giving a second chance and closure. You can’t have first class citizens and second class citizens in America.” Grayson says he’s also working with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2018.
Florida is expected to be a battleground state in this fall’s Presidential election, and as it stands now, effectively a quarter of Florida’s black citizens are barred from voting.
That’s certainly good news for Republicans, and why Republican governors here and elsewhere around the country have fought to tighten up voting laws which tend to penalize African-Americans and Latinos the most. Seventeen states will have new voting restrictions in place for the 2016 presidential election.
Maybe that’s not really news at all here in Mount Dora — yet. The Republican primary for senate seat vacated by Marco Rubio is coming at the end of August, and Grayson is in the running as well as the widely-endorsed Patrick Murphy. On the Republican side, U.S. representative Ron DeSantis is well-funded and said to be the front-runner, followed by Florida’s lieutenant governor Carlos Lopez-Cantrera and U.S. rep. David Jolly. Carlos Beruff (whose real estate developments includes The Lakes of Mount Dora) is in the running too as a pro-Trump, outsider businessman. With a Senate seat so crucial in the balance and Florida a battleground state, every vote counts. And let’s not forget that the 2000 presidential election was decided by 500 Florida votes.
And yet, with the current fervor of the presidential nomination process taking so sickly a cast, political exhaustion may have set in well before August. In dead times there is an inevitability of things, a desensitization to the cascade of wrongs. The march to Washington this year feels like the march to the First World War, the murderous fiasco and mass-killing machine of the Ypres Salient. Wilson Groom wrote in his book A Storm in Flanders,
Forests have been sawed down for the paper to explain the origins of the First World War; historians argue and debate it still. A precise truth can never be divined because of the fallibility of the human factor — in the torturous process who, on which side, in their darkest thoughts, understood or believed what, and at which moment? It is almost as if mischievous gods dropped a gigantic jigsaw puzzle from the sky in which some of the pieces will always be missing and others do not fit exactly in the places for which they were designed.
It is eerily similar to this year’s march to Washington, stuck with the two most unlikeable candidates for President ever, grinding out their daily combative sog through the mud of our ravaged attention spans.
Three Mount Dora council seats also are up for election this year — the second and third districts, currently held by Cal Rolfson and Ed Rowlett, and the at-large seat currently held by Marie Rich. Qualifying for those seats ends on June 20, so we should be hearing soon how the politicking for those seats will go. If it’s anything like the last three elections for council seats, the going will also be a grind. (Will anyone show up come election day?) As I reported earlier, unfair campaign practices within the city’s gated communities on the east side of town will not make it easy for an at-large candidate living outside those communities to be voted in.
Last year, the city’s political squawkbox of a local “news “site did everything they could to damage the reputations of four incumbents running for office, including joining in in a a Sunshine Law suit that the state’s attorney saw no merit in pursuing. (No matter; the bad publicity just before election season was damaging enough.) That, combined with the overwhelming support (and vote clout) of the Lakes of Mount Dora, decided the current composition of city council one which has aggressively moved to gut City Hall and try to do business in a ghost town.
Mount Dora’s political dysfunction has faded some from the public eye as newer scandals pop up across Central Florida — Groveland’s city manager and council are at war, Tavares’ mayor is living out what Lake Columnist Lauren Ritchie calls “a continuing episode of the Jerry Springer Show,” Leesburg’s mayor escapes almost all responsibility for a fatal motorcycle accident he caused, and DeBary is simultaneously trying to remove its mayor while the city manager is being investigated for Sunshine Law violations trying to work around said mayor.
It’s grueling stuff, for sure. Who even cares to pay much attention to it?
And should we? I’ve covered Mount Dora with a close eye for the past year, and I confess I’m both exhausted by it and over it. As with the national, maybe the local has to come in doses.
And maybe the eye has to be broad enough to take all of it in, what Wallace Stevens called “the complicate amassing harmony.”
But back to my point. Walter Irwin’s chance to vote in the state that had wrongfully accused and tortured and convicted and brutalized him died when he was found dead at the wheel of his car in Lake County in 1969. Sam Shepherd’s chance died when he was shot and killed by Sheriff Willis McCall “attempting to escape” from crimes he didn’t commit. Charles Greenlee’s chance to vote ended when he was sentenced to life in prison for a rape that never happened. Meanwhile, Sheriff McCall was never brought to any reckoning for his 25-year reign of terror in Lake County’s African-American community (although he was relieved of duty in 1972 after stomping a black prisoner to death).
Would an apology from Gov. Scott be enough to redress the night that Walter Irwin, Charles Greenlee and Sam Shepherd were taken down to the basement of the Lake County jail in Tavares, handcuffed to a pipe and then forced to stand barefoot on shattered Coke bottles while Deputy James Yates of Mount Dora and a fellow deputy beat them with lead-filled pipes until two confessed?
Would an apology from Gov. Scott be enough to redress 150 years of willful disenfranchisement of the African American community?
And what about all those decades of judicial malpractice committed by all-white juries overseen by Jim Crow judges?
And doesn’t the United States owe Walter Irwin and Sam Shepherd something more, having served their country and fought in the Second World War where racism in the ranks was also rampant?
It is the recognition of those who sacrificed their own blood for our freedom which is the core of Memorial Day celebrations today. It is the casualness in which we blithely pay homage that we all fall so short of the mark.
Lamenting the poor turnout of Lake County voters in a 1955 primary election — only 50 percent of the county’s 20,000 registered voters had turned out — Mabel Norris Reese wrote in this in a “Musings” editorial. Noting a recent election in Germany where 85 percent of citizens turned out to vote, she writes:
… The other night I attended a meeting at which a young man spoke forth: “The greatest problem in the coming primary is to get the people out to vote. How can we make them realize why they should? — that’s the problem. If they would stop to consider that American soldiers have fought and died on battlefields to protect their right to a free ballot — I think they would vote. I am in favor of taking a couple of uniform-clad boys around in a truck, with ketchup spattered all over them, and with a sign saying: “They shed their blood so YOU may still retain your right to a free ballot box.” I wonder if that would have any effect on the thousands who did not bother to vote May 4.”
Perhaps the young man — obviously himself a veteran — had an idea. People seem to appreciate a fact when it is dramatized: perhaps the sight of bloody soldiers would be drama enough to stir them to the pools on May 25.
So I say, Florida has a challenge on May 25. Germany — with its memory of tyranny — challenges Florida. Great Britain, France, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Finland and Italy — countries in the shadows of another tyranny which could spread to America — challenges Florida.
And the memory — if not the sight — of bloody soldiers who died to halt tyranny challenges Florida.
Let’s not let it be said in Florida that its citizens cared not for democratic government, cared not to investigate the issues at stake so they could make an intelligent one. The obligation, like the issues, is clear-cut.
Walter Irwin fought for our country, was condemned by the state of Florida for a crime he didn’t commit, refusing to admit guilt even when it would have meant an easier sentence. He and Shepherd and Greenlee are all owed a full pardon, for sins of the state in far greater measure than Jim Morrison getting busted for pulling his pants down onstage in Miami in 1969.
It’s too late to restore their voting rights, but Florida’s governor can put a stop to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow-era practice of blocking the black vote.
What do you say, Rick?
War narratives have changed a lot since “The Red Badge of Courage” — not the horror of battle — never that — but what happens over there and what comes back. In Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead (1948), as much happens on the carriers headed for the beachhead — a ghetto of American manhood, dehumanized by life in the Army — as what is opened to rare fire and testing; the essence of brotherhood comes no through heroics but failure (only the dead are heroes). The absurdity of war gets equally humorous and horrific treatment with humor in Vonnegut, Heller and Pynchon, but it isn’t until Tim O’Brien’s 1980 Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried that the effect of war on the American psyche back home opens up a new frontier to consider. Why is it so hard from Americans who fight in foreign wars find it so hard to return home?
The literature of the Iraq War made me wonder if PTSD, although caused by exposure to extreme violence, is bred and flourished in a deeply wounded society. Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (2012) is one of the most poetic of these narratives, asking us if the horror of war a gate into the nightmare of the American Dream, where there is only fear of death and outrageous avoidance of anything resembling real death.
Perhaps it is because going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan is voluntary, serving in a professional army the American public is not asked share in sacrifice. The disconnect is humorously and achingly wrought in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, where a platoon whose firefight with Iraqi insurgents was captured on video and broadcast ad infintum on Fox News are scripted into a ten-day whirlwind heroes’ tour of the States, culminating in the halftime show of a Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys football game. (The movie is slated for release this November.) It will give you a long pause the next time you thank the next veteran for their service.
I’ve just finished Luke Mogelson’s 2016 collection of short stories, These Heroic Happy Dead, and I now wonder it’s the tearing contrast between war-ravaged worlds and this neurotically wish-fulfilled one that vets can’t keep zipped. The book is a stunning addition to the canon. Taking its title from the ee cummings poem “next of course to god america i,” we are offered only one tale of battle — in the ironically titled “Kids” — with a couple of stories about collateral damage (“Guidance,” “Total Solar”). The bulk of the lifting — the carrying, if you will — is done back home. In “To The Lake,” a violent, PTSD-addled alcoholic vet goes on patrol to get his ex-wife back, the tripped minefield of his mind leaving only one destructive course for him.
In “Peacetime,” one of my favorites in the collection, a medic serving out the rest of his National Guard tour in the Lexington armory in New York City, working as an EMT between drills. (Mogelson was a medic in the National Guard in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2010 and has been a journalist since.) All the good men were left behind in Iraq, dead; the rest return to a peace defined by a war that cannot end. While attending to peacetime emergencies — mostly self-inflicted — the medic steals little trophies from each scene, doodads or knickknacks mostly, but once it’s a suicide note, and another time it’s a dead man’s false teeth. Things we carry, yes — because they are things we can’t let go of. Can’t, or won’t.
In “The Port is Near,” an Afghanistan war vet tries to get the skipper of his fishing boat to open up with some war stories.
Once or twice, after a few beers, I was able to coax out of him a reminiscence or two about the war. What he survived in Korea was so much worse than anything I ever had to deal with, it seems unfair to call it by the same name. Still, I often talked about Afghanistan — because I wanted to, for one, and because I thought it might inspire Sal to do the same. Usually it didn’t. I remember one night, watching the suburban glow bloom over Contra Costa, I started telling him about the mosque. I’d never told anybody about the mosque. If I couldn’t entertain him, I guess I figured, I would at least appall the man. Before I got very far, Sal pushed himself up from his lawn chair, staggered to the end of the doc, and pissed.
“The only thing these stories are good for are getting laid,” he said. “And I’m not fucking you.”
Why else publish war stories? No one reads literary fiction. (No one will read this post, I’m sure.) Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but the silence of them can be deafening. (Especially contrasted to the opiate lull of American commercial life.) The violence we pour our troops into is something we have no remedy for once they return home; silent generation or gabby one, they shoulder our country’s too-powerful imperatives and carry them, sometimes for better but much more commonly for the worse. With two million American men and women having served in the endless Middle East conflict (and many in multiple deployments over this long, long war), it’s impossible to tell yet how peacetime is affected by their struggles.
But flags on a hot Memorial Day is too small a gesture — an apology when exoneration is called for. (So is reading a book, or writing this post.)
Mount Dora’s newest development is Dora Parc on Lake Dora, a 38-home development a ways south of Palm Island which will be capped by four $500,000 dollar lakefront homes. (I know, because I got the ad in the mail the other day). Styled for the arts community, the house plans are named after artists — Warhol, Pollock, Rockwell and (heavens no) Kinkade — and promises an “ideal location for those who enjoy the sophistication and seclusion of a community unspoiled by overdevelopment, but with all the conveniences and artistic influences of an urban setting.” At the entrance to the gated (yes) community is a “high end arts installation” of four colored penguins by the Cracking Art Group, “commissioned as a way to bring the artistic essence of Mount Dora to the steps of our community.”
Walter Irwin is buried in Edgewood Cemetery in Groveland, his grave headed by a bronze military marker. If he had been permitted to live a free life in Florida, Irwin would be 89 this year — same age my father, who was a pharmacist’s mate in the Navy and completed his service after the Second World War at Great Lakes Naval Hospital, tending to burn victims whose faces had been erased by burning oil. Irwin’s war story was buried the night he and Sam Shepard drove back from Eatonville (a free black city just north of Orlando) to Groveland, stopping to offer help to white couple whose car looked stranded. After that, it was all Syria.
Before you get too settled in the good life, wave a Memorial Day flag Walter Irwin and Sam Shepherd. Watch the “Roots” remake on TV tonight, updated for the black lives that have always mattered.
And don’t forget to vote for everyone’s right in Florida to vote.
—David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
