The book launch for The Culture Wars of Warren Folks, my 22nd book, an historical work of antiracism and critical biography, happens at the Jacksonville Historical Society at 5:30 on September 14th. Click here for tickets. Here are some questions for which you might want answers.

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1)     Why did the weekly racist news rag The Jacksonville Chronicle, of the 1950s and ’60s, eventually turn into a “sex scandal sheet”?

2)     Why did Warren Folks, shortly before running for sheriff himself, send notes to Sheriff Dale Carson, saying “Sheriff Carson – If you Want Warren Folks Killed – Why Don’t You Gun him down Yourself?”

3)     Just how different were Folks’s “Christ, America and the White Race” campaigns from today’s political slogans and campaigns?

Click here for your tickets to the upcoming book launch of The Culture Wars of Warren Folks.

4)     What happened when Black Power activist H. Rap Brown spoke in Jacksonville in 1968 and Governor Claude Kirk hopped the fence at Durkee Field to confront him?

5)     Why, when crime novelist Mickey Spillane came to town in response to Folks demanding his books be banned, did he wear that tight mesh polo shirt fronted with shoelace-style threads?

6)     Why did WIVY disc jockey Jamie Brooks, who frequently introduced rock bands at the old Jax Coliseum, challenge Warren Folks to a pie fight?

7)     Why did Folks tell a judge in federal court that he believed federal marshals had hidden evidence of government overreach by eating 420 pounds of apricot seeds?

8)     Who was the only Black person Warren Folks ever voted for, and what does it mean that Florida’s most infamous self-avowed white supremacist once voted for a Black person?

9)     What did Civil Rights icon Rodney Hurst do when Warren Folks showed up at the 40^th commemoration of Ax Handle Saturday and reached out to shake Hurst’s hand?

10)  What exactly did Warren Folks, while still in the Navy, have to do with the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands?

Click here for your tickets to the upcoming book launch of The Culture Wars of Warren Folks.

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

When novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston first lived in Jacksonville, she said it “made me know that I was a little colored girl.” In their 1936 booklet, Negro Folk Customs and Folk Lore, Hurston and Pearl Randolph told the stories of Mollie Peartree and Wilhelmina Kaiser, two robed Black women in Jax considered “prophetesses,” whom people saw as healers. Here are their stories:

Mollie Peartree’s House

Wilhelmina Kaiser’s House

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

Ice cream, murder, and the Great Fake Serial Killer. Banana splits and the Ottis Toole Death Car. Histories all connect. Somewhere. Often the connections make for the strangest hyperlinks. In the new location of the historic Jax ice cream shop, the Dreamette, the following stories merge:

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/west/murray-hill-dreamette-creamette/

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/north/garys-ice-cream-creamette/

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/north/springfield-spence-auto-sales-and-ottis-toole-death-car/

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

Blacksmith and sculptor David Ponsler lives and works in the only historic police substation remaining in Jacksonville. From the building’s police years come stories of counterfeiters and drunks and a fatal interrogation. Now, David liquefies steel here and makes art in fire.