Tag Archives: Ku Klux Klan

New Story: First Baptist Church

Posted on October 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

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

First Baptist Church has perhaps received more love and more hate than any other entity in Jacksonville. It dates to a ca.-Civil War split with black church members who retained the original name, Bethel Baptist. In 1923, Pastor W.A. Hobson welcomed 200 Klansmen in full regalia into his farewell sermon. In the 1980s, Pastors Homer Lindsay and Jerry Vines ignited a showdown with more “liberal” members of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2019, what once seemed unthinkable occurs: the church plans to sell 90 percent of its downtown campus.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged A.C. Shuler, Bethel Baptist Church, Billy Graham, Bob Gray, Calvary Baptist Church, Celebration Church, Christian Alamo, Donald Trump, Eleven22, FBC Watchdog, First Baptist Church, First Baptist Church Watchdog, Fuller Warren, Heath Lambert, Henry John Klutho, Hobson Auditorium, Homer Dome, Homer Lindsay, Homer Lindsay Jr., Human Rights Ordinance, James Fifield, Jerry Falwell, Jerry Vines, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Lester Roloff, Liberty University, Mac Brunson, Martin Luther King, Moral Majority, Prosperity Gospel, Rebekah Home for Girls, Robert Calhoun Gray, Robert Morris, Southern Baptist Convention, Springfield Jacksonville, Tabernacle Baptist Church, Trinity Baptist Church, W.A. Hobson

Two Writers Dead on Bay Street

Posted on January 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

Click below for the full story:

When “Poor Sam Russ, one of the best, most brilliant and widely known newspapermen in Florida” drank himself to death “in a cheap lodging house” on Bay Street, newspapers said, “Dying alone, unwept and unsung,

[he] reminds us also of the death of Hamilton Jay, who, like Sam Russ, occupied a position on the Times-Union, was a brilliant writer of prose and poetry.” Hamilton Jay, the poet laureate of Florida, drank cyanide, leaving a note that said the voices would not stop calling; “I can hold back no longer.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Alfred Koch, Bay Street, Bay Street Bay and Grill, Bettelini's, Bettelini's Hotel, Billy Hankins, Bold City Brewery Downtown, carpetbaggers, Cowford Chophouse, Crystal Saloon, Crystal Saloon and Roof Garden, Everett Hotel, Financial News and Daily Record, Florida Theatre, Florida Times-Union, Frederick Bettelini, Hamilton Jay, Harrison Reed, Jacksonville poetry, Jacksonville poets, Jacksonville writers, jaxpsychogeo, Justice Pub, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Melrose Hotel, Old Tramp's Sermon, Osky’s Alligator Store, poet laureate of Florida, Reconstruction, Riley Groover and Company, Sam B. Russ, Sam Russ, Seminole Wars, Telaunee, Terminal Hotel, Tim Gilmore, William Hankins, Zora Neale Hurston

Black Masonic Temple

Posted on December 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the full story:

What these walls have seen! Architects Mark and Sheftall began their own firm in 1912 and with a commission for the grandest building in black Jacksonville. The Black Masonic Temple formed the brick foundation of the black community.

Princess Laura Adorkor Kofi preached her “back to Africa” message here in the 1920s. Future Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Leander Shaw had his offices here in the 1960s. And the tunnels beneath Broad Street would offer protection if Florida’s massacres of black communities at Ocoee, Perry, and Rosewood should spread to Jacksonville.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged African Lodge no. 459, African Universal Church and Commercial League, Anderson Bank, Black Masonic Temple, C.H. Henry, Central America, Charles Wright, Clara White Mission, D.W. Perkins, Daniel Webster Perkins, Earl Mark, Florida Star, Frank Lloyd Wright, Free and Accepted Masons, Genaro Urso, Gerry Urso, Henry John Klutho, Incorporated Prince Hall Affiliated, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, Jim Crow, John H. Dickinson, July Perry, Jurisdiction, Ku Klux Klan, Laura Adorkor Kofi, LaVilla, Lawrence Moman, Leander L. Shaw, Leander Shaw, Leeroy Sheftall, Louis Sullivan, lynching, Marcus Garvey, Mark and Sheftall, Most Worshipful Union Grand Lodge of the Most Ancient and Honorable Fraternity, NAACP, Negro Blue Book, Negro World, Ocoee Massacre, Padrica Mendez, Patricia Moman Bell, Pedro Mendez, Perry Massacre, Prairie Style, Prince Hall, Prince Hall freemasonry, Princess Laura Adorkor Kofi, Robert Broward, Rosewood Massacre, Stanton School, State of Florida and Belize, The Crisis, Tillman Valentine, Tim Gilmore, United States Colored Troops, USCT, Wainwright Building

Stories of Pine Forest: Incinerators, Klan Crosses, Family Love and Mulberry Trees

Posted on April 6, 2018 | 1 comment

Click below for the full story.

The Ku Klux Klan burnt a cross in front of her family’s little woodframe house.

The Clydo Road incinerator burnt as much as 120 tons of trash every day. Donna recalls the black smoke pouring through the trees.

Another Lebanese family, the Johns, lived in the three-story rambling house at 5724.

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Albert John, Chop Suey candy, Clydo Road, Craig Swamp, Donna Delegal, Douglas Anderson, Florida Junior College, Florida Panther, Hazel Tisdale, Jennifer Grey, Jerusalem Cemetery, Ku Klux Klan, Marlen Frazee, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, mulberries, Osiris, Philips, Philips Cemetery, Pine Forest, Red Bank Plantation, Sadie Nasif Aborjali, San Diego Campus, Southside Incinerator, St Augustine Road, United States Colored Troops, Vinson Lane

Confederate Park’s “In Memory of our Women of the Southland”

Posted on March 25, 2018 | 1 comment

Click below for the full story:

She’s the embodiment of a Romantic concept called the Lost Cause. Her rhetorical strength, as an object of art, is that to stand before her and deny the Lost Cause lie is to look her in her loving and noble face and call her a liar before her tender children.

Unfortunately, for the Lost Cause Romantics, history documents the originating words of the Confederates.

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Alexander Stephens, Allen George Newman, Birth of a Nation, Confederate Park, Confederate Veteran, Eartha White, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan, Lost Cause, NAACP, Ocoee Massacre, Reconstruction, Redemption, Stetson Kennedy, Triumph of Peace, Zip Coon

Tale of Two Cities: Pick Your Poison, Vote Your Conscience, Choose Your Own Adventure

Posted on February 18, 2018 | 1 comment

Click below for one or both of two new stories.

1. Which house on McCormick Woods Court stands atop Rain Cemetery? And how does History’s Witch answer Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History?

and / or:

2. What did the Tinsleys mean when they said Catherine Tourist Court “cater[ed] to the better class only”? And what’s happened to CTC in Klan Kountry since?

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Abner Rain, Amy Rain, Catherine Tourist Court, Idlewild, Imeson, Jacksonville, Jacob Rain, Jane Rain, Jim Alderman, Ku Klux Klan, McCormick Woods, Oceanway, Oceanway Bar and Grill, Rain Cemetery, Tim Gilmore, Walter Benjamin

Old Philips, w/o Boundaries, Beheadings, the Last Hall-and-Parlor

Posted on February 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the full story:

Someone stole their heads. Their bodies had been burnt. Police found two axes in the scorched desolation of the shack. Just before Christmas. 1913.

Most of the residents of Philips were the children or grandchildren of former slaves, or were former slaves themselves. Sunken ground in the slope and swale of Philips Cemetery at Craig Swamp might mark older unrecorded graves.

Her husband lived to be 97. She was born in the house in 1922. Surely he’d heard the story when he was young.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Albert Gallatin Philips, Craig Creek, Craig Swamp, First Coast Industrial Supply, Florida East Coast Railway, hall and parlor, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, Jerusalem, John McLaurin, John McRay, Joseph Moore, King's Road, Ku Klux Klan, Larsen, Louis Hufbauer, Marjorie Moore, Mary Ann Harvich, Mary Hufbauer, Naugle Funeral Home, Philips, Philips Cemetery, Philips Community, Philips Congregational Church, Philips Highway, Pine Forest, Red Bank Plantation, Reddi-Arts, Sanborn Fire Insurance, shotgun house, South Jacksonville, Southbank, St Augustine Road, Stone Tape, T.C. Lethbridge, Tidbits, Tim Gilmore, W.H. Dowling, Yellow Fever

Beluthahatchee–land of activism and art

Posted on August 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the full story:

“Florida is my birthplace,” Kennedy writes in The Klan Unmasked, “and I am attached to it. I did not want to give the Klan the satisfaction of forcing me to abandon Beluthahatchee.”

When Kennedy drove up to the bus station in Jacksonville to pick him up, all he saw was a bum with a guitar case. When he asked Guthrie where the rest of his belongings were, the singer-poet said, “I’m wearin’ ’em.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Arlo Guthrie, Beluthahatchee, Chip Southworth, Karen Roumillat, Klan Unmasked, Ku Klux Klan, osprey, Sartre, Stetson Kennedy, Woody Guthrie

When the Klan hid and sniveled in a courthouse bathroom

Posted on June 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the seventh story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

A wave of mostly black protesters, about 300 of them, marched against the Klan before Duval County Courthouse on Bay Street, chanting, “Who’s gonna stop the Klan? We’re gonna stop the Klan!”

A black protester named Rose Marie Seay had snatched the white hood off Royals’s head and was parading around on the street with it for cameras.

Klansmen hid in a back bathroom, upstairs in the courthouse. “‘They accused us of being racists,’ one said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his shirttail.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Bill Wilkinson, Clyde Wayne Royals, Dale Carson, Imperial Wizard, Jacksonville, James Baldwin, KKK, Klan, Ku Klux Klan, Margaret Meade, Robert McMullen, Rose Marie Seay, schadenfreude

The Klan in Jax Politics, Story no. 6

Posted on June 8, 2017 | 1 comment

Click below for the sixth story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

Confederate generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest formed the KKK in Tennessee in the wake of the Civil War in 1866. A prominent Jacksonville attorney and Klansman had dubbed himself Nathan II in 1950.

Jacksonville would name another prominent bridge after Governor Fuller Warren, former Jacksonville City Councilman and Klansman. In 1949, Warren called the Klan “covered cowards and sheeted jerks,” but only after Jax Klansman and Baptist preacher A.C. Shuler outed Warren in a sermon as a Kluxer.

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged A.C. Shuler, Alexander Stephens, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Association of Carolina Klans, Axe Handle Saturday, Bill Hendrix, Canter Brown Jr., Carver Village, Claire Goforth, Confederacy, Cornerstone Speech, David Lawrence, Donald Trump, Edgar Waybright, Florida Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Fuller Warren, Fuller Warren Bridge, Gutzon Borglum, Harry T. Moore, Haydon Burns, Heritage Not Hate, I.D. Hart, Imperial City, Isaiah David Hart, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, John Kasper, John Mathews, KKK, Klan, Klan Act, Ku Klux Klan, Loyal White Knights, Mathews Bridge, NAACP, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Nathan II, Original Southern Klans, Ossian Hart, Richard Spencer, Robert Lee “Wild Bill” Davidson, Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Southern Poverty Law Center, Stet, Stetson Kennedy, Stone Mountain, The Klan Unmasked, Tim Gilmore, Tom Hamilton, United Daughters of the Confederacy, unmasking, White Primary Bill