Tag Archives: Murray Hill Heights

New Story: Ottis Toole’s Mother’s House (Until He Burnt It Down)

Posted on July 27, 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:

The first time Ottis Toole burnt down his mother’s house, he was 10 or 11 years old. When he burnt down his mother’s house on Day Avenue in 1981, his name wasn’t yet famous as either one of the worst serial killers in history, or one of the biggest fakes.

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Tagged Adam Walsh, Becky Powell, Buddy Terry, Day Avenue, Death Diploma, Drusilla Powell, Drusilla Toole, Frank Powell, George Sonnenberg, Hammond Grocery, Henry Lee Lucas, Jacksonville history, Joel Norris, Murray Hill Heights, Ottis Toole, Springfield Jacksonville, Tim Gilmore

Posted on June 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the fourth 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.

For most of his life, he’d not realized the full traumatic effect of the Klan’s bombing of his childhood home as retaliation for his being the first black child to attend Lackawanna Elementary School.

Can anyone feel the brutality and tragedy in the landscape? Does the Klan’s hate and the Godfreys’ fear and sorrow and determination remain in the soil or the air or the trees? I can’t tell, because I can’t not know what happened here.

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Tagged Beloved, Bob Gray, Donal Godfrey, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Lackawanna, Lackawanna Elementary, Murray Hill Heights, Ottis Toole, Robert Gray, Sethe, Terianne Summers, Tim Gilmore, Toni Morrison, Trinity Baptist Church, We Shall Overcome