Lackawanna and Forest Park Elementary and Jacksonville Classical Academy (Segregation, Bombings and Banning Black History)

by Tim Gilmore, 1/12/2024

Pines and ragged palms stand over the chimneys and rusted fire escapes at Lackawanna Elementary School, Public School no. 10, where no teacher has explained a grammar or math lesson in 30 years, where small children took upon their shoulders and into their hearts and stomachs all the racial tension and turmoil and hatred around them.

It was here, at Lackawanna, that a small Black child named Donal Godfrey, six years old, first studied amongst a sea of white faces, and the surrounding white community treated him and his mother like cancer. And it was here, to Lackawanna, that the students of Forest Park Elementary, a segregated Black school built on garbage incinerator ash, were sent when their school closed. And it was here that white supremacists concentrated their picketing efforts when the first court order for school desegregation came down.

If the blood of Abel, murdered by his brother Cain, the first human born, cried out to God from the ground in the Book of Genesis, what childhood suffering of the spirit lingers in this land, in these old sand-colored buildings, in these school grounds abandoned beside the interstate?

“The bomb blew the refrigerator through the roof,” Donal Godfrey told me in 2017. “Not too many people have survived a Klan bombing. It’s an exclusive club.” The blast shattered the windows and cracked the walls of the houses on either side. If Donal and his mother Iona, Iona’s mother Bessie, and Iona’s Aunt Mattie and Uncle George hadn’t been on the opposite side of the small woodframe house at Gilmore and Owen Streets, they would have died that morning.

It had been a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregating schools by race was unconstitutional, so Iona thought it was time Jacksonville complied. Instead of enrolling Donal at Forest Park Elementary, segregated Black, she sent her son to Lackawanna, a mile westward. Across Duval County in 1964, 12 other Black first-graders first stepped into formerly all-white schools.

Yearbook photos show Donal sitting in the back of the class, surrounded by white children in those typical wooden school desks, a big sweet eager smile on his face, a teacher beside him in a floral print dress. His first morning, on his way into the school, a group of angry white mothers accosted him and his mother, asking her where she thought she was taking her son, bleating the ever-present n-word.

When I first spoke with Donal, he hadn’t yet retired from the U.S. Foreign Service, nor published his book Leaving Freedom to Find Peace: My Life’s Journey. Atlanta filmmaker Hal Jacobs hadn’t yet made his 2024 documentary called Just Another Bombing? Donal had served in Norway, then Ghana, and had decided, when he spoke to me that day from Monrovia, Liberia, that when he retired, he’d spend the rest of his life in Ghana.

Before the bombing, but after Donal started attending Lackawanna, he’d been playing with his best friend Lorenzo near his home in Murray Hill Heights, just across the tunnel beneath the highway from school, when Lorenzo asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Lorenzo wanted to be a cowboy. He’d seen the movies; the cowboys always won the war. Donal wanted to be an astronaut; he’d seen John Glenn’s 1962 space flight aboard a craft called Friendship.

So first it baffled Donal when Lorenzo laughed; soon it broke his heart. “You can’t be no astronaut,” Lorenzo said; “You a Negro!” So, Donal told me, “I went home and I asked my mama. I wanted to be John Glenn and this kid burst my bubble.”

Donal had become friends with a little white girl at school and when the two of them began walking home at the end of the school day, women gathered on Phyllis Street to shout down these children with the usual hateful racial slurs. Strangers started phoning Iona anonymously with death threats.

Before dawn on Sunday, February 16, 1964, 20 sticks of dynamite exploded at 3259 Gilmore Street. The blast blew Donal out of bed on the opposite side of the house. To this day, he can call up, from deep body memory, the smell of dynamite.

On March 12^th, five members of the Robert E. Lee chapter, or “klavern,” of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested after a fellow Klansman, William Rosecrans, arrested on March 1^st, spilled their names. The first trial resulted in one Klansman’s acquittal, Rosecrans having pled guilty, and mistrial for the others.

Klan attorney J.B. Stoner represented the would-be murderers in court. He asked the jury whether white people in the Klan had “as many civil rights as the NAACP.” In the second trial, the all-white jury handed the verdict down on Thanksgiving, acquitting the Ku Klux Klan, and Stoner called the verdict a “victory for the white race.” Four years later, Stoner became the defense attorney for James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1980, Stoner would be convicted of the 1958 bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, “Bombingham,” Alabama.

Klan leaders from around the South met at the Capri Motel on Jacksonville’s North Main Street, trying to figure out how they could break Rosecrans out of jail and kill him. They failed. They also failed to find breakfast, Congressional testimony later showed, when Robert Creel, “grand dragon” of Alabama, “became so intoxicated that at three a.m. he wanted to go into the city and shoot his way into a restaurant and get breakfast.”

Three of the acquitted Klansmen showed up in Life Magazine in 1965, in the barbershop of white supremacist Warren Folks, who ran unsuccessfully for various offices from Jacksonville from the 1960s through the early ’90s. They bragged to the Life reporters about getting away with the bombing.

Tensions at Lackawanna, when the 1960s fell into the ’70s, threatened to recapitulate the Civil War, a century after the Confederate States of America ceased to exist, in the bodies of schoolchildren. Included in Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat’s first desegregation order for Duval County was the merger of Forest Park and Lackawanna Elementary Schools, a mile and a quarter apart, across the racial demarcation line of McDuff Avenue, north of Interstate 10. Whites from Lackawanna rarely went east of McDuff, cityward, and Black residents from Mixon Town and Brooklyn seldom ventured west.

Lackawanna Elementary opened in 1911 in its original building, then doubled in size with a second structure in 1918, recessed from the road and sporting a pediment. Forest Park opened in 1954 at Forest and Goodwin Streets in Mixon Town on the site of a former garbage incinerator ash dump beside a poultry processing plant.

When Jon Thompson became principal of Lackawanna in 1970, moving across town from Norwood Elementary, he knew of the bombing of the Godfrey home and quickly learned the Forest Park / Lackawanna racial line. It was up to Thompson and Annette Espy, principal of Forest Park, to decide “how to distribute students.” Instead of assigning students to schools based on the first letters of last names, Thompson and Espy went by grade. Forest Park would take students in the first four grades, Lackawanna would take fifth and sixth grade students, and both schools would have their own kindergartens.

Black children who’d previously attended Forest Park were afraid of what they’d understood to be a redneck school, while white parents whose children were assigned to Forest Park showed up at Lackawanna on the first day of school and planned to stay until their children were enrolled there. Already private religious schools admittedly founded to avoid racial integration, like Trinity Christian Academy, known across the South as “segregation academies,” mushroomed across the landscape.

Thompson remembers how when he got in his car to come to work in the morning, his stomach would sink and nausea would begin to roll over him. He could only imagine how Black parents and students felt. Though close to two dozen schools were involved in that first court order, picketers from multiple schools gathered in Oceanway, a rural area north of Downtown long known as Klan country, and decided they could be more effective by consolidating their efforts and that Lackawanna would be their focal point.

Led by Warren Folks, they showed up at Lackawanna the second week of school. The school had no playground and regularly used Mallison Park, which faced the school across Lenox Avenue, for “recess.” It was there the picketers planted themselves.

“Students had to walk through picket lines,” Thompson recalls, “and the picketers harassed and shouted at both students and teachers. Warren Folks told me, ‘You’re a nigger-loving Northerner.’” Thompson learned the school board would only provide security officers if principals made formal complaints. He did. He ended up in court with Judge Marion Gooding, who “made a non-decision,” because he didn’t want to “antagonize the relationship between the school and the community.”

That same year, Governor Claude Kirk, a former Jacksonville insurance salesman, left Tallahassee to hole himself up in the Manatee County School Administration Building in Bradenton, saying he would not leave until the county halted desegregation efforts. He directly disobeyed a U.S. District Court order that he appear before a judge for contempt of court, until the court charged him a daily $10,000 fine as long as he remained in the building.

When segregated, Forest Park had twice the student population as Lackawanna. When the schools merged, white parents, in increasing numbers, removed their children from Lackawanna and sent them either to private schools or to schools attached to different family addresses. Overnight, Lackawanna became a mostly Black school.

Tjoflat’s next court orders turned several Black schools into desegregated “sixth grade centers” and closed other Black schools, including Forest Park Elementary, altogether. Warren Folks, running for city councilman and state representative, campaigned on impeaching and imprisoning Tjoflat and offering government vouchers to white parents to send their children to private schools.

Far northward, full-scale busing riots broke out in supposedly liberal Boston where, in 1976, photographer Stanley Forman snapped the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, “The Soiling of Old Glory,” showing white anti-busing protester Joseph Rakes assaulting Black attorney Theodore Landsmark with an American flag, its pole wielded like a spear, near Boston City Hall.

About a month before I first spoke with Donal Godfrey in 2017, Reggie Bridges showed me a photo of Josephine Statums, Forest Park crossing guard, a no-nonsense-looking woman in a tie and officer’s cap, purse slung over her shoulder. “I saw her just last week,” Reggie told me. She was 92 and Reggie was 61. She recognized him instantly from half a century earlier.

Reggie Bridges lived at 1107 Jackson Street in Brooklyn, one neighborhood east of Mixon Town, in a shotgun house, with a screened-in porch, that he’d called home since the mid-1960s. Reggie was the unofficial historian of Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood first platted just after the Civil War where United States Colored Troops held off a Confederate advance. Reggie’s house, an unofficial museum of neighborhood history, contained his lifelong collection.

Reggie lost his house in mid-2019, a few months after he and his neighbors received a letter from Atlantic Beach real estate developer Vestcor Companies, advising them Vestcor would purchase their homes and planned to demolish them that summer. Though everybody sold, Reggie told me, “I hated it. Spent my life in that house.” I didn’t ask him how much Vestcor paid, but Reggie’s friend Les Paul Garner told me about a neighbor whom Vestcor paid $60,000, saying, “She ran around acting like it was a million dollars. That ain’t nothing compared to the money they’re making off our neighborhood.”

Vestcor demolished the houses, fenced off the property, prepared to build new apartments called Lofts at Brooklyn, then affixed a banner where Reggie had lived for 56 years that advertised “Urban Living,” coming soon!

“And you know Vestcor is doin’ the new school over there too, right?” Paul asked. “They buildin’ it where our school was,” on the environmentally reclaimed former site of Forest Park Elementary. He meant Jacksonville Classical Academy, a “public,” and therefore tuition-free and taxpayer-funded “charter school” affiliated with the private religious conservative “liberal arts” institution called Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Hillsdale “classical” schools now dot the American landscape from Florida to Washington State and Southern California to Massachusetts, with curricula serving as the model for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” agenda, which includes the rejection of Black history classes and textbooks, the cancellation of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs, and the “hostile takeover” of New College, a small liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida, to turn it into “the Hillsdale of the South.”

Unlike Lackawanna Elementary before Donal Godfrey, Jacksonville Classical Academy has to accept Black students and forefronts them in promotional materials, but those students won’t learn much Black history, Black literature or Black cultural studies. They won’t learn the truth about slavery, the Confederate States of America, the history of racism in their town and state, or why the “flatteries” spewed at Robert E. Lee’s funeral nauseated Frederick Douglass. They won’t read Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin or Nikki Giovanni or Alice Walker or Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates. They also won’t know, by design, what they’re not allowed to know.

Donal Godfrey left Lackawanna Elementary after the Klan bombed his house. He finished first grade at Susie E. Tolbert Elementary up on 13^th Street, then attended still-segregated Forest Park from second to fourth grade and returned to Lackawanna in fifth grade. He graduated, in 1975, ironically, from a school named Robert E. Lee, same name as that of the Klan “klavern” that bombed his and his mother’s house. Lee is now Riverside High School.

Iona, Donal’s mother, worked for Head Start, the U.S. program focusing on early childhood education, health and parental involvement, for several years, before becoming a professor of early education at Florida Junior College and Florida Community College at Jacksonville for 25 years.

In the 1980s, Lackawanna became an “alternative school” for students expelled elsewhere. It closed in 1992, then served for a while as a schoolbook depository, now School Board storage.

After its closing in 1972, Forest Park served as a Head Start and neighborhood community center, then sat abandoned before demolition and environmental reclamation and construction of the new “anti-woke” Jacksonville Classical Academy.

Donal Godfrey lives in Ghana, where he returned when he retired. Iona lives in Washington, D.C. Donal feels uneasy when he returns to the U.S., as he told Atlanta filmmaker Hal Jacobs, director of Just Another Bombing? The precise racist horrors Donal detailed to Hal in September 2022 occurred in the white supremacist mass shooting outside Edward Waters University in August 2023.

“The bombing of our house shaped my future perspective on the U.S. and its rhetoric of ‘home of the free and the brave’ and ‘freedom and justice for all,’” Donal told me in 2017. “These slogans did not ring true for me, no matter how I sliced them.”

Despite civil rights successes (and reversals), American racial violence doesn’t seem much different to Donal now than it did 60 years ago, various U.S. presidents tempering or encouraging violent white grievance, white supremacists having traded bombs for assault rifles.

From that incinerator ash site, across McCoys Creek, past corner groceries and heartpine and crackerwood porches, the abandoned Pic N’ Save Drugs at the racial demarcation line between Forest Park and Lackawanna, to that otherwise white school where Donal Godfrey first set foot in 1964, old hateful stupidities cry out, like Abel’s blood, to whatever God won’t abide them.

If this land’s cursed, it’s also sacred ground. It awaits, wearily, post-Confederate Truth-and-Reconciliation, having readied and readied and readied itself. What patience I presume of it shames me. How will we act upon its bequest?