Racial profiling is nothing new to Florida, including many despaired laws.
The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated conflict that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida. At least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Racial disturbances were common during the early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation's rapid social changes. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.
Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.
On Christmas night, 1951, Harry T. Moore and his wife were fatally injured at home by a bomb that went off beneath their house. It was the Moore’s' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Moore died on the way to the hospital in Sanford Florida. His wife Harriette V. Moore died from her injuries nine days later.
Moore has been called the first martyr in the Civil Rights Movement. He was the first NAACP official murdered in the civil rights struggle. The murders caused a national and international outcry, with protests registered at the United Nations against violence in the South. The NAACP held a huge rally in New York, where the renowned poet Langston Hughes read a poem written in memory of Moore. Although the state called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help the investigation, it was unable to bring any indictments against the suspects.
There were eleven other bombings against black families in Florida the year that Moore was killed. The risk to activists and any blacks in the South was high and continued to be so. According to a later report from the NAACP's Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or were simply "innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism." For example, bombing was prevalent in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s, used by independent KKK groups to intimidate middle-class blacks moving into new neighborhoods.
August 27, 1960 - Jacksonville, Florida - Ax Handle Riot:
1963-1964 - The St. Augustine Movement was a civil rights movement that took place in St. Augustine, Florida. It was part of the wider African American Civil Rights Movement. It was a major event in St. Augustine's long history and had a key role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1963 a sit-in protest at the local Woolworth's lunch counter ended in the arrest and imprisonment of 16 young black protesters and seven juveniles. Four of the children, two of whom were 16 year old girls, were sent to "reform" school and retained for six months. The St. Augustine Four, as they came to be known, JoAnn Anderson, Audrey Nell Edwards, Willie Carl Singleton and Samuel White, had their case publicized as an egregious injustice by Jackie Robinson, the national NAACP, the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper and others. Finally, a special action of the governor and cabinet of Florida freed them in January 1964.
January 6, 2006 - Martin Lee Anderson was a 14-year-old from Florida who died while incarcerated at a boot camp-style youth detention center, the Bay County Boot Camp, located in Panama City, Florida and operated by the Bay County Sheriff's Office. Anderson collapsed while performing required physical training at the camp. While running track, he stopped and complained of fatigue. The guards coerced him to continue his run, but then he collapsed and died. A 30-minute portion of the surveillance video depicting the coercion was made public.
The teenager's death resulted in a broad outcry accusing the camp guards of racially-motivated murder, in part in response to an official videotape that showed the guards using physical coercion. The Florida legislature voted to close the state's five juvenile boot camps.
February 26, 2012 - The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin is dominating the news in America. Trayvon was killed in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman. On the evening of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman went out to patrol the gated neighborhood in his vehicle as he did every night because of several break-ins had been reported in recent weeks. While out patrolling his neighborhood, Zimmerman saw a young black teenager with a hood over his head so he started to follow him.
“At no time do we condone wrongness on either side of the wall"
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