Book Review: A History of Florida Through Black Eyes

I’d describe Marvin Dunn’s A History of Florida Through Black Eyes as two books comingled.  The first book is history and sets up the reading of the second, which is the author’s personal memoir.  In the memoir section are three chapters on lynching, a historical phenomenon that Dunn sees as unfinished business that he aims to finish personally. He does this by adding information and eye witness accounts to what the public record has preserved.

For example, Dunn researched the 1934 mob killing of Claude Neal. Then he got on the phone or jumped in his car and went to anyone he could find who may preserve some fragment of a memory of the event. By doing this, Dunn fills in what may be missing in the public record. In Neal’s case, Dunn spoke with surviving family members sometimes months before their deaths.  Dunn’s effort has made the record of these deaths as complete as possible and this book presents data about lynchings that cannot be found elsewhere. 

Interviewing those who might be holding even the most incidental or personal information about lynching matters because there was often a secretive element in lynching.   Sometimes they were public spectacles, but often the perpetrators worked to remain anonymous. 

Newspapers and police reports often overlooked lynchings because they brought reproach to a community. Schools minimize the ugly parts of Black experience to preserve an idealized impression of the heritage of young people. For example, Florida’s new social studies standards, which purport to cover the whole of Black experience, mention lynching once in 125 pages of curriculum directives. 

Dunn has done his part to pull the sheets off some Florida lynchings that racists wish were forgotten.  And for this reason, I see the middle three chapters as a merger of history and personal memoir.  Dunn concludes the book with the story of his own early life, education, Navy experience and his early career and successes as an educational psychologist in Miami. 

As for the historical sections, these are mixed.  For example, the information about the complicated relationship between Blacks and Native Americans in Spanish Florida before statehood is fresh and unique to Florida. 

On the other hand, the all-too-brief section about Reconstruction feels like it is in the book because no account of Black history would be complete without at least a hat tip to the complicated period that spans between the Civil War and Jim Crow.  Dunn gives the reader a vivid sense of the Jim Crow era in the personal memoir sections.  His recollection of boyhood and his family experiences gives a moving picture of what it meant to be African American between 1877 and 1955, not all that long ago.

Why did Marvin Dunn write this book? 

Dunn made it clear that many benefits countered his status as a member of America’s diminished class.  He had good parents.  He was smart and worked hard.  He got some good advice and several kindly people helped to offset the cruelties of racism that were all around him.

One factor, however, seemed to me to play an outsized role in Dunn’s life—seeing something new, different and better.  Even trivial images on television could be an epiphany for a boy who had been kept in the darkness of racial oppression. 

Gloria Lockerman showed me, and millions of black youngsters like me, that it could be done! And it hooked me on history. The point here is that role models are critical to a child’s ambitions. Our role models in the 40s and 50s were teachers, preachers, and prize fighters. When we looked into our futures, except for them, there was emptiness, a void created by Jim Crow himself. Except for an occasional phenomenon, like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, or Gloria Lockerman, we saw little that was worth emulating. Adding insult to injury, this was by design, and Florida itself was complicit in it by subjecting us to a segregated education system that intentionally depicted African-Americans primarily as laborers. My education in Florida schools skipped over slavery with a few drawings of slaves picking cotton and appearing happy to be doing it. They had neat little cabins with little black children playing in the background.

Dunn, Dr. Marvin . A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes (p. 253). Kindle Edition.

Dunn narrates his life story as a succession of curtains opening to reveal vistas that changed his beliefs about life and himself.  Dunn needed to see not only positive role models but examples of oppression and violence that cast the positive in sharp contrast.  I read Dunn and begin thinking of his life as the “Black Forrest Gump.”  He was gifted by having a lot of first and second-hand experiences.  It was what he saw that proved to be the most energizing for him.  He mentions in his personal narrative that he didn’t only learn about Black inferiority from racist Whites, but also from his own family.  Dunn’s ample experiences of a different narrative was critical for him to rise above even the limitations of his otherwise wonderful family experience. 

I think the importance of seeing energized Dunn’s passion for completing the accounts of Florida’s more recent lynchings for the sake of future generations.  It’s significant that while Dunn was bringing this book to publication, Florida was busy burying the story of lynching not only in Florida but in the nation.