Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Barrington Salmon

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” —James Baldwin

There is a deep irony that the face of resistance against Ron DeSantis’ efforts to conceal and misrepresent Florida’s Black history has lived the very history that the governor and his arch-conservative/MAGA buddies are working so hard to erase.

Racism and discrimination are poisons that have infected every part of this country and all of its institutions, including the legal and criminal justice system, education and academia, the military, the media, and healthcare. Segregation, discrimination and legal and de facto separation of the races was never stamped out and is rearing its ugly head again thanks to arch-conservative elements seeking to return the state and the country to a time when Black people occupied a place several tiers below their white counterparts.

Although the governor is wont to sugarcoat the brutality of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the casual, ruthless treatment of African Americans in Florida, 84-year-old historian and scholar Dr. Marvin Dunn is living proof of the lies and emptiness of the DeSantis/MAGA narrative.

He and other Black people carry in their bones the wretched history that DeSantis and others so desperately want to hide.

‘I know Jim Crow’

“I knew Jim Crow. I grew up in Florida under his dark, suffocating wings. I knew him intimately, as did every Black person I knew growing up in Deland and Miami in the 1940s and 50s,” Dunn writes in his book, “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes.”

“He hovered over every aspect of the first twenty-five years of my life, sucking ambition from me. I grew up during the last vestiges of his reign. I was so used to seeing the signs that read, “Whites seat from front—Colored seat from rear” on public buses that, when they were finally removed in the 1960s, sometimes I thought I still saw them there.

“Even after his death, Jim Crow was, for a while, omnipresent mentally and emotionally in our lives; such had been his reach. No black person I knew escaped the impact of the Jim Crow system or the possibility of being killed for no other reason than being black. A black person in Florida, during the time I grew up, lived with a pervasive awareness of the limitations a racist society imposed and of the impact those limitations imposed upon one’s life.”

With the passage of time, fading memories, and historical misinformation and disinformation, DeSantis and others seek to soften the violent, random, heartless system and spare the descendants of the perpetrators the pain of memory.

Against this background, Dunn’s is one voice standing up to the DeSantis political steamroller. He is a man whose actions are consistent with his values and beliefs. Dunn’s stories, books, lectures, and interviews serve as a poignant reminder of the power and potency of Black people.

Racial Caste System

Dunn, 84, is countering the lies, hateful rhetoric, suppression of free speech and dissent, and efforts to intimidate critics and anyone standing up to DeSantis and the MAGA horde.

Dunn was born in DeLand and grew up in the segregated South to a family that endured the indignities of Jim Crow and struggled economically because of racism and segregation, not because they didn’t work damn hard.

Dunn says in his book that in June 1940, he was born in an orange grove barn in the Blackberry community of DeLand. Corinne Elizabeth Williams, his mother, was a housecleaner and cook, and his father, James C. Dunn Sr., was a fruit and vegetable picker. The family were migrants who harvested crops in DeLand and Hicksville on Long Island, N.Y., he recalled.

He vividly remembers that every aspect of Black life was suffocated by the rigid racial caste system that consigned African Americans to second- and third-class citizenship manifested in inferior living accommodations; the worst-paying jobs, and a joke of an educational system. Black schools were in deplorable condition, the books were hand-me-downs, and children often had to walk miles to school in all types of weather, often passing sturdy, well-constructed white schools on the way.

“For most blacks of my generation in Florida, and I suspect elsewhere, the inferiority of our blackness was instilled in us by the people who were closest to us, our parents and grandparents,” Dunn writes.

Disrespect

“Jim Crow ruled. We used the colored water fountain at the Volusia County Courthouse. The water was not chilled as it was in the white fountain. We used bathrooms in the basement that were marked for ‘colored.’ I noticed that when I went downtown with my mother to shop, whites had the privilege of skipping ahead of us. Essentially, in the South at that time, a white person was not expected to wait until a black person was served, which would have been an act of subservience, or at least, respect.”

Noted Civil Rights attorney Benjamin Crump captured Dunn’s life’s work.

“As Black history is scrubbed from classrooms, Dr. Marvin Dunn is planting truth—literally. Under a tree at FL Int’l Univ, he’s teaching the Rosewood massacre and handing out banned books. In a state erasing our past, Black educators are once again forced to be the curriculum,” Crump wrote.

Meanwhile, after being named chair of the FIU Psychology department, Dunn co-produced several video documentaries. His FIU archival collection now consists of more than 4,000 photographs and images reflecting the Florida Black experience.

As a historian specializing in Black Florida history and culture, Dunn is founder and president of the Miami Center for Racial Justice and is known for organizing the “Teach the Truth” tours, which highlight Florida’s history of racial violence. Center staff members take participants to historic sites related to the history of racial violence in the state.

Dunn’s books include his “History of Florida,” “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century,” and “The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds.” In July 2024, the center received a Mellon Foundation grant of $1.5 million to extend this work to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

‘Insult to Injury’

Except for an occasional phenomenon like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, or Gloria Lockerman, Dunn remembers, Black Floridians 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,” he writes in his “History.”

“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. Florida was complicit because it imposed upon us a racist educational system that denied us our heroes, heroines and fighters. It was an effective, intentional and insipid way of milking ambition from generations of black Floridians,” Dunn writes in his “History.”

DeSantis’ Florida, and by extension about half of America, are places where one group of people believe they have the God-given right to alter the truth, expurgate historical facts, and suppress the racial violence, lynching, and destruction of Black communities in Ocooe and Rosewood in the early 20th Century. They’re intent on erasing the savagery and casual violence and diminishing the accomplishments Black Floridians wrote into history.

William DC Clark, a South Florida retired firefighter and paramedic, argues African Americans and their allies must fight like hell against this tyranny of the minority on all fronts.

“By now everyone knows that Trump (and DeSantis) are trying to erase any significant gains that Blacks have made. They’re trying to make it look like we didn’t even exist. Some say they’re trying to take us back to the day when we were considered 3/5ths of a man,” Clark, president of the DCS Mentoring Program in Miami, told me in a recent interview.

Dr. Marvin Dunn

Passive No More

“But what gets me is, when most reporters report on the latest DEI snub or latest firing of a top-ranked Black person, they do so as if they were reporting on someone being given a ticket for jaywalking.

“Maybe they feel the same way as Trump. Maybe they’re so used to many of us being so passive that it’s normal to them. But this is anything but normal and contrary to their beliefs, some of us will die for our freedom. FAFO if you want to … .”

The days of Blacks only having the option of cleaning white people’s homes; being prohibited from entering through the front door; being forced to step off the sidewalk when white people approached; enduring busing to get an education; and keeping Blacks in line are dead.

Dunn and Clark are the tip of widespread resistance in Florida and elsewhere to the grotesque efforts by Ron DeSantis and the Republican-majority Legislature, GOP leaders, policymakers, and donors to drag the country back to Jim Crow.

DeSantis and his hobgoblins probably think they’ve won this battle because the opposition is afraid and confused, and too many have been cowed into silence. But all of us need to do as Clark and Dunn have done and continue to fight against the forces of ignorance by organizing, protesting, engaging in civil disobedience, and using the courts, literature, music, and theater arts. Because, despite what the MAGA crowd posits, African Americans are Americans too.