SARASOTA, Fla. — Black History Month is an opportunity to learn from the past to build a better future. This year, for Sarasota and Manatee counties, that means taking steps to recognize the injustices of the past.
A new historical marker to memorialize and honor victims of lynching and racial terror is set to be unveiled next week.
The marker, which will be located at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, is going to be called the Manasota Racial Healing Memorial.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, which embarked on a mission to curate all the documented and undocumented lynchings in the country, Florida had 315 recorded lynchings. There were at least six documented cases of lynching that occurred in the Sarasota and Manatee areas.
"Most of the lynching happened in the early 1900s, and at that time, Sarasota and Manatee County were one county," Dr. Caryl J. Sheffield, the chair of the Manasota Remembers, said.
It was a time when mobs of white residents rampaged the land, terrorizing their Black neighbors. The mobs were sometimes aided by local law enforcement. The victims who will be honored on the marker are:
Henry Thomas (March 8, 1903)
Sam Ellis (March 7, 1910)
Wade Ellis (March 7, 1910)
Ruddy (March 8, 1910)
William English (July 1, 1912)
James Franklin (April 4, 1934)
According to several documented accounts, including those involving the local victims, the lynchings followed a pattern familiar across the county but most especially in the segregated Jim Crow South.
"The stories are amazing and tragic at the same time because these were people just minding their business," Dr. Sheffield said.
"One is of the Black man that has an interaction, or a so-called interaction with a white woman, and then the white woman goes home and tells her family and she gets her brothers and her uncles all riled up and they come after the Black man," she explained.
"There's another story of one of the victims who had a feud with his boss over salary, and he shot his boss, and the boss came looking for him at somebody else's house, and they shot all three of them. They just got all three of them," Sheffield added.
There were more than 5,000 such documented and undocumented lynchings of African Americans in the United States between 1865 and the 1950s.
Many of them are now remembered at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama including Caesar Sheffield who was lynched in Lake Park Georgia in 1915.
"My grandfather, being that he was an architect, you imagine what kind of family wealth was stopped at that moment that he was lynched," Sheffield said.
According to the EIJ records, Sheffield's grandfather as described by the Valdosta Times on April 19, 1915, was taken from an unprotected jail by a mob and shot.
Mr. Sheffield, who had recently emigrated from England, had been accused of stealing meat from a smokehouse owned by a local white man, according to the report.
His body was found several days later in a field with several bullet holes.
However, according to his granddaughter, the version of events in the papers may have been economical with the truth behind her grandfather's murder.
"Our version through family oral history is that my grandfather came here from England as an assistant to an architect, and he had built his family a very nice home, and some white people wanted that home and he wouldn't give it to them and that's the family history of why he was taken and put in jail," Sheffield said.
"They never have a word. The victim never has a word. It's whatever they say that happened. It's the mob that decides 'Oh we're not going to wait for the authorities. We're just going to go and we have the power and we have the authority to do that," she explained.
The process to get a marker for the Manatee and Sarasota lynching victims was a five-year-long joint effort by various community groups like the Boxser Diversity Initiative, Newtown Alive, the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition, Manasota ASALH, and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative.
While the effort was spearheaded by the community, a large number of residents of the historically Black community of Newtown opposed placing the marker there.
"It's very traumatizing and it's not something that you would like to see all the time. It's right to help with the healing not to have the marker in Newtown and to have it someplace else where other people can see it as well," she said.
The marker will be right on the property of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Fruitville Road but not far from the sidewalk. Three concrete benches have been constructed and positioned under a nearby tree to allow people to sit and reflect on the history and impact of racial terror in America.
"Principles of the Unitary Universe include equal justice for all people, that all people are created equally, and it was very important that we stepped up and helped this project come to fruition," Dr. Dale Anderson from the Unitarian Universalist Church said.
The area designated for the marker and memorial is accessible to the public and comes with ample parking. It is also conveniently along the Newtown Alive Historical Trolley route which teaches Sarasota's African American heritage.
"These lynchings were you know an egregious part of the history of this country," Anderson said.
"The memorial is really to help people reflect on that and make sure that that doesn't go forward, that kind of hate," he said.
"I think it's the best place for the marker to go because we really do want to honor these six victims, and the documented victims and the unknown victims," Sheffield said.
The marker will be dedicated during a ceremony at the church on Fruitville Road at 11 a.m. on Feb. 24.
That will be immediately followed by an elaborate cultural ceremony to honor the victims outside the church.
Another phase of the project will involve collecting soil from the actual lynching sites or from as near to it as possible for the memorial museum in Montgomery.