Hernando lynchings stain past indelibly
The Senate apology for not making lynching a federal crime is too little, too late, says the cousin of one local victim.
By DAN DeWITT
Published June 19, 2005
BROOKSVILLE - In 1929, a 19-year-old black man named Carl Lang was arrested for shooting into a store in Spring Lake.
After spending a few days in jail in Brooksville, Lang was inexplicably released and then, as he walked home, grabbed by a mob of white men on horseback.
They carried him to what is now the Withlacoochee State Forest, said his cousin, Mable Sims, 58, where "they put him on a horse and tied a noose around him and popped his neck and then put his body down on the ground.
"They put lighter stumps on him and built a fire ... They danced and drank moonshine while this black man lay down and his bones turned to ashes."
Lynchings such as this one, tacitly sanctioned by local authorities, were never considered a federal crime.
That was a tragic injustice, the U.S. Senate acknowledged last week when it formally apologized for failing to pass a federal lynching law and for allowing black citizens to live in fear of mob violence for decades.
This apology had special significance in Hernando County, where at least five black residents were lynched between 1900 and 1931 - more, per capita, than any county in the state.
"Remember, this was a tiny county at the time," said Gary Mormino, a professor of Florida Studies at the University of South Florida. "(The rate in) Hernando County is just astronomically high."
For Sims, who wept as she talked about her cousin, the apology came too late.
But for Charlie Batten, 90 years old and white, it is unnecessary. He calls the 1920s, when at least three residents were lynched, "the hanging times." Though he was too young to take part, he said, he is not ashamed to admit he knows people who did.
"There ought to be more of it going on now, the Ku Klux Klan too," he said. "A lot of those people need a good whipping."
Hernando's history of endorsing racial violence dates back to at least 1856, when residents named their town after Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery South Carolina Congressman who had severely beaten an abolitionist senator.
For several years after the Civil War, white residents carried on an armed feud with black residents that was sparked by an interracial marriage. Among those killed was one of Sims' ancestors, Arthur St. Clair, whose main offense was considering a run for the mixed-race Reconstruction-era state Legislature, she said.
Mobs lynched two black men in Hernando County in 1900, according to a NAACP survey of racial violence, said Mormino, author of Florida, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A social history of modern Florida.
This was justified by a claim that the men had murdered a white person, Mormino said, "which should be viewed with an extremely jaundiced eye. Rape, for example, could mean that someone had winked at a white woman."
These lynchings, shocking as they are today, fit in with the wider history of racial violence in the United States, said Ray Arsenault, another USF professor. Nationally, the number of lynchings crested in 1892 and declined gradually with the passage of rigid Jim Crow laws that ensured severe punishment for blacks.
"Basically, you had legal lynchings," he said.
Florida was unusual because of the wave of racial violence here in the 1920s, including the Rosewood Massacre in 1923 and a disturbance in Ocoee in 1920 that began when the black owner of a citrus grove tried to vote.
"The Ku Klux Klan and others essentially burned down the entire black community," Arsenault said of Ocoee.
In 1923, about 100 Klansmen marched through the streets of Brooksville, according to the Southern Argus newspaper, which respectfully reported the address of the main speaker, a methodist minister from Tarpon Springs; at a time when the county's population was less than 5,000, the parade drew more than 1,000 spectators.
"This was the largest crowd yet witnessed in the city," the paper reported.
Mormino found a reference to the killings in a 1941 statistical study of racial violence in the southern United States. It offers no details, and, other than confirming that the three lynchings occurred in the 1920s, no dates.
But from interviews and a few newspapers stories, it is clear that the violence here followed the same pattern as in Ocoee. The lynchings of Lang and two other men, as well as a brutal beating, were acts of terrorism designed to prevent any challenge to white supremacy.
In 1924, Will Timmons lived in his family's settlement behind what is now the Brooksville Wal-Mart. He was prosperous enough to afford a car, his niece, Retha Timmons, said in a 1999 interview with the Times; Timmons, who has since died, lived with her uncle's family.
She was returning from the fields with her uncle when a group of men, not wearing masks because they apparently had no fear of prosecution, grabbed him and took him to the nearby woods where they beat him "half to death," she said.
L.C. Mobley, 72, who lived nearby, said he grew up hearing stories of the attack.
"I was told they beat him between the legs until they tore his testicles up," Mobley said. "They did castrate him ... because he bought a brand-new Ford."
On April 30, 1926, the Brooksville Herald carried front-page stories about the Hernando High debate team and the impressions of William McKethan, president of Hernando State Bank, upon his return from a trip to North Carolina.
A story about a lynching - "Mob takes negro on way to trial" - occupied one column on the bottom half of page seven.
Charles Davis, who was accused of killing a Pasco County deputy in eastern Hernando County on Jan. 1 of that year, had been in jail in Ocala, the paper said. As Sheriff W.D. Cobb and a deputy led him back for his trial, they were confronted by a mob near Nobleton.
In documents on file at the USF campus in St. Petersburg, Cobb said: "I believe Davis was taken and thrown into the Withlacoochee River ... Maybe in a day or two the body will come to the surface."
According to the Herald story, the judge in the case "expressed censure of the public indifference to such acts and said that until the people show more respect for the work of the juries ... such incidents will continue."
No documents could be found about the lynching that old-time residents seem to remember most clearly. Sometime in the mid-1920s, a black teenager from the settlement in Croom, now part of the Withlacoochee State Forest, was accused of raping a white woman.
Because of the threat of mob violence, he was taken to a jail in Hillsborough County, Roy Snow, a longtime county commissioner who is now deceased, said in a 1999 interview.
A group of Hernando residents produced a forged statement authorizing the jailer to release the young black man, said Snow, whose brother, Gene Snow, talked about the lynching in a 1990 Times interview. Gene Snow, who has since died, said the typewriter used to produce the fake document might have been at his store, Brooksville Lumber and Supply, though he refused to show it.
The mob then took the teenager back to Hernando and hanged him at the intersection of what is now Croom Road and Croom-Rital Road, Roy Snow said.
"I can show you the tree where he was lynched," Snow said.
Mormino said that this violence apparently chased black residents out of the county. While the total population of Hernando climbed during the 1920s to 4,948 residents, the number of African-Americans dropped by 16.5 percent, Mormino said.
"They were voting with their feet."
Retha Timmons said her uncle was taken to Citrus County to recover from his injuries, which left him bedridden for more than a year. She did not move back to her family home for 70 years.
Mobley doesn't remember being frightened of white authority, he said, but he never questioned whether he should obey them.
"We only had one high Sheriff and that was Mr. Neil Law," Mobley said of Cobb's successor, who was elected in 1932.
"Mr. Neil Law, he would always call a black man a high yellow. He always walked with a stick because he had a limp in his leg. If he arrested you, he'd tell you to go ahead and get in the car, and you got in. There wasn't no such thing as you didn't get in the car, because you had respect for the law."
That, of course, was precisely the point of lynchings and beatings.
"Back then, they did what had to be done," said Olan Batten, 82, Charlie Batten's brother.
"I know the n-----s weren't taking over everything like they are now."
Mable Sims said it devastates her to think that people still don't consider the lasting pain of such violence, which drove the male residents from the rural African-American community of Twin Lakes, were she grew up.
"That's why I was raised by women. It broke up our family," said Sims, who said Lang did not actually fire the shots, which in any case did not hit anyone.
"When (Lang's mother) talked about it, she would sit on the porch and cry. When you can see the pain and heartache, how he didn't even have a chance to go to the court to explain - it hurts. It still hurts. (The Senate) can say they're sorry all they want to, but it doesn't take the hurt away."
Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116. Send e-mail to dewitt@sptimes.com