African American

As innocent four-year-old girls in the late 1940s, Katie, who is white, and Delia, an African-American, become best friends despite societal pressures against them. In 1960, when the girls are 16, Kate abandons her childhood friend when she is needed most. In 2006, Kate is working to earn Delia’s forgiveness as danger surrounds the women’s reunion.

That’s the premise of the new novel “Reparation” by Titusville author Ruth Rodgers. Although the exciting and suspenseful book is not based on specific actual events, it does reflect reality in Florida from the 1940s to the present.

Ruth Rodgers is a native Floridian, raised on a farm in Madison County. She grew up in rural north Florida in the 1950s and ‘60s, when schools, theaters, restaurants, and other public accommodations were racially segregated. Rodgers says that black families and white families worked side by side in the tobacco fields, but that’s where the interaction ended.

“We worked with black people, but we never socialized with them,” Rodgers says. “It was very much frowned upon.”

The novel “Reparation” is written from the first-person perspective of Kate as she flashes back through her childhood relationship with Delia. The reader sees Kate’s convictions about racial equality strengthen over time. Rodgers is the same age as her main character Kate, and shares other traits with her. Both believed in racial equality, but were not outspoken about their views in the 1960s.

“They were not popular views at that time,” Rodgers says. “I think, looking back, a lot of liberal Southerners feel a sense of guilt that we didn’t do more, that we kept our views to ourselves, and that we let culture dictate to us how to behave.”

The novel “Reparation” has a warning label on the cover informing readers that the offensive and racially charged “n-word” appears in the book. Use of the word is particularly jarring to modern readers when it comes from four-year-old Katie near the beginning of the story. While presented in an historically accurate context, its use may be too shocking for sensitive readers.

“She wouldn’t have had any other word to use,” Rodgers explains. “This was the word that her parents used, her grandparents used, her neighbors used, everybody around her used. It was very common in the area in which I grew up. To her it’s just a descriptive term. It’s not a derogatory term, because she has no other word to replace it with.”

“Reparation” was being prepared for publication just as discussions about race relations in Florida and the nation were reigniting. As design of the book was nearing completion in 2013, President Obama spoke about frustration over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case; the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, and celebrity chef Paula Deen’s career was damaged by her admitted use of the “n-word.” Speakers at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington encouraged people to be diligent about protecting the legacy of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Rodgers says that a need exists for continued discussion about the history of race relations in Florida and the nation. She believes that her novel “Reparation” can serve as a catalyst for such conversations. “We’ve come a long way since the 1940s,” Rodgers says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

The story of Katie and Delia demonstrates that racism and bigotry are learned behaviors that can be overcome, even when they are instilled in children at a very young age and supported by prevailing societal attitudes.

Beyond providing a particular perspective on racial attitudes in Florida and how they evolved in the last half of the twentieth century, this novel also offers a well written and suspenseful story.

Carrying a cumbersome audio recorder that he called “the thing,” Stetson Kennedy traveled through rural backwoods, swamps, and small towns from north Florida to Key West, collecting oral histories, folktales, and work songs. He spoke with the diverse people of Florida including Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, Greek sponge divers, African American turpentine still workers, and Latin cigar rollers.

The result of Stetson Kennedy’s trek through Florida’s multicultural communities was the classic 1942 book Palmetto Country.

Born in Jacksonville in 1916, Stetson Kennedy traveled the world but always returned to Florida. He left his studies at the University of Florida in 1937 to join the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers Project, and was soon named the head of the unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies. During this period he was the supervisor of writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who also collected material for the WPA.

Stetson Kennedy’s work helped to establish the collection of oral history as a valid method of historical research among twentieth century historians. In a 2009 interview, Kennedy reflected on his role as an early oral historian: “I am a great believer in oral history because [of what] I call…the ‘Dictatorship of the Footnote.’  The academicians are quoting each other instead of going out and getting first-hand primary source material.  And oral history, of course, is [the perspective of] a participant and a witness, at least, and seeing it with all their sensory organs, and for that reason it has more validity from my point of view.”

While collecting oral histories in Florida’s diverse communities, Stetson Kennedy was particularly moved by the plight of African Americans suffering under the state’s restrictive “Black Codes” and the South’s tradition of “Jim Crow” laws. A social activist as well as an author, Kennedy risked his life by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Using the name John Perkins, Stetson Kennedy was able to gather information that helped lead to the incarceration of a number of domestic terrorists. These experiences led to the 1954 book I Rode With the Klan, which was later republished under the title The Klan Unmasked. 

Much has been made of Kennedy’s creative choice in The Klan Unmasked to blend information obtained by another KKK infiltrator with his own experiences, presenting them with one narrative voice. The accuracy of the information in his book cannot be effectively challenged, just the style in which the facts are presented. 

In 2009, Kennedy recalled his covert study of the KKK: “I first infiltrated during the war, when the Klan was afraid that President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt might prosecute them under the War Powers Act.  So they didn’t put on their robes, and they changed their names to various things like American Shores Patrol and American Gentile Army, and things like that, so that’s how it all began.  And, yes, it was exciting, to put it mildly.  When I went overseas some years later, I thought I’d get away from my nightmares, you know, of being caught.  But in Paris, it was raining frequently, and the French traffic cops wore white rubber raincoats with capes and hoods, and their hand signals were very much like the Klan signals, so I kept on having nightmares.”

Stetson Kennedy continued working until his death in 2011, at the age of 94. His last book, The Florida Slave, was published posthumously. He wrote eight books, and his work as an author, activist, and folklorist has been deservedly well recognized. Kennedy received the Florida Heritage Award, the Florida Governor’s Heartland Award, the NAACP Freedom Award, the Florida Historical Society’s Dorothy Dodd Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was inducted into the Florida Artist’s Hall of Fame.

For more information read Stetson Kennedy’s books including Palmetto Country, The Klan Unmasked, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, and The Florida Slave.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is producer and host of “Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society.”  The show can also be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me.  I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”

It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

Since 1990, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community (P.E.C.) has celebrated their town’s most famous citizen with the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Hurston will forever be associated with the historic town of Eatonville.    

Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.

Unknown to most, Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the happiest and most productive years of her life. 

Hurston first moved to Eau Gallie in 1929. Here she wrote the book of African American folklore Mules and Men (published in 1935), documented research she had done in Florida and New Orleans to fill an entire issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and made significant progress on some of her theatrical pieces.

After returning to New York in late 1929, Hurston came back to Eau Gallie in 1951, moving into the same cottage where she had lived previously. While living in Eau Gallie between 1951 and 1956, Hurston staged a concert at Melbourne High School (its first integrated event); worked on the project that became her passion, the manuscript for Herod the Great; covered the 1952 murder trial of Ruby McCollum (an African American woman who killed her white lover); and wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel arguing against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Her controversial disapproval of public school integration reflected her belief in the need to preserve African American culture and communities.

While working as a librarian at the Technical Library for Pan American World Airways on Patrick Air Force Base, Hurston was unable to purchase her much loved Eau Gallie cottage, so she moved to an efficiency apartment in Cocoa. In June, 1956, Hurston moved from the apartment to a mobile home on Merritt Island. She was fired from her job in May 1957, because she was “too well-educated for the job.” She then left her happy life in Brevard County to take a job at the Chronicle in Fort Pierce, where she died three years later. 

Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as a controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a talented anthropologist and collector of folklore, and a beloved novelist. While she will always be closely associated with her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Brevard County is where Hurston spent some of her happiest and most productive years, in her cottage on the northeast corner of what is now the intersection of Guava Avenue and Aurora Road in Eau Gallie.

More information about Zora Neale Hurston’s time in Brevard County can be found in the book Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade by Virginia Lynn Moylan and the television documentary The Lost Years of Zora Neale Hurston airing on WUCF TV, Friday, February 7 at 10:30 pm and Sunday, February 9 at 1:30 pm.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is producer and host of
“Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society,”
broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30
and Sunday afternoons at 4:00,
and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00.