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hello in honor of my birthday I will now share what might be my favorite historical tale about Gainesville.
CW: racism, sexual assault
thread
CW: racism, sexual assault
thread
The common Civil Rights history of Gainesville centers its most nationally important contribution: in 1968, UF faculty wife Beverly Jones and UF student Judith Brown penned The Florida Paper, defining the women's lib movement and launching 2nd wave feminism.
The (must-read imo) paper, "Towards a Female Liberation Movement," put Gainesville on the map as a hotbed of feminism. According to the Gainesville Sun, it was regarded alongside New York, Boston, Seattle and Chicago. https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20160419/News/605058835/GS
The authors' affiliations shed light on the alliance that made the paper possible. The two most prominent groups at the time were the students and the faculty wives. The organization that brought them together was called Gainesville Women for Equal Rights.
Some present-day groups, like the local chapter of National Women's Liberation, trace their origins to GWER. Another lasting legacy is the compound at W University and 8th St. A women's community center, women's health center, a women's bookstore.
That bookstore, originally called Womanstore, eventually changed its name to Wild Iris and was the last vestige of the 70s before it moved a few years ago. The women's compound also laid the foundation on which Wayward Council and Civic Media Center grew.
Now, there's one other story about that intersection that is important, and it makes me wonder if the location choice was almost sarcastic. Where the Checker's is now, there used to be a waffle shop.
Christmas Eve 1965, a group of Black boys walking from Porters Quarters to Seminary Ave stopped in at the waffle shop to warm up. The white workers made them coffee, served it, then cut the lights, threw the coffee on them, and beat them.
At one of the ensuing protests, things got dicey, so a group of Black protestors fled to the nearby house of a white woman named Carol Thomas. Counter-protestors followed them and surrounded the house, and the police refused to do anything until the morning.
Now GPD sprang into action. But the action was to prosecute Carol Thomas for helping her Black neighbors. They found out one of the protestors she took in was a minor. When his parents refused to press charges on Carol, a judge did so anyway.
The charges went away, but the fanfare had taken Carol Thomas from faculty wife to point person of the revolution. When Black activists came to town, it was Carol Thomas who they got in touch with. The white women in GWER were linked to Black women in Porters by Carol Thomas.
But one stands out against the others. A few years after the waffle shop protests, a Black man with a leather jacket and the first afro anyone had ever seen showed up out of nowhere. His name was Jack Dawkins.
Jack didn't show up out of nowhere, of course. He had been a migrant worker in Belle Glade who organized a strike. Conditions were horrendous in Belle Glade. I'll let activist Carol Giardina explain:
Following the unsuccessful campaign in Belle Glade, Jack made his way up to St Petersburg where he met Chairman Omali Yeshitela, an organizer with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the forerunner of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, AL.
Jack then headed up to Gainesville where he plugged in with Carol Thomas. He walked around the community with his Marx pin on his jacket looking cool as hell and before you know it, half the boys at Lincoln High School had their own afro to look like Jack.
Carol Thomas had been loosely affiliated with the faculty wives and the student groups, but generally felt isolated from their activities. In Jack, she found a match made in hell.
TW: sexual assault
The two got word that guards were raping female prisoners in Alachua County Jail and started to organize. The county organized a grand jury to review the allegations. The jury was composed of mostly white men and a few Black men Jack didn't care for.
The two got word that guards were raping female prisoners in Alachua County Jail and started to organize. The county organized a grand jury to review the allegations. The jury was composed of mostly white men and a few Black men Jack didn't care for.
So what did he do? Well of course, he wrote a pamphlet calling the grand jury "klan-infested" and distributed it outside the courtroom. In 1967! The judge quickly had Jack and Carol both put in jail for contempt. And that's when all hell broke loose.
Days after their sentencings, a wave of fire bombings hit white-owned businesses in Black Gainesville. Inside, Jack and Carol didn't wait a beat to organize their fellow prisoners and start a jail riot. When Carol was sent to solitary, prisoners went on a hunger strike.
Jack's old contact from St Pete, Omali Yeshitela, fresh out of the joint for his own radical demonstration, got a call to come speak at a demonstration. He got off the Greyhound in downtown and immediately heard that Dr King had been shot.
The march that night, obviously, became about a lot more than Jack Dawkins and Carol Thomas, and Chairman Yeshitela found himself and a few others locked up for inciting a riot shortly after.
But the heat (literally) in the Black community eventually became too strong for white Gainesville and everyone's bails were lowered. The whites instead resorted to their tried and true method of placing a bounty on the head of each of the leaders.
https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=d&d=BHFBFGA19680607.1.9&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1
https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=d&d=BHFBFGA19680607.1.9&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1
Carol, mother to three young children, had enough and left for Kentucky. She returned to the area some years later and worked in the background of the movement. In 2007, when Charlie Grapski kicked the living shit out of the GPD chief, Carol posted his bail.
But the trail on Jack goes silent. I have spent years trying to figure out where he went, what he worked on next. But he vanished into thin air. Then one night early in quarantine, I put on Omali Yeshitela's Sam Proctor interview where he shares this.
A common thread runs through the figures and orgs I've talked about: regardless of disagreements on tactics and goals, they supported each other. When Dawkins and the others were in jail, it was student groups who bailed them out.
And someone had to look after Carol's three young kids while she was inside. A faculty wife from the community, who was in the process of adapting the Black liberation movement around her to the feminist one, stepped up. Her name was Judy Brown.
Here is the link to Chairman Yeshitela's interview: . Also general shout-out to @SPOHP without whom none of this research would be possible.
