TU: Tim Gilmore Talks Tuesday Night about his Online History of Jacksonville KKK

Link to article: http://jacksonville.com/metro/literature/2017-06-09/tim-gilmore-talks-tuesday-night-about-his-online-history-jacksonville

In 1963, Donal Godfrey entered the first grade at the previously all-white Lackawanna Elementary School.

It was not a pleasant experience, he told Tim Gilmore, an English professor at Florida State College at Jacksonville who has written a number of books and articles about Jacksonville history.

Gilmore’s latest effort, posted on his website jaxpsychogeo.com, is a seven-part look at the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Jacksonville, which can be found at bit.ly/2sbNeoG. He’ll be giving a talk, “The Klan in Jax, Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse,” from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Coniferous Cafe, 42 W. Monroe St.

Gilmore interviewed Godfrey by phone from his home in Monrovia, Liberia.

“I remember walking to school with my mother, and a lot of whites were standing around, looking at us,” Godfrey told

Gilmore. “Some of them yelled: ‘Where are you going? Where do you think you’re taking that little n——- boy?’ ”

Six months later, a bomb went off outside the home where the six-year-old Godfrey was sleeping.

“It blew the refrigerator through the roof,” Godfrey told Gilmore. “Not too many people have survived a Klan bombing. It’s an exclusive club.”

When Klansmen were arrested for the bombing, several were identified by name and position within the Klan. Burton H. Griffin and Jacky D. Harden were “exalted cyclops.” Willie Eugene Wilson was a former Florida “Great Titan.” Robert Pittman Gentry was “kligrapp.”

“Newspapers failed to mention the position of Donald Eugene Spegal with the Klan, as well as that of William Rosecrans, who’d been arrested in nearby St. Augustine,” Gilmore writes.

At trial they were defended by attorney J.B. Stoner, a virulent and unrepentant racist who would later represent James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin. Although Rosecrans confessed, none of the other defendants were found guilty by an all-white jury. Stoner declared the verdict a “victory for the white race.”

In 1980 he would go to prison after being convicted of bombing a church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1958, one of several bombings for which he was a suspect. Bedridden in a nursing home, partially paralyzed from a stroke, just months before he died at 81 in 2005 Stoner conceded to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter that his side had lost.

“History is written by the victors,” he said. “… Society has changed. It was changed by defeat, defeat of the white people against race-mixing.”

Charlie Patton: (904) 359-4413