A new historical marker was unveiled in Gainesville, Florida to remember eight African Americans lynched during the Reconstruction Era in that city and the surrounding county. Several more Blacks were lynched during the Jim Crow Era. The marker was created by the Equal Justice Initiative in conjunction with local organizations and historians at the University of Florida.
According to the Gainesville Sun:
Evelyn Foxx, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, led the ceremony that included remarks by several local officials and performances by children from Caring and Sharing Learning School, a local charter school.
Foxx noted that the marker now standing near Main Street outside the Alachua County Administration Building would have been within a few steps of a memorial to Confederate soldiers, known as Old Joe, that was removed in 2017 as many cities across the nation were rethinking memorials that went up in the wake of Reconstruction, as white southerners sought to re-establish control over land, political power and social structures they held during the era of slavery.
At least 13 lynchings of Black residents in Gainesville have been documented, but local historians say it’s likely there were several more alongside other racial violence. Research by Karen Kirkman, a historian and president of the Historic Haile Homestead, has revealed 46 lynchings across the county. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn, a lecturer in African American studies at the University of Florida, who died last year, also contributed significantly to local research on lynchings.
…Mayor Lauren Poe read a proclamation from the city commission acknowledging the city’s complicity in lynchings from the end of the Civil War until the start of the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. “I’m truly sorry,” he said.
