A handful of activists with the Uhuru Solidarity Movement gathered Thursday on the steps of St. Petersburg City Hall to demand the city take responsibility for the 1914 lynching of John Evans.
A mob of some 1,500 white men, women and children lynched Evans, and was purportedly headed by St. Petersburg city officials. A noose was wrapped around Evans’ neck as he was dragged through the streets from his jail cell and hanged. When he did not die quickly enough, the angry mob shot him, Lula Grant, a resident of St. Petersburg since 1908, told The Evening Independent in 1979.
John Evans’ death was never officially classified a murder, according to “Days of Fear: A Lynching in St. Petersburg,” which detailed the incident years later.
Now, the activists are calling for justice as well as a monument to the victim, who was one of many who suffered the brunt of racist brutality in the South during the Jim Crow era and beyond.
A year and a half ago, an aluminum plaque commemorating John Evans was removed from the base of a light pole in downtown St. Petersburg.
“The city of St. Pete has never officially recognized the murder of John Evans, in fact the city has removed plaques placed around the city by individuals who sought to memorialize the life and death of John Evans,” said Jesse Nevel, national chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.
The USM is an organization of white activists that vocally supports the African People's Socialist Party, better known as the Uhurus, a St. Pete-based group that seeks reparations, fair treatment and greater autonomy in black communities that, despite efforts like the Civil Rights Movement, still suffer from gross economic disparity, police violence and, activists say, seeming ambivalence on the part of political leaders.
Nevel believes the plaque’s removal is the city’s attempt to whitewash an unsavory part of the community’s history.
Derek Kilborn, urban planning and historic preservation manager for the city, approached the three demonstrators after the press conference.
The city is not intentionally trying to hide the plaque or erase the past, Kilborn said.
Members of the Historic Preservation Department “were trying to figure out a more meaningful way to present it instead of just sticking it at the bottom of a light pole,” Kilborn said.
The simple memorial was installed anonymously on a light pole at Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Street, even though that was not the site of Evans’ lynching. The plaque was removed just over a year ago by a field engineer and turned over to the city’s Historic Preservation Department prior to the light pole’s removal.
The plaque reads: “At this intersection November 12, 1914 John Evans, a black laborer from Dunnellon, FL was lynched condemned by a secret council of fifteen of St. Petersburg’s most influential citizens. He was turned over to a mob of fifteen hundred white residents and murdered.”
The Historic Preservation Department is working on the memorial plan with the African American Heritage Association of St. Petersburg and the Museum of History. Until resolved, the plaque is being held by the department, said Kilborn.
At this time the USM has not filed a lawsuit against the city to reopen the unsolved case, but the group is “planning to develop this further in the coming months,” according to Nevel.
The activists demanded reparations which included “genuine economic development controlled by the African working class community of south St. Pete, not economic development that benefits gentrifiers and white business interests,” Nevel said on the steps of City Hall.
“It's important for the city to give more attention to this lynching and any others that might have occurred," said Dr. Julie Armstrong, a USF St. Petersburg literature professor and author of Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching. "Pretending that such things never happened does no one any good. Ignorance of the history of racial violence only perpetuates the sense that economic and social problems in south St. Pete are the fault of those who live there, not the consequence of decades-long systematic injustice.”
A public vigil and rally in memory of John Evans is planned for 10 a.m. April 16 at the site of his lynching, 2nd Avenue S and 9th Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Street.
Laura Mulrooney is a reporter with the Neighborhood News Bureau at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2016.