There are some things we just don’t talk about.
Florida led the nation in lynchings per capita from 1880 to 1940, according to historical archives and court records. Though there is little public acknowledgment of the fact, some of these abhorrent acts took place in Tampa and St. Petersburg.
Now local activists are seeking justice for one such lynching — and in so doing shed light on the institutional racism that persists today.
On Nov. 10, 1914, Edward Sherman, a prominent St. Petersburg real estate developer, was murdered in his sleep. His wife was in an adjoining room during the attack. Mrs. Sherman stated in her report to the police that she was threatened and beaten by two unknown black men immediately after she heard the shotgun blasts that killed her husband, according to Days of Fear: A Lynching in St. Petersburg, a detailed account of the incident and the days following.
“If the crimes terrified St. Petersburg’s white community, the community’s response was equally frightening. During the next seventy-two hours, St. Petersburg experienced almost total disintegration of the law, which passed from authorities to the hands of mobs,” wrote journalist Jon Wilson, that book’s author.
John Evans and Ebenezer B. Tobin, both employees of Sherman, quickly became the primary murder suspects. Mrs. Sherman recognized Evans’s voice during a lineup and identified him as one of the assailants.
Unfortunately for Evans, due process did not follow.
Within 72 hours of Sherman’s murder, a mob of some 1,500 white men, women and children, purportedly headed by St. Petersburg city officials, pulled Evans from his jail cell and murdered him.
“A noose was wrapped around Evans’s 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.
Accounts of the lynching indicate that shots were fired for 10 minutes and that Evans’s body was was so riddled with bullet holes that light shone through them from the other side.
St. Petersburg, the up-and-coming tourist town, had shattered its peaceful image.
“The lynching of John Evans wasn’t the only lynching in the city’s history, but it’s the primary one,” said Ray Arsenault, University of South Florida St. Petersburg professor of Florida History and the author of the book St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream: 1888-1950. “It involved the most people, it got the most publicity, you can say maybe the most horrific.”
Over the past month, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM), a group of white activists that supports the African People’s Socialist Party (better known as the Uhurus), has said it may file a lawsuit against the City of St. Petersburg in pursuit of justice over the incident, though members of the group have said they are not ready to discuss their plans for the case.
USM’s intent is for the city to take responsibility for the lynching and pay reparations to the black community.
The reparations demanded 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,” said Jesse Nevel, national chair of the USM.
Though Jim Crow may be technically a thing of the past, South St. Petersburg has yet to see the same fruits of economic development predominantly white parts of the city have. The area has far fewer job opportunities (and many that exist offer meager pay). Crime is rampant and schools are profoundly lacking in resources.
The city is attempting to help improve economic conditions in the area through efforts like a Community Redevelopment Area, which pulls extra tax revenue into a fund that can only be spent in the community as property values go up.
With meaningful economic development and greater autonomy potentially coming out of the suit, the thinking is that in the long run Evans wouldn’t have died in vain.
“It’s important for the city to give more attention to this lynching and any others that might have occurred,” said Julie Armstrong, a USFSP professor of literature 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.”
Could such a lawsuit be successful? The president of the St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP, Maria L. Scruggs, thinks that the lawsuit will be successful in opening dialogue, but success in litigation would be an uphill battle.
Historians say such horrific events, as difficult as they are to talk about, have an important place in history and should be treated as such, lest we forget the dreadful depths to which racism can sink.
“[Lynching], that kind of dehumanizing violence, is a moral and spiritual stain on a whole community,” says USFSP’s Armstrong. “And that stain continues to taint us as members of this community in ways we may not even realize.”
Organizations like legal nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based in Montgomery, Alabama, are working on plans to have such monuments erected across America. Evans’s lynching was at one time commemorated by a simple plaque installed anonymously on a light pole at Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Street. The plaque was removed during city renovations and currently awaits a new home at the City of St. Petersburg’s Historic Preservation Department.
Are monuments and plaques enough?
Scruggs doesn’t think so.
When asked what would be more appropriate, she suggests that Tropicana Field, if the land is sold, be included in the South St. Petersburg CRA. After all, the land on which the stadium sits was once home to an African-American neighborhood called the Gas Plant area, which was bulldozed to make way for the Trop. The plan would give a large percentage of tax revenue to the African-American community in an effort to give back what was taken from them and then some.
“We have to learn from our past and simply not make the same mistakes and be enslaved by economic and social benefits of others or fall back in the role of the victim and the oppressed,” said Scruggs. “As a community we have forgotten our story and we allow others to write our narrative.”
This article appears in May 19-26, 2016.