Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 Book

If your high school lessons on post-Civil War history came, as mine did, with a heavy side of Lost Cause mythology, "go home, Yankee carpetbaggers!," or deliberately obfuscating silences, then Paul Ortiz's Emancipation Betrayed is a heavy but necessary read.

Ortiz, a Duke alum who currently teaches at University of Florida, starts out by contesting the long-standing belief that the New Negro Movement was in any way new, taking as his centerpiece the civil rights struggle surrounding Florida's 1920 presidential election and carefully laying out the case that the protests and voter registration drives that marked that period were actually rooted in decades of social and political activism by Florida's black communities. Along the way he touches on the history of lynching in Florida (friendly reminder: in 1920, Florida boasted the highest lynching rate per capita in the country), the role played by social institutions like the Knights of Pythias in helping organize and support civil rights movements, and how much of the heavy lifting was done by black women.

Several other reviewers have commented on the repetitive nature of Emancipation Betrayed, but I found it no more so than any other academic book, most of which are stitched together from articles written by the author and therefore tend to spend the beginning of each chapter recontextualizing. I'd also argue that given how weighty and emotionally exhausting a read this is, most people are likely to pick it up and put it down over time, so a bit of repetition might come in handy. Aside from that, I found Ortiz to be a clear and relatively compelling writer, and one whose endnotes are absolute fire. (Well done citations are my personal kryptonite.)

Readers who come to this book, as I did, looking to fill in some blanks in Jacksonville's history will find plenty to interest them. While Ortiz's focus is Florida as a whole, Jacksonville's position as a tourist and industry mecca in the late 19th and early 20th century means that it tended to be at the forefront of everything, including racial terror and civil unrest. Bethel Baptist Church, Eartha White, and James Weldon Johnson all make appearances in these pages, and the struggle over streetcar segregation and resulting strikes and protests receive in-depth coverage.

As someone who took more than her share of AP history classes at a Florida high school but whose knowledge of Reconstruction somehow wound up being based mostly on what she learned reading Gone with the Wind, I found Emancipation Betrayed hugely informative. It's also the rare book that manages to be simultaneously depressing as hell and completely inspiring, and stands as a stark reminder of just how hard some people had to fight for rights most of us take so much for granted today.