Racial lynching in Florida: A tragic history memorialized

On Wednesday, December 6, Orlando will dedicate a marker commemorating the lynching of Arthur Henry. 

Opinion echo published in the Orlando Sentinel: As lead investigator for the Alliance for Truth and Justice seeking to remember our fellow citizen, I am grateful. At the end of this long journey, I reflect on what I learned in the process.

First, I am struck by the truth of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Both of those assertions have proven true in this process.

The investigation to remember Arthur Henry required five years to achieve. But the events it uncovered laid buried in time, indifference and the active collusion of those who sought to erase them from our collective memories for 98 years. Henry’s marker evidences that while justice is slow, it can finally arrive.

Second, I have learned that truth is a lot messier than we like. In coming to know Arthur Henry’s story, I also learned my own family history. On the one hand, my family has resisted the Ku Klux Klan for three generations, an act that was much more dangerous in the 1920s — when my grandfather told the hooded, torch bearing racists in Homestead to get off his property — than it is today. But I also know that he had a brother in Lake City at a time when a lynching occurred there. With no way to know the answer, I have been left to wonder, “Was he there?”

Third, I’ve come to believe that secret-keeping is the acid that erodes truth, prevents trust and ultimately harms our lives together. That includes white families protecting the worst kept secrets in the world of their Klan involvement as well as Black families protecting their children from “knowing too much,” refusing to tell them of the harm done to family members. 

This kind of secret keeping prevents recognizing the harm done to our fellow citizens as well as accountability for those who caused it. But such secrets never simply go away; they are wounds on the body politic that inevitably fester.

Finally, as a sixth-generation Floridian, I have realized that the story of Arthur Henry is not simply his story, my story or the stories of those immediately involved. It is a chapter of our story as Floridians, an integral part of who we are as a people. We do ourselves no favors when we opt for marketing with which our state sold its image to the world for decades even as Florida led the country in lynchings per capita.

Owning these parts of our story we never allowed ourselves to tell will not make us comfortable nor are we entitled to comfort. 

But, if we are to know who we are, we must embrace the whole truth about our common lives, good, bad and ugly. Until we own it, that truth is always a liability to whatever whitewashed façades we might maintain. In the end we owe ourselves more than that.

Harry Coverston is an Episcopal priest, a former assistant public defender and retired lecturer from the Philosophy Department at University of Central Florida. He serves St. Richard’s Church in Winter Park.