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.

Descendants of the slaveholders need to speak against the Ron "dah" Santis education censorship

Echo opinion by Harry Coverston published in the Orlando Sentinel, a Florida newspaper:

I am a sixth-generation Floridian, the descendant of slavers. I had nothing to say about my ancestors. But I have a lot to say about how we understand them today.

I am also a fourth-generation teacher. I worked in Florida’s public educational institutions for 36 years, teaching students from fifth grade through doctoral work. I strongly believe in public education. And I know what constitutes good pedagogy and sound educational content and what does not.

The recent state guideline directing the teaching about slavery to middle-school students is the antithesis of both of those concerns. Rather, it embodies a number of other concerns, most of them unarticulated. But education is not among them. You don’t have to have a degree in history to recognize that requiring teachers to tell their students that slavery resulted in a “personal benefit” to those enslaved is little more than indoctrination that would have warmed the heart of those charged with shaping minds in the Soviet system.

The problem is, we know better.

In fact, the ultimate concern about this directive is to deliberately disinform students about our history to protect white comfort. 

Moreover, the presumption that we descendants of slavers and beneficiaries of the privilege it has bestowed upon us are somehow entitled to constant comfort certainly reflects the cardinal value of a racist, consumerist culture.

But comfort for whom? And at whose expense?

One of the courses I taught at UCF was the Philosophy of Law in which Critical Legal Theory was discussed. That unit examined how the power of law could be used by dominant groups in a society to the detriment of the subordinate. Such patterns are readily observable by those willing to see them as they play out along lines of race and ethnicity, sex and gender, ability status and places of origin.

Critical Race Theory has become a bogeymen in today’s culture wars. Most who make sweeping assertions about it have little idea of what it actually is and cannot point to where they see it. 

But, it only takes a read of the daily news to see how this moral panic has become a rationalization for policies like Florida’s that readily illustrate the role that racism plays in the exercise of power in America.

What is most ironic about this directive issued to ensure the comfort of the privileged at the expense of those it dehumanizes is that it is a textbook example of the very behaviors that critical race theory critiques. It is precisely this kind of abuse of the power of the law to benefit white people at the expense of people of color that critical race theory requires us to confront.

The truth of our collective history of slavery and the racist system it generated is troubling. It should not make anyone comfortable. But none of us are entitled to such comfort. Nor are we entitled to let ourselves off the hook from learning about it.

Harry Coverston is a retired University of Central Florida assistant lecturer.  "....a retired educator, a recovering lawyer and currently an active Episcopal priest. The primary focus of my work life work was education at every level with secondary focuses in law, and religion and public scholarship. I served as public scholar for several Florida Humanities Council programs across the state for 10 years."