South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
HIS NAME WAS RUBIN STACY
A lynch mob killed a Black man in Fort Lauderdale in 1935
Long, long before anyone knew the name George Floyd, there was Rubin Stacy.
Like Floyd, Stacy lost his life to the scourge of racism in America. He died hanging from a tree in Fort Lauderdale rather than pinned to the ground in Minneapolis. But, like Floyd, he is becoming a symbol of the intolerance that still permeates this country more than eight decades later.
It was the summer of 1935. A mob strung up the farm hand Stacy after an unconfirmed accusation by a white woman. His lifeless, handcuffed body dangled for hours as an almost festive crowd came from all over town to gawk. Even children, frozen in time by photographs, smiled and smirked.
The hanging tree is long since gone, but the July 19 murder of Rubin Stacy still casts a painful shadow over Fort Lauderdale 85 years later. Now local leaders are on a mission to memorialize Stacy and make sure his story is never forgotten.
Their ideas include placing a memorial marker at the spot where he took his last breath, near what is now Davie Boulevard and Southwest 31 Avenue, also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.
A second marker might be placed near where he lived, in the 800 block of Northwest Second Street in downtown Fort Lauderdale. And a third might grace Stacy’s final resting place: Fort Lauderdale’s historic Woodlawn Cemetery, where he was buried long ago in an unmarked grave.
There is also talk of renaming a section of Davie Boulevard in his honor.
Revisiting the story of Rubin Stacy, however painful, will help the community deal with the tragedies of the past that still haunt us today, said Broward County Mayor Dale Holness.
The great-niece of Rubin Stacy, Sandra Blackmon-Lane, is tormented by what happened decades before she was even born.
She sees parallels between today’s civil strife and what happened nearly a century ago to her great-uncle.
She points to Floyd, a Black man killed May 25 when police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee pressed into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.
“Just like they stood back and watched him die, that’s what we did with George Floyd,” she said. “I wouldn’t even want to see an animal get hurt. And there he is hanging there and they’re just standing back watching. How do you normalize that? How are you not horrified by that? I don’t get it.”
Painful past
Stacy was one of 4,743 people lynched in this country between 1882 and 1968, and one of more than 280 people lynched in Florida during that same time. He died at 37, leaving behind a wife and toddler son.
Chilling photos of the lynching, with white children smiling beneath the death tree, appeared in newspapers across the nation. The murder of Rubin Stacy galvanized the NAACP and its push for a federal anti-lynching bill. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who worried it might cost him votes in the South, refused to support it.
The tragic tale still deserves telling today, now more than ever, local officials say.
With outrage rising nationwide over police brutality against Black men, women and children, they say now is the right time to revisit the story of Rubin Stacy.
“Our willingness to acknowledge these events as a community comes in waves,” said Charles Zelden, a professor of history and political science at Nova Southeastern University. “In this case, current events have opened the eyes of the white community enough to [get their attention] and say ‘Oh my gosh, how could that have happened? That’s horrible.’ It’s the moment. At this moment, in this county, in this nation, it’s hard to ignore the reality. And so people are bringing it up.”
The accusation
Stacy’s troubles began when he went to the home of a white woman on what was then Old Davie Road to ask for a glass of water.
The woman, Marion Jones, claimed he attacked her with a penknife — a charge he denied.
Three days later, he found himself surrounded by a lynch mob.
Deputies arrested him that morning and were on their way to a jail in Miami when their car was reportedly run off the road by 100 masked men in 50 cars. They drove Stacy to a wooded spot near his accuser’s home. His expression turned to horror as he was positioned under the tree, then strung up with his accuser’s own clothesline.
One deputy told a newspaper reporter, “They just picked him up with the rope from the ground, didn’t bother to push him from an automobile or anything.”
As word spread about the lynching, thousands of onlookers came to see for themselves. Some cut off pieces of Stacy’s overalls for souvenirs. Others took home pieces of the clothesline and tree.
His body was left hanging for eight hours, blood dripping from his toes, according to one account. Finally, deputies lashed the body to a car hood and delivered it to Black undertaker George Benton, telling him they had “another dead n——-” for him.
Strung up by a deputy
In 1988, a woman who said she participated in the lynching came forward to say it was Deputy Bob Clark, brother of the sheriff, who strung up Stacy, then directed onlookers to join in the killing and fire their weapons at Stacy’s limp body. Several rounds were fired. Seventeen hit their mark, based on a coroner’s count.
Two days after the lynching, a grand jury was convened, but no one was charged in the crime.
The story still pains BlackmonLane, Stacy’s great-niece.
“Did he deserve to be shot 17 times?” she said. “It was just awful.”
Another niece, now in her 90s, was 6 years old when Stacy was lynched.
“My cousin — who lived in the house with him at the time — did not want to ever talk about it,” said Blackmon-Lane, who lives in Fort Lauderdale.
Blackmon-Lane did not know about the lynching until she was in college, when her mother shared only bits of the story.
“My mom never said his name,” Blackmon-Lane said. “She said I had an uncle who they hung.”
Blackmon-Lane didn’t realize who her uncle was until six years ago when her daughter had a high school assignment about the 1935 lynching.
“That’s when it hit me [that we were related],” Blackmon-Lane said. “Because my mom never said his name. And I didn’t even know if the story was true.”
A story left untold
Parkland Commissioner Ken Cutler discovered Stacy’s story by chance last year while researching the history of Broward County.
“I ran into an article about this lynching, and I was flabbergasted,” Cutler said. “I was born and raised in Hollywood, and I had never heard we had a lynching here in Broward County. I went to school here, and no one ever mentioned it. It’s unbelievable that this could have happened here.”
Cutler says he wanted to find a way to honor Stacy and his memory and found quick allies in Holness and Fort Lauderdale Commissioner Ben Sorensen.
“This is an important time to recognize the social wrongs that have been committed,” Sorensen said. “I see it as more than a marker. I see a dialog. Why did this happen and what can we do to address systemic racism that still exists in our society today? We need to have those difficult conversations.”
Stacy has been memorialized by the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery, Alabama, two years ago to honor the thousands of people killed in lynchings. His name is etched on one of 800 steel columns that hang from the museum’s ceiling.
Just two months ago, Holness issued a proclamation declaring July 19 as Rubin Stacy Remembrance Day in Broward County. Some of Stacy’s family attended the event.
“They didn’t want their names publicized,” Holness said of Stacy’s relatives. “There’s still a great sense of trauma. It’s painful. Many of them don’t want to talk about it.”
Holness thinks the story of Rubin Stacy needs to make it into the classroom. Sorensen and Cutler agree — although there is still research to be done, including pinpointing exactly where the lynching took place.
The approximate site of Stacey’s killing is on the south side of Davie Boulevard just west of Southwest 31 Avenue, where a Publix grocery store now stands.
But Cutler says the exact spot might never be known.
“I think pinpointing the exact spot is probably close to impossible,” he said. “I have a photograph of the lynching, and it was a wooded area. There’s no surrounding structures that give me any kind of guidance on exactly where it is.”
Holness says he has been hearing about Stacy’s story for decades and thinks it’s high time others hear about it too.
“For me, I think we really need to face this head on,” Holness said. “For far too long we’ve swept this stuff under the rug. And then we end up with George Floyd and a police officer murdering him in broad daylight. And he was cold and callous and paid no regard to the human life he was snuffing out.”
Facing reality, no matter how painful, is all part of the healing process, Holness said.
“Too often we pretend these things didn’t happen,” he said. “And you can’t fully heal unless you acknowledge the pain and the suffering. You have to acknowledge that you have a situation that’s causing you problems. And then you can heal from it.”