Lynching museum awakens memories of Broward atrocity that shocked nation

The only justice afforded Rubin Stacy was mob justice. Broward County consigned the farm worker’s fate to the murderous whims of a barbaric rabble, then buried his bloody, battered, tortured body, riddled with 17 bullet wounds, in an unmarked pauper’s grave. But, 83 years later, Rubin Stacy has been afforded his rightful place in history — a lynching victim whose wretched killing became a cause célèbre in the fight against Jim Crow. His awful death has been memorialized by the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. His name has been etched on one of the 800 rust red steel columns descending — hanging would be a more appropriate description — from the museum ceiling.

Fort Lauderdale, too, has been given its rightful place in that museum. Etched in infamy.

Stacy is among the 4,400 known victims of lynch mobs remembered in this harrowing museum which opened last week in Montgomery, Ala. They were humiliated, tortured, murdered, often as public spectacle, during America’s epoch of racist terror that persisted from 1877 through 1950.

The black farm worker, thought to be about 37, had been accused of assaulting a white woman at a time and place when just the accusation was enough to set off a murderous frenzy.

On July 16, 1935, a white Sunday school teacher reported that a black man had come to the door of her home among the orange groves southwest of the city. She said the farm worker, a stranger, had asked her for a drink of water, then attacked her with a pen knife. She suffered cuts on her arms but said she managed to escape and run outside, screaming for help. Her assailant fled.

Stacy was arrested three days later after a furious manhunt, led by Broward County’s notoriously corrupt, notoriously racist Sheriff Walter Clark. The sheriff ordered his chief deputy, his brother Bob (also his partner in an illegal slot machine operation), and five other deputies to transport the prisoner to the more secure Dade County Jail in Miami. They never made it.

The chief deputy later told a grand jury that he was intercepted by a caravan of cars carrying about 100 “unknown” masked men. Deputy Clark said he was unable to identify any of the assailants.

Stacy was dragged to a clearing off Old Davie Road, about the 3100 block of West Davie Boulevard on a modern map. Of course, no historic marker identifies the site.

In 1988, the Sun Sentinel published an account of Stacy’s killing researched by local historian Bryan Brooks. He had found a witness who remembered the chief deputy himself tying a clothesline around Stacy’s neck and hoisting the black man onto a pine tree. Clark then ordered the members of the mob to shoot into Stacy’s corpse, ensuring that they all shared culpability.

The body was left suspended there for hours as hundreds of locals drove out to Old Davie Road to see the gruesome sight. That was what appalled the civilized world outside the enclaves of the Old Confederacy as much as the lynching itself — the macabre death carnival, the wives and children come to celebrate their menfolk’s savagery.

The Associated Press’s story about the lynching was carried by the major newspapers, including The New York Times. But it was a particular photo that grabbed the nation’s attention: Stacy’s body hanging from a metal clothesline, surrounded by a festive crowd including three small children and four teenagers, all girls, who were regarding the dangling body with bemused expressions.

The image was so chilling that the NAACP incorporated the photo into a national campaign demanding a federal crackdown on racist terrorism. The hope (futile, as it turned out) was that President Roosevelt would find the image so abhorrent that he would champion anti-lynching legislation.

Author Gilbert King, in his book “Devil in the Grove,” about another racist legal atrocity in Groveland, Fla., described how the Rubin Stacy photo had haunted NAACP Legal Fund lawyer Thurgood Marshall, later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. “It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body that caused Marshall to stir in his sleep,” King wrote. “It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s strung-up corpse.”

Stacy’s hanging was the only known lynching in Broward County, just one among 4,400 in America’s history of racist mob justice. But that one killing and the morbid circus it brought to Old Davie Road was shame enough.

The body was left suspended there for hours as hundreds of locals drove out to Old Davie Road to see the gruesome sight.

Fred Grimm