Legislators set on erasing Florida’s distressing racist legacy

Among the meager offerings of my elementary school library, we sixth graders (the boys anyway) especially coveted an illustrated biography of Lew Wetzel, known to kids as our state’s greatest frontiersman. That’s because, in 1957 West Virginia, the more accurate description of our historic homeboy as a racist homicidal psychopath might have tarnished the legend.

I read the book twice. Still remember the pen-and-ink illustrations of the flintlock-armed adventurer in pursuit of villainous savages back in the late 1700s, when mountainous West Virginia was still the untamed, westernmost portion of Virginia. The Indian fighter portrayed in the biography was hardly less heroic than the fictionalized Lew Wetzel whom Zane Grey glorified in three adventure novels.

Never occurred to me to wonder why the Indians Wetzel killed and scalped — estimates range from 28 to more than 100 — had been so fiercely resistant to the incursion of white settlers. Never occurred to me why, 200 years later, most of the state’s indigenous Americans had utterly disappeared, although my hometown’s business district had been built around a 33-foot-tall Indian burial mound.

Never occurred to the state’s education bureaucracy to provide educational materials that suggested the venerated scout the Indians dubbed Deathwind was actually a morally bent scoundrel who slew friendly Indians (including the ambush of a Seneca peace envoy in 1788) with the same enthusiasm he had for killing enemy warriors. His infamous quote, “I’ll shoot’em down like the worthless dogs they are long as I live,” was left out of the biography.

But Lew’s fans (who apparently include latter-day white supremacists) need not worry that modern-day students might be exposed to a less-heroic version. West Virginia legislators, like those in a dozen other Republican-run states, including Florida, intend to ban history lessons that might make students suffer “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” Which, I suppose, would bar teachers from telling white students that the state’s most revered frontiersman was a hate-consumed bigot who got away with murder.

In a not-so-amazing coincidence, Florida lawmakers are also moving a bill through the Legislature that forbids exposing students to lessons that might make our own students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex.” Authors of the Florida legislation added “national origin” to the list of prohibited stressors.

Texas not only passed a law last year featuring the very same prohibitions against discomfiting race and sex talk, but also approved creation of the 1836 Project, all about preserving the 1960 John Wayne movie version of the Alamo creation story, unsullied by the inconvenient motivations that led pro-slavery Texans to secede from a nation that had abolished slavery in 1829. Or the passage in the 1838 Texas constitution declaring, “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” had no rights.

If Florida adopts the Republican boilerplate legislation banning lessons in racial oppression as expected, we’ll have a passel of distressing incidents to excise from our own state history. Right off, we’ll need to forget the 1916 Alachua County lynching, when a mob seized six relatives or friends of a Black murder suspect, shot one and hung the other five from an oak tree.

The 1920 Ocoee election day riots would be even more disturbing, if impressionable young white students learn how a white mob reacted to a Black man attempting to vote by killing as many as 30 Black residents and incinerating nearly every residence on the Black side of town.

Of course, we’ll also need to ban the 1923 Rosewood massacre from Florida lesson plans, lest youngsters discover how another savage mob burned down an entire Black village and murdered eight residents, probably more.

Our collective amnesia will need to obscure 331 known Florida lynchings, including the horrific mob murder of Rubin Stacy, orchestrated by a Broward deputy sheriff just west of Fort Lauderdale in 1935.

The Florida bill, which Gov. DeSantis dubbed his “anti-WOKE act,” would also outlaw corporate training sessions that might similarly cause employees unease. Like those classes that instruct knuckleheads what constitutes sexual harassment. The guv must be thinking, “Who needs this kind of lefty stuff, anyway?”

Well, now that you asked, I’m guessing the entire Republican legislative caucus could use a jolt of racial and sexual enlightenment before they reconfigure Florida’s racist history. And given what we now know about Lew Wetzel, my childhood hero could have used a parley with the folks down in

HR.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.

Fred Grimm