Broward family: Speech doesn’t make the man

Former Florida Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward II had a larger-than-life name and big plans to match. One was to drain the Everglades for development. Another was to rid the country of blacks.

His role in turning South Florida swampland into property to be developed was widely known; his extreme segregationist views were not.

Those views clash with the stories passed down by his family and histories that paint him as a visionary: Championing a centralized state university system, fighting for strict child-labor laws and promoting the interests of labor, small businesses and consumers against those of big corporations.

“Everyone, growing up, talked about him as this great liberator,” said great-grandson Douglas Broward, son of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward IV and brother to Napoleon V. He and other family members find it hard to square the man being described as a racist to the legend of their famous ancestor with “a good heart.”

“I just know the guy is a different guy,” said Douglas Broward, a businessman in Atlanta.

Officials removed the former governor’s statue overnight Wednesday from its 24-year home inside the Broward County Courthouse and put it in storage, acquiescing to criticism that the statue did not deserve such a place of honor.

“When you’re at a courthouse, it’s an epicenter of fairness, justice and equality for all, and it’s supposed to represent due process for all,” said Harold Pryor, president of the TJ Reddick Bar Association, a local group of black lawyers that sought the statue’s removal after learning of Napoleon Broward’s segregationist writings.

Broward’s family hopes the county’s decision does not cause people to forget his other achievements, but his legacy has definitely taken a hit from the revelation of a 1907 address he made as governor to the state Legislature.

State of the State Address

The speech showed a different side to Broward, one of a man who did not question white supremacy and who saw no possibility that blacks and whites could ever live in harmony. He didn’t want to put the white man through the turmoil of having to live alongside blacks anymore, he said.

Broward told legislators “it would be acting the part of wisdom to protect the white man from his own temper, when aroused, as it is a fact that when he esteems himself superior to any other race, he becomes intolerant of that race.”

He saw blacks as “wards of the white people” and believed it was up to whites to accomplish the “civilization and Christianization” of the world.

“Our children must be able to read the history of our lives, and see that it contains accounts of the best lived lives, and that their ancestors were the best people on earth,” Broward said.

His solution was for the U.S. to purchase a territory, buy up black-owned property at a “reasonable price,” and move the blacks to the new country. Whites would not be allowed to live there, and blacks would not be permitted to migrate back to the States.

“The white man has concluded that the negro has no pride in the institutions of the white man, and no friendship for him,” Broward said.

“The white people have no time to make excuses for the shortcomings of the negro, and the negro has less inclination to work for one and be directed by one he considers exacting, to the extent that he must do a good day’s work, or pay for the bill of goods sold to him,” he said.

Scholarly take on Broward

Sara Combs, a professor at Virginia Highlands Community College who wrote a thesis about early 20th century race reform, said Broward was part of the progressive movement within Florida’s Democratic Party.

“For the progressive movement in general, race was the weak spot of the movement,” Combs said. “The progressives tended to share the white supremacist ideas that were very popular at the time … They tended to favor improving their economic condition and their status, but they did not favor political and social equality.”

Combs said the notion of a separate territory for blacks by Broward was odd for that time. The idea of a separate country for blacks was discussed before emancipation, but not when Broward broached it 40 years after the Civil War ended and post-Reconstruction.

Combs said she didn’t know if Broward was offended by the lynchings and other violence against blacks and if that could have contributed to his position.

Paul Ortiz, a professor at the University of Florida who has done extensive research on Broward, said that’s not who Broward was. He doesn’t see the 1907 speech as looking out for black interests but as a warning shot for them to stay in their place.

The words aren’t just from anyone but are part of a thought-out speech delivered by the governor to the Legislature, Ortiz said. The comments were “crass” and “insidious” in a state where the black vote virtually didn’t exist, which led the country in per capita lynchings and where most of the grueling labor was being done by blacks, he said.

“If Florida expelled all blacks in 1907, who would be left to do all the work?” Ortiz asked. “It would be impossible to do.”

Ortiz said Broward had other reasons for the comments. In the same year, the state Senate sought to nullify the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which gave blacks equal protection under the law and the right to vote. The effort failed, in part Ortiz said, because the state had already successfully subjugated blacks.

“I think it was a physical and moral and psychological attack,” Ortiz said of the speech. “Why would you want to pile on? Why would you want to rub people’s noses in it?”

The legend of Broward

Douglas Broward wants to give his great-grandfather the benefit of the doubt. In the speech, he sees an underlying concern for the welfare of blacks in the state. He said in some light, what Napoleon Broward suggested wasn’t all that different from the creation of the state of Israel for Jews after World War II and the Holocaust.

“You think about anybody from history, you can take any one something of anything they ever said, and put it in a different context,” he said. “It just seems like everybody has come to a conclusion about him that I don’t believe.”

The idea of his greatgrandfather as liberator stems from Napoleon Broward’s role running guns to Cuba in its war against Spain before the United States entered the fray. Douglas Broward has an engraved gold pocket watch given to his great-grandfather in 1896 by Cuban General Enrique Collazo in thanks for his help.

He also has stories about his great-grandfather, who was Duval County sheriff in Jacksonville in the 1890s, when a black deputy was shot and killed. That greatly upset Napoleon Broward, his great-grandson said, and he kept that bullet in memory of the deputy.

On another occasion, Sheriff Broward was able to stop a mob from lynching a black man who had killed a white man, telegraphing the governor at the time for assistance from the state militia.

“It’s just to see someone you heard these stories about, and [then] you see this newspaper article, Broward the Segregationist,” Douglas Broward said. “It’s really like a punch in the gut.”

Ortiz said there is more to the lynching story. When rumors of a lynch mob being formed circulated, blacks in Jacksonville organized and protected the jail themselves, not allowing whites through and creating a showdown with the mob that eventually showed up. The arrival of the militia restored order and no lynching took place.

“He lost effective control of law enforcement,” Ortiz said of Broward. The real heroes were the armed blacks who came out to defend the prisoner, he said.

What’s next?

Pryor said the movement to remove the statue was successful because of a “cosmic shift in awareness” that is taking place in the country.

Broward’s legacy is the latest to come under scrutiny in efforts across the country to remove from places of honor the statues of racist, Confederate, segregationist and proslavery individuals, many of which were erected as Jim Crow reminders of white rule over blacks.

“We can’t ignore our history,” Pryor said. “We didn’t call for the destruction of that monument. We proposed moving it to a museum. That’s always been our stance for this monument.”