!
“As Project South heads down to Jacksonville, Florida for Marissa
Alexander's final hearing, we reflect on our work in alliance with
New Jim Crow Movement over the last two and a half years of
confrontation with DA Angela Corey's version of state violence.”
FREE MARISSA- INSIDE THIS BRIEF TOOLKIT:
- ARTICLE: Angela Corey is the Bull Connor of the South,
50 years later
- TIMELINE: Corey’s impact on Jacksonville
- ARTICLE: Confronting Hostility; Why Southern Movements
converged in Jacksonville
- TIMELINE: Women of Color Prosecuted for Defending
Themselves
- TIMELINE: Concise History of Jacksonville, Florida
TIMELINES were compiled by Cita Cook for Project South, 2013-2014
More on the Southern Movement Assembly can be found at:
www.southtosouth.org or www.facebook.com/southernmovementalliance
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Angela Corey is the Bull Connor of the South, 50 years later.
As Project South heads down to Jacksonville, Florida for Marissa Alexander's final
hearing, we reflect on our work in alliance with New Jim Crow Movement over the last
two and a half years of confrontation with DA Angela Corey's version of state violence.
In 1965, Bull Connor in Birmingham and Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma represented the
face of white supremacy and were important guardians of cruelty protecting Jim Crow
South as local law enforcement. In public protests, they knocked heads into concrete,
tear gassed crowds, and unapologetically defended organized racism. Angela Corey,
the top cop District Attorney in Florida's 4th district represents the face of this history
today, reflecting a growing trend of 21st century racist cruelty that incarcerates
teenagers and domestic abuse survivors while letting murderers walk out without
consequence.
Corey's version of legal terror uses the courts instead of the streets to remind us ‘who
is boss’ by enforcing public and racist hostility. Her attack on Marissa Alexander is not
just about punishing one woman. After Marissa won an appeal and secured a second
trial that threw out a 20-year sentence, Angela Corey ran an intimidation campaign,
announcing publicly that she would seek a 60-year sentence in the new trial. As much
as this fight feels like a personal vendetta, Corey has built her entire career on
excessive punitive practices that have set wild records for over-sentencing and sending
disproportionate numbers of juveniles to adult court. Corey’s actions in Marissa’s case
are directly connected to punishing the growing movement that has risen to confront
the public killings of Trayvon Martin in Sanford FL and Jordan Davis in Jacksonville FL,
where she also served as prosecutor. Forced into a plea deal that will keep her under
state surveillance and detained at her home for two more years, Marissa is part of
growing trends in incarceration that force plea deals and keep more and more people
under state control in their own homes.
As in the days of Bull Connor, people have not remained silent in the face of this
brutality. Social movements are rising again to confront racist violence and the legal
frameworks that protect it.
On April 26, 2013, Marissa's mother Ms. Jenkins attended the second Southern
Movement Assembly anchored by the New Jim Crow Movement in a park on the
historically Black Northside of Jacksonville. Under an old army tent, donated by a local
church, a participant read a heartfelt letter written by Marissa to the entire assembly
of 250 representatives from 10 states. We stormed the Duval County Courthouse the
next day, and the Southern Movement Assembly participants committed to both
Marissa's individual fight for freedom and the broader pattern of injustice that this
case represents.
A few months after that on July 14, 2013, Angela Corey was smiling at the press
conference that announced Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Grassroots movements sprung into action, and the Southern Movement Assembly
organized the Walk for Dignity from Jacksonville to Sanford. The call from Aleta
Alston-Toure of Jacksonville was met by hundreds of people, over 25 organizations,
churches, and community groups. We walked for two demands: Free Marissa Alexander
& Fire Angela Corey. This ongoing fight has galvanized new generations of active
communities who say: Enough is Enough.
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On the eve of her release into home detention, we recognize the incredible grassroots
movements in Florida, around the South, and across the country that have made sure
that Marissa’s case was part of a national dialogue and that also made important
connections between this case and the growing impunity for violence we see in our
communities.
FOR MORE: CHECK OUT WWW.SOUTHTOSOUTH.ORG & THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE’S INITIATIVE
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THE HISTORY OF ANGELA COREY’S IMPACT ON JACKSONVILLE
October 31, 1954 - Angela B. Corey, the granddaughter of Syrian immigrants, was
born in Jacksonville, Florida. She grew up on the Southside and majored in Marketing
at Florida State University.
1979 - Corey received a doctorate in law from Levin College of Law at the University
of Florida.
1981 - 2006 - Corey was hired as an Assistant State Attorney in Florida’s Fourth
Judicial Circuit Court (Duval, Nassau, and Clay Counties) and tried hundreds of cases,
including sixty-five homicides.
1991 - Harry Shorstein, a Democrat, was appointed to be State Attorney for the Fourth
Judicial Circuit.
July 1, 1994 – A new law, passed by the Florida legislature in response to a tourist
industry panic about teenage criminals, gave prosecutors the power to send juveniles
to adult courts without having to wait any longer for a judge to hold a hearing on
which court would be most appropriate for each case.
1998 – State Attorney Harry Shorstein established the use of civil citations in Duval
County Public Schools, allowing school officers to cite rather than arrest students for
certain first-time misdemeanors.
March 1999 – In Wieland v. State, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that women have
the right to rely on the battered spouse syndrome as a defense to killing their abuser.
2005 - Shorstein changed Corey’s work assignment from Director of the Gun Crime
Unit to Director of the County Court, which handles misdemeanors. She trained newly
hired lawyers to be prosecutors.
2006 - Corey announced that she would run against her boss, Harry Shorstein, to be
State Attorney.
November 2006 - When Shorstein received complaints about Corey as a supervisor, he
fired her. Corey said it was because she was running against him. He then announced
he would not run for re-election.
2007 - John Tanner, the State Attorney for the Seventh Judicial Circuit, hired Corey.
Shorstein was overseeing a grand jury investigation of Tanner’s handling of a Flagler
County Jail investigation.
August 26, 2008 - Corey won the election as State Attorney in the 4th Circuit with over
64% of the votes.
2009 - Soon after taking office, Corey fired ten assistant state attorneys, over half of
the investigators, and forty-eight support employees. That year she sent 230 juvenile
felony cases to adult court, twice the number in all the years before she became State
Attorney in the Fourth Judicial Circuit Court.
August 2009 - Corey asked Florida’s U. S. Senators not to recommend Shorstein for
the position of U. S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida because he used “the
grand jury for personal vendettas” and said she would refuse to speak with Shorstein if
he were appointed. He was not appointed.
August 1, 2010 - Marissa Alexander, a thirty-one-year-old African American woman
from Jacksonville, fired a warning shot to stop her abusive husband from attacking her.
The bullet did not hit anyone.
March 14, 2011 - Toddler David Galarrage, the younger half-brother of Cristian
Fernandez, was taken to the hospital; he died two days later from a fractured skull
and bleeding brain.
June 2, 2011 - Corey sought and received a grand jury indictment of twelve-year-old
Cristian Fernandez for killing his two-year-old brother and for aggravated child abuse,
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making him the youngest person ever charged with murder in Florida. By combining
the two cases, Corey turned the charge into one of felony murder, meaning she would
not have to prove premeditation for the murder and could ask for a sentence of life
without parole. Although Cristian, whose mother was twelve when he was born, had
suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse, Corey decided to try him as an adult,
ignoring widespread pressure to try him in juvenile court. She eventually claimed that
because she had always intended for him to accept a lesser plea (which he did in
2013), he was never really in danger of receiving a life sentence.
December 2011 - Corey was listed as a host for a fundraiser for the re-election of
Public Defender Matt Shirk. She was trying to convince Shirk to accept a plea
agreement for Cristian Fernandez.
January 5, 2012 - Corey charged Cristian Fernandez with sexual battery of his
younger half-brother, a charge that was later thrown out by a judge.
February 26, 2012 - George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old neighborhood watch
volunteer, shot and killed Trayvon Martin as Martin, a seventeen-year-old African
American, was walking from a store in Sanford, Florida to the home where he was
staying. A few hours later, the Sanford Police Department declared that they would
not be arresting Zimmerman because he had fired in self-defense.
March 2012 - March 22, 2012 - After both Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee and Seminole
County State Attorney Norm Wolfinger resigned from the Zimmerman case, Governor
Rick Scott appointed Corey to be the Special Prosecutor. Sandy D’Alemberte, former
president of the American Bar Association and former president of Florida State
University, emailed that he could not “imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to
serve in the Sanford case.” One reason he gave was that she could not “command the
respect of people who care about justice.” Michael Hallett, the Chairman of the
University of North Florida’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said the
Zimmerman case would enable her to shift the media focus away from the Cristian
Fernandez case and “to show concern for a black victim.” At this time, Corey hired
Jackelyn Barnard, a veteran television reporter, as her Director of Communications.
April 2012 - In responding to a question about Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, Corey
said, “I’ve prosecuted a woman who shot her husband and killed him because he
slapped her, and we argued that [the slap] was not deadly force and she was convicted
and sent to state prison.”
April 11, 2012 - Corey charged George Zimmerman with second degree murder.
May 2012 – After Marissa Alexander refused to accept a three-year plea bargain
offered by Corey, a jury declared her guilty. She received a mandatory minimum
sentence of twenty years.
June 2012 - In Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that giving a juvenile a
mandatory sentence of life without parole is unconstitutional. This meant that Corey
could no longer legally threaten Cristian Fernandez with such a sentence.
June 2012 - Alan Dershowitz, a defense attorney and professor at Harvard Law School,
criticized Corey for not giving Zimmerman’s defense team the pictures of Zimmerman
showing his injuries after the killing, as well as not taking the case to a grand jury.
She then tried to convince Harvard University to fire Dershowitz and threatened to sue
him for libel and slander, as well as to have him disbarred.
June 14, 2012 - Ronald Thompson, a white military veteran in his sixties, received a
twenty-year sentence for having shot twice in the ground to try to scare off some
teenagers who were threatening his neighbor (the grandmother of one of the young
men). Angela Corey had refused to accept the three-year sentence a review judge had
said was the only constitutional sentence they could impose. Eventually, Thompson
was freed on appeal. He may be too ill to last until another trial.
October 2012 - Travis Swanson, a Jacksonville African American youth, was sentenced
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to twenty-two years in prison for a robbery with a BB gun that he was allegedly
involved in at seventeen. He was pressured to confess without having been read his
Miranda Rights. While Angela Corey was not the trial attorney in the case, it did occur
under her jurisdiction.
November 23, 2012 - Michael David Dunn, a forty-six year old white software
developer became so irritated with the loud music (what he called “thug music”)
coming from a car next to him, that he fired into the car and killed Jordan Davis, a
seventeen-year-old African American.
December 2012 - Wesley White, a prosecutor under Corey, resigned because of
disagreements with her priorities as a prosecutor.
January 8, 2013 - Angela Corey was sworn in for four more years as Fourth Circuit
State Attorney.
February 2013 -- Cristian Fernandez pled guilty to manslaughter for the death of his
two-year-old half-brother in 2011 when Christian was twelve years old. He was
sentenced to detention in a juvenile facility until his nineteenth birthday.
February 20, 2013 - Corey announced that she would personally prosecute Michael
Dunn for the first-degree murder of Jordan Davis.
April 19, 2013 - A fourth high-level employee in the State Attorney’s Office resigned
because of disagreements with Corey, including over her decision to grant herself and
another official an increase in their pension fund (a legal action).
July 13, 2013 - Corey fired Ben Kruidbos, an information technology director in her
office, for making public his charge that Corey had withheld from the defense photos
of Trayvon Martin that supposedly would make him seem less sympathetic.
July 14, 2013 - A jury of six women (five white, one Latina) decided that George
Zimmerman was innocent of either second-degree murder or manslaughter when he
shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
July 15, 2013 - Corey stated in a press conference that the case against Zimmerman
was never “about race or the right to bear arms.”
July 16, 2013 - Ben Kruidbos announced that he would be filing a whistleblower suit
against Corey.
July 20, 2013 – About a thousand supporters of the Free Marissa Now coalition
protested outside Corey’s office, urging her to resign.
July 26, 2013 - Governor Rick Scott rejected the call by the Florida Civil Rights
Association to remove Corey from the trial of Michael Dunn, accused of the shooting
death of Jordan Davis.
August 15, 2013 - The trial of Michael Dunn for the murder of Jordan Davis, with
Corey as the prosecuting attorney, was postponed to early 2014.
September 26, 2013: Florida’s First District Court of Appeals overturned the
conviction of Marissa Alexander, saying that the jury had been given “erroneous”
instructions. Angela Corey indicated that she would ask for a new trial.
October 2013 – U. S. Rep. Corrine Brown told U. S. News that Corey is notorious
among her constituents for overcharging people accused of crimes.
November 28, 2013: Marissa Alexander was given house arrest in exchange for
$200,000 bail.
January 2014 – In a luncheon speech, Corey stated that the media shouldn’t be
allowed to report on high-profile cases since “The public doesn’t need to know
anything about a case before it goes to trial.”
January 5, 2014 – The parents of Jordan Davis settled a civil lawsuit against Michael
David Dunn because he had shot and killed their son. Dunn’s insurance company
declared that it should not have to pay the settlement and Dunn had already been
declared legally broke.
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January 20, 2014 – Angela Corey’s office requested that Circuit Court Judge James
Daniel revoke Marissa Alexander’s bail, claiming she had violated her release
conditions when she had left her house to do things such as shop for clothes, renew
her driver’s license, and visit her sister-in-law. Daniel refused, saying Alexander had
gained approval from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in each case.
February 3, 2014 – The Florida Times-Union reported that between 2009 and 2013,
the Fourth Judicial Circuit, headed by State Attorney Angela Corey, had issued 1,475
direct commitments, requiring juveniles to choose between being charged as an adult
and accepting assignment to a juvenile facility; they often have had to make this
choice without being allowed to know or question the evidence against them. During
that same period, there were only 34 direct commitments in Miami, where there are
twice as many youth as in the Jacksonville area. Angela Corey’s office issued a
statement saying, “Juvenile cases…are handled no differently than how an adult case
moves through the judicial system.”
February 16, 2014 – After thirty-two hours of deliberations over four days, a jury
ruled that Michael David Dunn was guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted
murder for his having endangered the lives of the three friends of Jordan Davis but
deadlocked on the charge of first degree murder for killing Davis. When Circuit Judge
Russell Healey declared a mistrial for that count, Corey called for a retrial. Although
the convictions could lead to a sentence of at least sixty years, the judge decided not
to impose a sentence until after the second trial, currently set for September 22,
2014.
February 18, 2014 – Juror Number Four from the Michael Dunn trial, a white woman,
reported on ABC’s “Nightline” that nine of the twelve jurors had favored a conviction
for the first-degree murder charge for killing Jordan Davis because they did not
believe that Dunn was ever in real danger from any of the four teenagers. The jury
did not, however, discuss whether race might have been a factor in the crime because
“it was never presented that way.”
March 10, 2014 – The National Organization for Women announced that it was calling
for the resignation of State Attorney Angela Corey because of how she was handling
the case against Marissa Alexander. Florida New Majority, another group which has
backed Alexander’s release, announced that they were looking for candidates to run
against Corey in 2016.
March 11, 2014 – The Florida Times-Union reported that since 2009, Angela Corey had
sent more people to death row than any other prosecutor in the state. The total was
25% of those in Florida, even though her jurisdiction represents less than 7% of the
population and 8% of Florida’s murder rate. Of the 21 people her office sentenced to
be executed, 66% were African American; only 25% of the people in her district are
black.
March 18, 2014 – Jackelyn Barnard from Angela Corey’s office sent an email to state
legislators from Northeast Florida describing Corey’s version of what happened when
Marissa Alexander fired a gun in the presence of Rico Gray and their interactions after
that, supposedly so the legislators would know how to respond to questions about the
case. Bruce Zimet, Alexander’s attorney, responded that Corey’s narrative was only
one version of the facts of the case. The state legislature at that time, influenced by
Alexander’s case, was considering a bill to expand the Stand Your Ground Law to grant
those with a credible fear for their lives immunity from prosecution for warning shots.
March 19, 2014 – Color of Change, a national advocacy group, asked Governor Rick
Scott to suspend Angela Corey because the way she was conducting her job was similar
to the style of “Jim Crow era prosecutors and legal authorities.” Corey’s
spokeswoman, Jackelyn Barnard, told U. S. News that Corey had a “thirty-two year
record of seeking justice for all victims, regardless of gender or race.”
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April 3, 2014 – Corey had agreed to meet with a group of Jacksonville clergy in the
Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation, and Empowerment (ICARE) to discuss
the possibility of issuing more juvenile civil citations instead of criminal charges.
When she saw that they had asked the media and parishioners to be there, she
debated with them for about ten minutes and then left. According to the Florida
Department of Juvenile Justice, from March 2013 to February 2014, only 26% of young
people eligible for a citation instead of a criminal charge received them, while the
rate in Miami-Dade County was 86%. Corey claimed those figures were incorrect.
April 8, 2014 – The Jacksonville City Council agreed to delay voting on a resolution
calling for an increase in the use of civil citations for juveniles until State Attorney
Angela Corey could speak to them.
April 15, 2014 – Corey issued a public statement stressing her support for the use of
non-custodial arrests, including civil citations, except in cases when there is a victim
since prosecutors in Florida are obligated to consult with victims before determining
the status of accused people.
May 18, 2014 – Supporters of the Jacksonville Juvenile Drug Court, including Chief
Circuit Judge Donald Moran, stated their concern that this alternative to a criminal
record for juveniles may be closed or cut back because Angela Corey’s office has
referred so few of the eligible youth: 19 in 2013, as compared to 92 in 2009. Corey’s
spokeswoman said there are legitimate reasons for the lower number, but Public
Defender Matt Shirk plans to lobby the legislature to allow judges to send someone to
juvenile drug court without consulting a prosecutor, as they already can do in the case
of adults.
May 27, 2014 – The Jacksonville City Council, disagreeing with the position Angela
Corey had presented to them, passed a resolution calling for more efficient use of the
civil citation process for eligible first-time misdemeanor juveniles, as the Florida
legislature had encouraged all communities in Florida to do in 2011 through HB 997.
June 10, 2014 – Judge James Daniel pushed the date of a retrial for Marissa Alexander
to December 2014 in order to be able to consider the implications of the new WarningShot Bill.
June 20, 2014 – Governor Rick Scott signed house Bill 89, known as the Warning Shot
Law, legalizing the threat of force in circumstances when actual force would be
permitted as self-defense. The Marissa Alexander case was one of the primary
inspirations for the bill.
July 18, 2014 – Judge James Daniel ruled that Marissa Alexander is not entitled to a
2nd immunity hearing under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, saying the appellate
ruling calling for a new case addressed only the jury instructions, not the facts of the
case and the new warning shots law could not be applied retroactively, even though
the law was partly inspired by her case.
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WOMEN OF COLOR WHO HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED FOR DEFENDING
THEMSELVES
1855 - Celia, an enslaved Missouri woman, was hanged for killing with a stick the
white widower who had bought her five years earlier, when she was fourteen, and had
raped her frequently from then on. According to historian Melton McLaurin in Celia, A
Slave, Celia may have lied to protect her enslaved husband, who disappeared soon
after the killing. The judge for her case told the jury that a slave had no right to
resist her master, even in a case of sexual assault.
Early 1860s - An enslaved woman named Agnes, living in Washington D. C., was
executed for killing her master with an axe after he had beat and raped her for many
years.
1913 - Mary Wilson, a black woman in San Antonio, shot and killed in self-defense a
white trooper who had threatened and then grabbed her. There is apparently no clear
record of what then happened to her.
March 5, 1945 - Lena Baker became the only Georgia woman to be executed in the
electric chair. A domestic worker in Cuthbert (south of Columbus), she killed a white
man who had hired her and then had made her a sex slave. In a fight when she was
trying to leave, he raised an iron bar to hit her and she grabbed his gun and shot him.
Some of her last words were, “What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been
killed myself.” In 2005, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned her
posthumously.
1948 – Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American sharecropper and widowed mother of
twelve children from Ellaville, Georgia (north of Americus), was sentenced to death
with two of her sons (aged 14 and 16) for killing a white sharecropper in self-defense
after the sixty-four-year-old man tried to force her to have sex with him and
bludgeoned her with his gun. After the Civil Rights Congress (1946-1956), the NAACP,
and others brought international attention to the case, their death sentence was
amended to life in prison.
Mary Church Terrell, Shirley Graham DuBois, and other well-known African American
women organized the National Committee for the Defense of the Ingram Family, which
sent pleas to politicians every Mother’s Day until the state of Georgia released the
Ingrams in 1959. Many of the women in the Defense Committee were also founders of
the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a group of left-wing black women organized in
1951 who praised Rosa Lee Ingram for “defending the honor of all womanhood,”
declaring, “WE SHALL NOT BE TRAMPLED UPON ANY LONGER.”
1972 – Yvonne Wanrow, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville
Reservation in Washington State, shot to death a man who was attempting to molest
her son. After being convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree assault, an
Appeals Court and then the Supreme Court of Washington overturned the conviction
and ordered a new trial. Taking the advice of William Kuntsler and other experienced
criminal attorneys, she accepted a plea bargain requiring her to do 2,000 hours of
community service, which she carried out by counseling and teaching others who had
left her reservation.
March 17, 1974 – Inez Garcia, a thirty-three year old California farmworker with
Puerto Rican and Cuban roots, was raped by two men. After they threatened to kill
her, she went to their house and confronted them. When one of them threw a knife at
her, she fired and killed him. The Inez Garcia Defense Committee publicized her case.
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She lost her first trial and served two years before an appeal led to a second trial in
1977 when she was acquitted.
August 27, 1974 – Joan (Jo-Ann) Little, a twenty-year-old black woman in Beaufort,
North Carolina was waiting to learn what kind of charges she was facing for allegedly
breaking and entering. A white jailer threatened her with an ice-pick unless she
performed oral sex; she was able to grab the ice-pick, stabbed him a number of times,
and fled the jail. With money raised by the Joan Little Defense Committee, her
defense team commissioned surveys which revealed that about two-thirds of the white
respondents in the area near her home believed that black women are lewder than
white women and that black people are more violent than white people. This
information convinced a judge to move the trial to Raleigh where a jury of six whites
and six African Americans ruled that she was not guilty.
1975 – Dessie Woods, a black woman from Atlanta, killed a white man who tried to
rape her while giving her and a friend a ride; she received a twelve-year sentence
(two concurrent sentences). Her strongest supporters, black nationalists in the
National Committee to Free Dessie Woods, publicized the severe treatment she
received in the Georgia prison where she was often left drugged and naked in solitary
confinement. In June 1981, an appeals court overturned the charge of armed robbery
but not that of manslaughter; she was released later that year.
May 1978 – Cassandra Peten, a young black mother and shipyard worker in San
Francisco, had an altercation with the abusive husband she had recently left. When
he raised his fist to hit her, she shot him, slightly wounding him in the leg; she was
convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Under pressure from the publicity
stimulated by a defense committee, the judge put off sentencing until she had
undergone a three month psychiatric observation period. At the end of that
observation, he released her on parole.
May 10, 1977 – Sharon Crigler, a twenty-one-year old black mother in Tacoma,
Washington, accidentally killed her abusive and threatening ex-boyfriend when she
shot through the door he was trying to unlock with keys given to him by her apartment
manager. She was found guilty, but because the judge had described her to the jury as
“one of those welfare mother leeches who suck up my tax dollars,” the first trial was
overturned. The appeals judge, however, ruled that her case did not involve selfdefense and ordered a re-trial. In 1980, she accepted a deal that gave her probation
in exchange for a guilty plea.
March 2012 - Marissa Alexander, a thirty-one-year-old African American woman from
Jacksonville, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for firing a warning shot to stop
her abusive husband from attacking her without harming him. When, in November
2013, her first trial was overturned and she was released on bond, Angela Corey, the
Prosecuting Attorney, proclaimed that she would seek to impose a sixty year sentence
in her next trial. Alexander is currently confined to her home with a tentative trial
date of December 1, 2014 and was denied the right to use a Stand Your Ground
defense in July.
June 2012 – CeCe McDonald, an African American transgender woman and activist in
Minneapolis, was tried for stabbing to death a man who had attacked her and her
friends. After an expert witness was not allowed to testify about the role that her
race and gender identity had played in the attack against her, she accepted a plea
bargain for second-degree manslaughter due to negligence and was sentenced to
forty-one months in prison.
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Information was available about most of the women mentioned here only because some people
were able to organize strong campaigns to support them. We’ll never know the numbers or
names of all of the women who were sentenced and often lynched or executed after defending
themselves when in danger from abusers and rapists. We can, however, be certain that they
have always been a large percentage of the women of color in prison because white
authorities are less apt to see them as victims than they will many white women.
See also: Sharon Angella Allard, “Rethinking Battered Woman Syndrome: A Black Feminist
Perspective,” UCLA Women’s Law Journal, 1991: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/62z1s13j.
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CONCISE CHRONOLOGY OF THE HISTORY OF JACKSONVILLE,
FLORIDA
1502-1700s - Some enslaved and/or free people with African roots came with the
Spanish conquistadores (conquerors) and often served as translators for interactions
with the indigenous people. The Spanish Slave Code, unlike the practices in AngloAmerica, allowed individuals to buy their freedom, maintain their family ties, and sue
their masters for mistreatment.
1683 - The Spanish Governor of Florida supported the formation of a black militia in St.
Augustine.
1690s - Enslaved Africans in (South) Carolina began escaping to St. Augustine. They
could receive sanctuary if they were baptized as Catholics and (if male) would serve in a
militia for four years.
1738 - North of St. Augustine, a Mandinga captain, Francisco Menendez, who had
escaped slavery in South Carolina, commanded the militia at Fort Mose (pronounced
“Moh-say”) for over forty years.
1763 - Spain ceded Florida to the British; most free blacks moved to Cuba.
1783 - At the end of the American Revolutionary War, England returned Florida to Spain.
1821 - The Adams-Onis Treaty gave Florida to the United States. The treaty granted
free blacks certain legal and property rights, but most left for Cuba.
1822 - The town of Cowford changed its name to Jacksonville, honoring Andrew
Jackson.
1826 - Florida Territory forbade free blacks from entering Florida.
1845 - Florida became a state.
1861-1865 - During the Civil War, hundreds of enslaved men from the area joined the
First, Second, and Third South Carolina Regiments (the black Glory Brigades) of the U.
S. Army.
1867 - African Americans met in Jacksonville to choose candidates for city elections.
They passed a resolution asserting “there is no distinction between the white and black
man in political matters.”
1867-1869 - African American voters in Jacksonville elected black delegates to the
Florida State Constitutional Convention and representatives to the Jacksonville City
Council and the Duval County School Board. Black men also served as policemen,
marshals, judges, and justices of the peace.
1886 and 1888 - Mosquito bites led to major yellow fever epidemics. By November
1888, the city employed over 1400 African Americans for relief projects. When the
Committee on Sanitation announced that they were laying off half of the workers, nearly
a thousand unemployed African Americans and their families demonstrated and held
nightly meetings until the jobs were restored.
1886 - Candidates sponsored by a coalition of the Knights of Labor and African
American Republicans won the city elections in Jacksonville.
1888 - After black women gathered near polling places to encourage black men to vote
the right way, Jacksonville elected a number of African Americans to local offices. The
state legislature nullified Jacksonville’s charter, disbanded its elected government, and
replaced it with men appointed by the Governor. Other new laws restricted more of the
rights of African Americans.
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1892 - When the white community threatened to lynch Ben Reed, an African American,
for killing a white man in a fight he had not started, about five-hundred armed black men
organized a sentry system, preventing lynchers from taking Reed out of the jail,
escorting white people who passed through, and allowing twenty white policemen to go
into the jail. Reed was sentenced to four years in jail.
1900 - James Weldon Johnson, the principal of the only black middle school in Florida,
wrote the words and his brother, Rosamond Johnson, composed the music for “Lift
Every Voice and Sing.”
1901 - When white insurance companies stopped serving black people, Abraham
Lincoln Lewis and some other men founded the African American Life Insurance
Company.
May 3, 1901 - The Great Fire in downtown Jacksonville left 10,000 homeless.
1901 and 1905 - African Americans, especially women, organized boycotts of
segregated streetcars.
February 1917 - James Weldon Johnson organized the first meeting of the Jacksonville
NAACP.
September 7, 1919 - Two black men were lynched in Jacksonville.
1920 - By October 17, over seven thousand African American women had registered to
vote in Jacksonville and over one thousand black men, in spite of various forms of
harassment. Democratic officials used tricks and lies to prevent three to four thousand
African Americans from voting.
April 27, 1957 - The James Weldon Johnson Middle School and the Jacksonville Jewish
Center were bombed to warn people not to support desegregation.
1960 - Three African American businesses were bombed in Jacksonville.
August 13, 1960 - After nonviolence training overseen by their teacher, Rutledge
Pearson, teenagers Rodney Hurst and Alton Yates and the other members of the
NAACP Youth Council began sit-in demonstrations at the lunch counters at Woolworth’s
and other downtown stores.
August 27, 1960 - About 150-200 members of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups,
carrying ax handles, baseball bats, and other kinds of clubs, threatened to organize
citywide boycotts if the stores made an agreement to serve food to black customers.
They then attacked student demonstrators who had been kicked out by a store manager.
The police stayed away until members of a group known as the Boomerangs began
assisting the demonstrators.
Early 1964 - Roderick Pearson led a new action campaign against still segregated
businesses.
February 16, 1964 - A bomb caused serious damage (but no human injuries) to the
house of Iona Godfrey, an activist and mother of a child who had integrated an all-white
elementary school. In March, the FBI (not the local police) arrested the bomber and
then six accomplices.
March 23, 1964 - As the Civil Rights Bill came close to passage in Congress, some
whites in Jacksonville circulated a false report that four black males had beaten and
robbed a white man. After the NAACP led several hundred African Americans in a
protest at Hemming Park, students in a high school pulled a fire alarm so most could join
the protestors. Over the next several days, some people attacked buildings with
firebombs and threw rocks at cars. Martin Luther King Jr. offered to go to Jacksonville to
help, but Roderick Pearson asked him not to. After a white man was injured by a thrown
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brick and cars were firebombed, Pearson convinced the youths to stop all violence from
their side.
March 23, 1964 - In a poor neighborhood away from downtown, Johnnie Mae Chappell,
the mother of ten children, was looking along a roadside for a wallet she had dropped. A
car drove by with four men wanting to punish someone black for the “riots.” One of them
shot and killed Chappell. He eventually served only three years of a ten-year sentence
and the charges against the other three were dropped.
August 2006 - After two black firefighters in Jacksonville found nooses hanging inside
their lockers, a Human Rights Commission Report concluded that the Jacksonville Fire
and Rescue Department was allowing widespread discrimination against African
Americans.
March 2012 - Marissa Alexander, an African American thirty-one-year-old woman from
Jacksonville, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for firing what she said was a
warning shot to stop her abusive husband from hurting her. Her husband was not hurt.
Her case was overturned a year and a half later.
April 2012 - The U. S. Department of Justice filed suit against the City of Jacksonville,
accusing them of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
October 2012 - Travis Swanson, a Jacksonville African American youth, was sentenced
to twenty-two years in prison for a robbery with a BB gun that he was involved in at
seventeen. He was pressured to confess without having been read his Miranda Rights.
November 2012 - Jordan Davis, a seventeen-year-old high school student, was shot to
death at a gas station by a man upset by the loud music Davis was playing; he claimed
he thought Davis had a gun.
February 2013 -- Christian Fernandez pled guilty to manslaughter for the death of his
two-year-old half-brother in 2011 when Christian was twelve years old.
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#BLACKWOMENSLIVESMATTER
A TELEVISED PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY: TAKING ACTION ON STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN
Hosted by Denyce Gartrell, CEO of More Than a Woman
WJCT/ PBS, 100 Festival Park Ave., Jacksonville, FL. 32202
Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 1:00 PM
A call for political movement building since Winnie Mandela, Angela Davis,and Assata Shuker
cases.
GOALS:
● Articulate a set of actions for political change in our struggle.
● Documenting the Domestic Violence & Sexual Abuse Epidemic.
● Recollect how we became the back seat discussion of #blacklivesmatter.
● Outline the struggle of plea bargaining amongst black women nationwide.
● Contribute black women sheros discussions and their work since Emancipation.
● Economic Exploitation through jobs, children, family, state/federal programs and prisons.
● Questions Framed by:
"
The significance of bottom up global world political movement building has been indoctrinated
through the Southern legacies of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. These same organizing
strategies exist today and have been catapulted through the present nationwide sentiment of
cases such as, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Gardner. Here in Jacksonville, FL., Free
Marissa Now organizers from across the country will share for the world the ambivalent attitude
towards women and the systematic racism noted as gendered racism.
The People’s Movement Assembly process broadens the discussion to those in the community
where the people are directly involved in the strategies and the outcomes that will be discussed.
#BlackLivesMatter Caravan will also be here from California.
We believe that we can win and we believe that #blacklivesmatter.
Free Marissa Now * freemarissanow.org * facebook.com/freemarissanow Donate to the television event: www.gofundme.com/freemarissanowtv
#blackwomenslivesmatter * freemarissanow@gmail.com * 904 .631.1674
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