Invisible History: Middle Florida’s Hidden History, produced by the Florida State University film school, focuses on middle Florida, the cotton growing counties in the panhandle where slavery was an essential part of the economy. It is everything people like Governor DeSantis want to eradicate: stories of black people enslaved, often tortured, for the sake of profit, with all sorts of apologists ready to say why it was acceptable.
Watch this now before the Florida legislature labels it pornography and forces its removal. You may need to make a donation to your PBS station in order to access Passport where it is streaming.* Here is the preview. Many of the commentators are black professors at Florida universities, and I wondered if they had come under attack for participating in this documentary, which was made in 2021.
*You may find it via your public library via the Hoopla app.
The first thing Virginia’s governor did (day one literally) was to order the Department of Education to rescind all the policies and programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Somehow helping people see how past and present inequities and discrimination have created huge cultural, political and economic gaps in our state and country might make those who benefitted from those policies and practices and live on the “right” side of the gap feel badly about themselves.
Do not forget that Virginia’s response to Brown vs. Board of Education was to essentially close the schools. Once they were forced to desegregate, localities closed Black schools, fired Black teachers and forced Black students into hostile, white-centered environments. Friends who lived through the process tell the story of finding their school memorabilia–from football trophies to administrator photographs–in a dumpster. Their lives, their stories, were being erased.
Youngkin and his minions are simply continuing that tradition. Fortunately, the Virginia Education Association stepped in to post the EdEquity VA website. You can also find the original site by using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.
I haven’t much felt like writing lately: everything I think about writing seems frivolous in light of the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols and multiple mass shootings in January. Meanwhile, governors like Glenn Youngkin here in Virginia and Ron DeSantis in Florida are using their power to literally whitewash history.
So, I’m going to highlight a black historian I wrote about earlier, Mr. Ernest Crim III. He focuses on what matters, digs out that history that Youngkin and his ilk want to bury, and also finds bright spots in the world like the new poet laureate of New York, nine-year-old Kayden Hern.
In The Virginia Plan: William B. Thalhimer & a Rescue from Nazi Germany, Richard Gillette tells the story of Hyde Park, a farm in Nottoway County that became a home for about three dozen Jewish young people in the late 1930s. The students came from a communal training farm in Gross Breesen, Germany, at the invitation of William B. Thalhimer, one of the brothers in the retail business Thalhimer Brothers whose family owned the land near Burkeville. The Thalhimer family itself came to Richmond from Germany in 1840, choosing the Virginia capital city as it had a large population of German Jews.
Thalhimer was involved in Jewish resettlement during the 1930s as Hitler rose to power and Jewish immigration was becoming increasingly difficult. Gillette’s book details the challenges of getting the students to the United States. During Kristallnacht, some of the students from Gross Breesen were taken to Buchenwald although Gillette indicates they were eventually released and able to get to the United States. All Gross Breesen graduates were able to immigrate to a variety of different countries.
The Richmond Times Dispatch has a good story about the farm as part of its reporting on a visit by a group of contemporary German students. The Washington Post featured the story of a reunion of the students at the farm in 1990.
The Virginia Museum of History and Culture features a lecture by Gillette:
William B. Thalhimer had to step back from active work after a heart attack in 1927. His son, William Blum Thalhimer, Jr., took over and led the company for almost 60 years. The son’s entry at VMHC’s website includes some information about Hyde Park. The farm is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has a good summary of the farm’s history.
I am not able to tell if the farm is currently open for touring but I’m not too far from Nottoway County so may take a drive one of these days. At the least, there is an historical marker near Burkeville.
The Washington Post has created a gruesome but necessary database that tracks those shot and killed by police. The database was begun in 2015 after the murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officers led to the discovery that many police killings were never recorded in the FBI database.
The data is clear: young, black men are killed more often than others.
Unfortunately, the database focuses on shootings so this morning’s news about the cousin of a Black Lives Matter co-founder who was killed by police with a taser may not be included. The young man from Washington, D.C. was visiting family in Los Angeles for the holidays. The video, released at the request of the family, shows his fear, driven by his sense that he was probably going to die like so many others. It will stay with me, alongside George Floyd calling for his mother. I won’t post it but encourage you to watch it. I think about Emmett Till’s mother who insisted the casket stay open so people were forced to confront the truth.