Days of Trouble, Days of Hope
Remembering dark times—from slavery to pandemics to nuclear threats—which have threatened, but not extinguished, Florida’s very soul.
By Gary Mormino
From slavery to deadly storms, yellow fever to the Spanish flu, polio to nuclear threats, Florida has had its share of dark days. In our featured image, Don Hoover and Joe Sistrunk donned masks to go to school during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which took the lives of about 4,000 Floridians. Photos Courtesy of The State of Florida Archives And Wikimedia.
Everything about the disease with the scary name was disputed—where it began, who was to blame, whether patent medicines offered cures. Poor people, immigrants, and Blacks suffered disproportionately. Nurses and doctors served heroically.
Despite the striking similarities, this was not the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020; rather, it was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide, far more than died on European battlefields.
Georgie Hyde-Lees, the 25-year-old pregnant wife of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, miraculously survived the influenza. In “The Second Coming,” begun after his wife’s illness, Yeats penned these haunting and prophetic passages that resonate today with Floridians struggling to understand the upheaval caused by the new strain of virus:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Called a paradise and a dream state, Florida has nevertheless endured multiple crises in its 500-year history. As a colony, territory, and state, Florida has experienced the abomination of human slavery and deadly outbreaks of smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, influenza, and polio. It has weathered 130-mile-per-hour hurricanes and survived the threat of nuclear annihilation by way of missiles aimed from 90 miles off its shore. Yet repeatedly, through all these crises, Floridians have survived and rebounded, demonstrating strength and resolve, though the cost has been steep.
The plague of slavery: Casting a long shadow
Florida’s bleak and shameful history of slavery was foreshadowed even before the first known European settlement was established here. On April 2, 1513, a voyage of exploration led by Juan Ponce de León sighted land he christened La Florida, after the Spanish name for Easter, Pascua Florida, Feast of Flowers, and made brief landfall along the coast. Among the crew were slaves and free Blacks.
Slavery was woven into the fabric of Florida – existing here for 350 years, longer than in any other state. “Every 16th-century Spanish expedition to Florida included Africans, both freed and enslaved,” writes University of South Florida St. Petersburg historian J. Michael Francis. “The first recorded slaves to reach La Florida arrived in 1526 as part of the Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón expedition.” The new Spanish settlement was short-lived, as the African slaves rebelled.
By 1619, La Florida’s population included an eclectic mixture of West Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Flemish, Italians, Germans, Irishmen, and a diverse group of Native Americans.
Sign Up
Sign up to receive notices of funding opportunities, free public programs, announcements about our special events, and to receive our award-winning FORUM magazine.
Under Spanish rule, slavery was more complex and nuanced than in neighboring colonies and states. It was profoundly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which categorically forbade the enslavement of Florida’s Native Americans and the children of African slaves. Separation of families was officially verboten, and slaves could own property and were meant to have legal redress against cruel masters.
In Florida, writes historian Jane Landers, “Spanish law and custom . . . granted the enslaved . . . certain rights and protections not found in other slave systems.” A remarkable free Black society emerged in La Florida. Still, slavery remained a brutal and dehumanizing system.
La Florida became a stop on America’s first Underground Railroad. Beginning in 1693, Spain offered sanctuary to runaway slaves living in the Carolinas and later Georgia if they converted to Catholicism and bore arms for the Crown.
When Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, chattel slavery followed. In the South, slaves were considered property, not persons. Such property, including children, could be sold, whipped, and inherited.
On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Florida’s population numbered 140,424, a figure that included 61,745 slaves and a few thousand free Blacks. Slaves picked cotton, constructed Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, and helped build El Castillo de San Marcos. In 1837, the French naturalist Comte Francis de Castelnau visited Florida and kept a diary, observing, “Slaves . . . are generally treated with the greatest severity. A whip is the only language used with them.”
In their own words: Remembering bondage and freedom
A priceless insight into that dark period came years later, in the nadir of the Great Depression. In 1935, the federal government created one of the more remarkable, indeed inspiring, programs to document the past. The Works Progress Administration (renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939) paid unemployed writers, folklorists, journalists, and artists to build schools but also, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, to canvas the South to document stories of ex-slaves.
Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy conducted interviews in the mid-1930s at one of the most unusual places in America—the Ex-Slave Association of Greater Miami, located in Liberty City.
Author Zora Neale Hurston was one of 10 African Americans employed in the Negro Writers’ Unit.
Altogether, 2,358 interviews with former slaves took place across America during the mid-1930s, including 60 in Florida. The vast collection largely languished in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress until scholars discovered it decades later. In 1972, Greenwood Press published 19 volumes of the collection, titled The American Slave. One volume, comprising 379 pages, is devoted to Florida. Today, what is commonly referred to as the WPA Slave Narrative Collection has been digitized and is available online through Project Gutenberg. The Florida collection may be found at Gutenberg. org/ebooks/12297 and the Library of Congress website.
The narratives chronicle shocking stories of abuse and inspiring stories of hope and redemption.
All remembered the electric moment of freedom. On May 20, 1865, Brigadier General Edward M. McCook received the surrender of Confederate troops at Tallahassee. From his headquarters at the Knott House, McCook announced to the slaves of Leon County that they were now free, two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A local Black preacher, Richard Edwards, exhorted field hands and domestics, “Take your freedom . . . Go where you please.” Claude Wilson, who had left Dexter’s plantation in Lake City, reminisced, “Horns and drums could be heard beating and blowing every morning and evening.” Louis Napoleon recalled dirt roads “filled with these happy souls.”
Hidden vectors of death:What slave ships secretly carried
From the beginning of exploration and settlement in the 16th century, Europeans brought with them lethal old-world diseases – smallpox, influenza, measles, and whooping cough – that decimated Florida’s Indigenous population.
Though Native Americans were not enslaved, unmarried males were required by Spanish law to cultivate soldiers’ fields and provide maize to the Crown.
When many succumbed to these diseases, African slavery was seen as a solution to the labor problems.
But along with countless victims of human enslavement, what was soon to become Florida’s most dreaded disease arrived on African slave ships.
Bound for the Caribbean and South America, the vessels carried in their water casks Aedes aegypti and Anopheles mosquitoes, toxic twins author Jared Diamond labeled “accidental conquerors.” African slaves, by dint of history and genetics, were largely immune to the mosquito-borne diseases of yellow fever and malaria.
The Europeans, however, succumbed to it in masses, mistakenly blaming it on miasma, a fog creeping from the swamps. “Yellow fever,” writes historian Timothy Winegard, “3,000 miles removed from its 3,000-year-old ancestral home in West Central Africa, would significantly shape the destiny of the Americas.”
Yellow fever arrived in spasms of fear and contagion. It first broke out in St. Augustine in 1649, likely brought aboard a trading vessel from Cuba. Only weeks after the U.S. acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, yellow fever struck the Ancient City again, killing 172 inhabitants, returning with a vengeance in 1839 and 1841.
“Yellow Jack” wiped cities off the map. In the late 1830s, St. Joseph in present-day Gulf County was so promising that Florida’s first Constitutional Convention of 1838 was held there. But in 1841, yellow fever erupted, and the town’s population plummeted from 4,000 to 400 to a ghost town. Territorial Governor Robert Reid died of yellow fever contracted at St. Joseph.
The former slave made history as Jacksonville’s first Black physician and proved himself a hero during the city’s terrible outbreak of yellow fever in 1887–88. As the rich abandoned the city, the fearless doctor treated and comforted the victims.
Statues depicting a late-in-life reunion of Professor Edmund Kirby Smith and Dr. Alexander Darnes have stood since 2004 in the courtyard of the family’s former home, the Segui-Kirby Smith House in St. Augustine, now the site of the St. Augustine Historical Society’s research library. Descendant Maria Kirby- Smith sculpted the two figures.
In 2018, the Florida Legislature voted to remove General Kirby Smith’s statue from Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., where it had stood since the 1920s. It will be replaced by one of Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of ex-slaves and a prominent educator.
Amidst today’s debates over Confederate monuments and who belongs on the pedestal, Alexander Darnes provides a stirring role model, reminding us that honor depends upon character, dignity, and decency, not station or inheritance. The doctor led a life of purpose and understood the power of love and redemption, heroic qualities. Some 3,000 people, Black and white, attended Darnes’ funeral in 1894. It was said to be the largest such gathering held in the city up to that time.
The 1887–88 epidemic scoured Tampa and Jacksonville, claiming more than 500 lives. Waycross, Georgia, banned fearful refugees fleeing from Jacksonville, and Bartow in Polk County halted Tampans. The Tampa Journal retorted, “Who wants to go to Bartow anyway?
Portrait of courage: This former slave helped save a city
Amidst the tragedy and fear of this lethal disease, heroes emerged. Born a slave in 1840 St. Augustine, Aleck grew up in the home of Judge Joseph Lee Smith, where he was taught to read and write, although it was illegal. At age 15, Aleck became a valet for the judge’s youngest son, Edmund Kirby Smith, a West Point graduate and captain in the U.S. 2nd Cavalry stationed in Texas. Aleck, whose mother was also enslaved in the Smith home, may have been Edmund’s half-brother or nephew.
Aleck and Edmund were inseparable for more than a decade. Aleck served Captain Smith from the First Battle of Bull Run to the western frontier, where General Smith, by then a Confederate military leader, surrendered in Galveston, Texas, at the end of the Civil War. In July 1865, fearful of being hanged for treason, General Smith fled to Cuba. Smith later became a professor of mathematics and botany at Sewanee, University of the South.
After Emancipation, Aleck became Alexander Hanson Darnes, free to follow his undanced dreams. With the financial assistance of Frances Smith Webster, General Smith’s sister, Darnes graduated from Lincoln University and earned a medical degree from Howard University.
The former slave made history as Jacksonville’s first Black physician and proved himself a hero during the city’s terrible outbreak of yellow fever in 1887–88. As the rich abandoned the city, the fearless doctor treated and comforted the victims.
Statues depicting a late-in-life reunion of Professor Edmund Kirby Smith and Dr. Alexander Darnes have stood since 2004 in the courtyard of the family’s former home, the Segui-Kirby Smith House in St. Augustine, now the site of the St. Augustine Historical Society’s research library. Descendant Maria Kirby- Smith sculpted the two figures.
In 2018, the Florida Legislature voted to remove General Kirby Smith’s statue from Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., where it had stood since the 1920s. It will be replaced by one of Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of ex-slaves and a prominent educator.
Amidst today’s debates over Confederate monuments and who belongs on the pedestal, Alexander Darnes provides a stirring role model, reminding us that honor depends upon character, dignity, and decency, not station or inheritance. The doctor led a life of purpose and understood the power of love and redemption, heroic qualities. Some 3,000 people, Black and white, attended Darnes’ funeral in 1894. It was said to be the largest such gathering held in the city up to that time.
Mosquito control: Attacking disease at its source
In the wake of the yellow fever epidemic, eradicating mosquito-borne diseases became a priority that demanded action and organization. For most of Florida history, residents endured the omnipresent mosquito. Window screens helped. “Skeeter beaters,” lashed palmetto fronds, were useful. The State Board of Health was established in 1889, and in 1902 its director, Joseph Porter, launched a statewide campaign to control the menace. To eliminate breeding areas, crews built drainage ditches and dispersed oil on ponds and wetlands. Mosquito spraying trucks crisscrossed cities and towns.
In World War II, American soldiers faced tropical diseases in Pacific jungles. A new weapon was employed: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known as DDT, a colorless, toxic, synthetic compound. In postwar Florida, DDT was hailed as a miracle insecticide.
Mosquito control allowed year-round living in places once considered too mosquito-ridden. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, calling DDT a “witches’ brew” that poisoned the food chain. The book was a clarion call to arms for an emerging American environmental movement. In 1972, the U.S. banned the insecticide.
Spanish flu: Progress, then a pandemic
The quarter century following the yellow fever epidemic of the late 1880s witnessed a dizzying period of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. If a single word described the meaning of these developments, it was progress.
But in 1914, any illusion of progress was shattered. The guns of August commenced the fighting called the “Great War,” also known as World War I. The conflict unleashed ancient demons and modern forces. In a war famous for the new instruments of death—the airplane, U-boats, and poison gas—the Grim Reaper’s most lethal weapon was an ancient one: a virus.
Military conflict on a colossal scale, fought across four continents by 70 million soldiers in dense conditions, served as a perfect setting for a global pandemic. The lethal virus spread like prairie fire across the globe. Between 1918 and 1919, one-half billion people fell ill with what contemporaries called Spanish flu.
Death estimates range between 50 million and 100 million, including 4,000 Floridians. In contrast, as of early August 2020, COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has killed more than 160,000 Americans, including 7,746 Floridians, and more than 716,000 people worldwide .
Epidemics ordinarily claim the most vulnerable, but the Spanish flu targeted healthy young adults. By mid-summer 1918, medical officials rejoiced that the epidemic had crested. “In fact, it was more like a great tsunami that initially pulls water away from the shore,” observed historian John Barry, “only to return in a towering, overwhelming surge.”
A second wave darkened the Sunshine State. By September 1918, Jacksonville teemed with war workers and soldiers. Florida’s largest city was home to Camp Joseph E. Johnston, bustling shipyards, and 82,000 residents. The outbreak began at a city prison farm.
By Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, one-third of the city was walloped by the disease, resulting in the closing of movie palaces and vaudeville theaters, pool halls and saloons. “No Spitting” signs appeared. Influenza claimed almost 900 lives in Duval County. Ominously, coffin makers reported shortages. Comparing the yellow fever and Spanish flu epidemics, T. F. Davis wrote, “The rattle of the death carts of 1878 was supplanted by the whir of the motor in 1918.”
Pandemics turn societies upside down. In July 1918, a newspaper headline read, “Pensacola One of Healthiest Cities on Map.” Influenza soon erupted there. By October, a journalist gasped, “Almost no spot was spared.” Schools closed for the fall term. In Gainesville, one-third of the all-male student body at the University of Florida reported sick, along with President Albert Murphree.
Since the 16th century, St. Augustine had struggled with plague, invasion, and fire, but the St. Augustine Record of the day reminded readers, “For the first time in the history of St. Augustine, churches, schools and theaters have been closed and public meetings canceled.” Children giggled a ditty, “I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and Inflewenza.”
The epidemic also scoured small towns, claiming 20 victims in Quincy and eight in Kissimmee. Greenville lost four citizens in one week alone. Herbert Moore of Crawfordville, the youngest member of the State Legislature, succumbed to the flu.
Having survived three savage wars, Florida’s 750 Seminoles felt safe in the remote region of the Everglades. But modernity arrived when, in 1918, an airplane crashed in the Big Cypress and a rescue expedition reached the Seminole outpost, bringing the infection. Ten Seminoles died.
The pandemic occurred during a “war to save the world for democracy,” inflaming passions and prejudices. Engines of conflict isolated and ignited racial, class, and ethnic tensions. America was already deeply embroiled in clashes over Prohibition and women’s suffrage, the Great Migration and immigration restriction.
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher,” wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. Poor Floridians who lived in close quarters were hit hardest. Thousands of laborers rolled cigars in Ybor City and West Tampa factories. In one block in Ybor City, every single home housed a sick member.
Only near the end of the crisis did officials open an emergency hospital for African Americans. Clara Frye, a Black Tampa nurse, treated the ill in her home. In total, influenza infected 20,000 Tampans, killing 283 citizens. In Miami, the city’s first Black millionaire, D.A. Dorsey, transformed his hotel in Overtown into a hospital for the city’s African Americans.
Home-front doctors and nurses performed steadfast service in a terrifying environment. The Tampa Tribune editorialized, “For devotion to duty, who except mothers and soldiers excels the family doctor? . . . The Tampa doctors are the salt of the earth.” Without a vaccine or antibiotic, doctors’ and nurses’ major treatment was boosting morale and giving comfort.
In Florida, as in America, there was little collective mourning. Few monuments honor the victims of the yellow fever and Spanish flu disasters.
These pandemics of the past contained sad warnings for today, as one commentator noted near the beginning of COVID-19’s emergence in the U.S.
“Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together,” argued columnist David Brooks in The New York Times in March, “but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart. These are crises in which social distancing is a virtue. Dread overwhelms the normal bonds of human affection.”
Polio: Fear on the heels of optimism
When WWII ended, America was supremely confident. A new Florida dream emerged, defined by fresh starts, palm trees, and the promise of a better life. But amid Cold War tensions, an old threat reemerged: Poliomyelitis, Polio.
Polio is an ancient disease, but the first polio epidemic in America did not occur until 1894. Polio’s most famous victim was a young Franklin D. Roosevelt who contracted the crippling illness in 1921. When Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, the press had a tacit understanding never to photograph the chief executive in his wheelchair or on crutches.
While COVID-19 disproportionately impacts senior citizens, polio targeted young victims. Images of patients suffering from infantile paralysis, a disease that attacked the body’s central nervous system, became part of 1940s and ‘50s culture: children in clanking metal braces, iron lungs, mothers fearful of sending children to swimming pools, and placards with inserts for dimes to raise money.
Officials attacked polio with best intentions, such as conducting DDT spraying campaigns and Georgia’s 1946 two-week quarantine on all travelers from Florida.
Curiously, polio seemed to erupt in small towns, not big cities. In the fall of 1954, the Leon High football team shut down because 448 cases of polio had been reported countywide. Opponents refused to play the Lions.
In 1953, the scientist Jonas Salk announced that he had developed a successful polio vaccine. In 1955, the vaccine was adopted throughout the country. School children were rushed to centers to be inoculated with menacingly long needles. The Salk vaccine was followed by the oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin, which went into widespread use in the 1960s.
The campaign to eradicate polio is considered one of the great success stories. Since 1979, not a single case of polio has originated in the U.S. The late news commentator Daniel Schorr told the story of taking a young journalist to the annual Jonas Salk banquet. The guest asked, “Who’s Jonas Salk?” Schorr explained that he had developed a vaccine for polio. The reporter then sheepishly asked, “What’s polio?”
13 days in October: A threat from 90 miles offshore
Besides deadly disease, the most existential crisis faced by Floridians occurred on October 22, 1962. In a televised address, President John F. Kennedy shocked Americans when he announced that U.S. spy planes had confirmed the Soviet Union was constructing missile bases in Cuba. The threat of assured mutual destruction was the product of a Cold War and an arms race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
“I remember when the announcement happened, and my family reacted with: ‘The world is going to end,’ and it had something to do with Cuba. I was 7 years old at the time . . . I was very afraid,” recalled Marta María Darby, in an interview with National Public Radio in October 2012.
“It was quite frightening. . . . [at school] You hear the alarm, you dive under your desk. And I remember thinking, even as a child, thinking, really, this is going to prevent a bomb from destroying us?”
In 1959, Fidel Castro and his rebel forces overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista. For the next three years, the U.S. and Cuba engaged in an escalating chess match: the exodus of Cuban refugees to Miami, Cuba’s expropriation of U.S. property, an embargo on Cuban sugar, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and a Soviet-Cuban alliance.
In his 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy, the young American president, had laid a marker, vowing, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship . . . to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
For more than a decade, a popular culture had grown up around the Cold War and the need for bomb shelters and “duck and cover” drills in schools. And in 1962, Floridians felt on the brink.
The Cold War boiled over when President Kennedy confronted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet missile sites capable of launching nuclear-tipped weapons 90 miles from Florida. An eerie term emerged to describe what might happen: “Nuclear Armageddon.”
For 13 days, the world was transfixed with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Florida, which stood in the crosshairs, was a beehive of activity as the military reserves were called up and residents were sent scurrying for safety in rural areas. Residents of Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Pensacola were especially nervous because of the presence of military bases and Cuban refugees.
Deborah Burmester Leibecki recounted to the Florida Times-Union a memory of her parents watching newscaster Walter Cronkite’s nightly broadcast, but turning it off when she or her siblings walked in the room.
“I was in elementary school at the time (Jacksonville),” she said, in a story commemorating the crisis’ 50th anniversary. “We were given metal bracelets that had our full name, address, religious faith, phone number, and mother’s name on it. I still have mine.”
The world exhaled when the crisis was defused. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” sighed Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “and the other fellow just blinked.”
Hurricanes: Uniting Floridians across history
Each summer meteorologists remind Floridians that a Category 5 hurricane brings the force of a nuclear bomb. Florida history can be measured by its most powerful hurricanes: Cedar Key in 1896, Key West in 1935, and Donna in 1960. More recently, the evil triplets—Andrew, Irma, and Michael—have punctured any sensibility that Florida is safe from killer hurricanes.
Hurricanes connect Floridians across the ages. Residents of Mexico Beach can relate to a Spanish chronicler who, describing a 16th-century hurricane, swore that “it seemed as if all the demons had escaped from Hades.” But hurricanes also bring Floridians together in ways that a long peninsula and panhandle divide us.
Conclusion:
In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1938 novel, The Yearling, Jody Baxter runs away after his mother forces him to shoot his beloved deer. When a bedraggled Jody returns, his elated father tells the young boy, “You’ve done come back different. You’ve takened a punishment. You ain’t a yearling no longer.”
The melancholic scene provides a message for the Sunshine State in 2020. Florida is strong and resilient. The pandemic has taken, and continues to take, a grievous human toll. But if history is any guide, Floridians will hold on and come back stronger.
We live in turbulent and fraught times. We can hope that the crisis will strengthen our resolve and instill a new Florida dream.
Many Floridians in search of hope and serenity are rediscovering what brought them to Florida in the first place: the spiritual and comforting power of nature.
Writing in The Guardian newspaper in 2016, Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, considers our troubled contemporary era and evokes inspiring words: “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”
Gary Mormino is the Frank E. Duckwall professor of history emeritus at University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where he is also scholar in residence at Florida Humanities.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2020 Issue of FORUM Magazine. Visit our collection at the USFSP Digital Archive by clicking here.
