A new book details how Black activists and gay teachers were targeted by a legislative inquest in Florida in the 1950s and '60s.
The book includes the story of one St. Petersburg man who fought back — and won.
In "American Scare," author Robert W. Fieseler wrote about a period in Florida toward the end of the national "Red Scare," when U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy led investigations into alleged communist infiltration in the government and society.
Under the guise of McCarthyism, a committee led by state Sen. Charley Johns, a conservative Democrat, unsuccessfully investigated the NAACP for communist ties, then turned the hunt toward academic homosexuals at state universities.
Fieseler will discuss his work from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Tombolo Books, 2153 First Ave. S., St. Petersburg.
WUSF's Kerry Sheridan talks to Fieseler about his research, the Johns Committee and that era's parallels to today's politics.
The interview below was lightly edited for clarity.
WUSF: How did Black and gay activists happen to come under that definition of communism?
Fiesler: Well, you'd have to use the term "communist" in the most unscientific way possible. Basically, it was anyone who seemed like they were a threat to a white ruler.
A Southern person understood that "communist" was a hot-button word and could be thrown around to ruin a reputation, no matter what.
Tell me about the Johns Committee, and how they really used an unorthodox approach. They were taking people out of classrooms and interviewing them in motel rooms, right?
Correct. So they started off investigating integrationists like NAACP, et cetera. They would call and subpoena them into an open hearing in the state House or into Miami courtrooms and sort of badger and embarrass them there, using the threat of basically public shame and publicity.
When it stopped working, because the NAACP successfully blocked them through court actions, what the Johns Committee needed was — they were an investigative committee that needed someone to investigate.
They had budgetary constraints. They had to show heads on spikes, basically, to the white segregationist base. So, Charley Johns [who also served as acting governor after the death of Gov. Dan McCarty] knew that he was going to have to find someone else who was unpopular among the public, who could be called subversive to the white system.
So he went to the University of Florida, trying to find charismatic teachers, teaching [Karl] Marx. Didn't find any, but what he did find were closeted gay people hooking up in various bathrooms, the most popular being in Gainesville, the basement bathroom of the Alachua County Courthouse.
And so they noticed some of these closeted gay professors going to these zones where they would meet each other and experience a kind of furtive release. And the Johns Committee decided basically that this constituted a threat to the straight white system, and "we need to basically persecute these individuals to the totality of our power."
I can imagine how terrifying that must have been. And you're going to be reading at Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, and there's another person in your book who is from that area and had quite an effect on this turn of events. Can you tell me about William James Neal?
Yes, one of the individuals who successfully stood up to the Johns Committee was a closeted gay black music teacher at Gibbs Junior College, which was a segregated junior college in St Pete. His name was William James Neal.
He was yanked out of a classroom and forcibly interrogated by a state agent in front of his white boss, basically the district superintendent.
His white boss made him confess to something verifiably false, involving homosexual behavior. And then, as a result of that false confession, William James Neal was fired from the Florida school system, and his teaching credentials were revoked.
And then William James Neal did what no other individual who was closeted gay who'd been victimized by the Johns Committee did before.
He sued the in state court, and it went all the way to the appellate court, state Supreme Court, and he won. He won back his teaching credentials due to the Johns Committee being overzealous in the way they persecuted him, according to their own laws.
The way he knew he'd be successful is he knew he'd have to hide his race. So what he did is he hired two white appellate lawyers to argue his case. He fled the state, went all the way to Maryland, knew he was never going to come back. And never, in one instance, could I find in any legal documentation any mention of William James Neal's race.
As you're talking about this, I'm thinking of the things that are happening in Florida now. When you were researching this, what parallels did you see from history to the current era?
Everything old is new again.
I mean, I thought I was writing a left-field history, and then the rise of DeSantis-ism occurred right in the midst of when I was researching "American Scare."
And so as I'm researching John's Committee files, I'm seeing the so-called "Don't Say Gay" law being passed. I'm seeing the "Stop Woke Act." And the parallels aligned even more with the rise of Trump 2.0, which was basically, you know, the super ego of [President Donald] Trump put on spin in the Florida political machine.
And so what it really brought home was the fact that we're living in a second Red Scare.
There was no punishment for the Johns Committee, right? They just kind of went out of existence?
They ended not with a bang, but a whimper, and they were able to seal their records, meaning that the worst atrocities, the worst misdeeds, were basically kept from public knowledge and kept from all study for decades.
The state specifically passed a law that would redact the names of all of the victims of the Johns Committee, such that when those papers came to light in the early 1990s, they were mutilated and almost useless for study except by ethnography.
No one could know the names of many of the individuals who were persecuted, harmed and affected their entire lives. So the names like Art Copleston, William James Neal, were lost to history for a span of time until they could be recovered.
And you have quite a story there of how you recovered those because someone else had the full copies of all those files, right?
Yes, a Tallahassee paralegal named Bonnie Stark had, as a result of the process and a happenstance with the 1993 records release of the Johns Committee files. She calls it "the forgotten" – I call it the "secret second set" of the Johns Committee – records, which was sloppily redacted, sloppily censored.
I called Bonnie Stark. She was at her Tallahassee paralegal office just blocks away from this state archive in Tallahassee, where I'd been just agonizingly going over these perfectly censored documents for months. Bonnie told me on our first visit that she had the secret second set of records. She's been lugging them around for years, and she wants to give them all to me.
What's interesting is that when you compared the first set of records to the second set of records, what was crossed out was different, and if you overlaid them and had access to both, in 75% of the cases, you could recover all of the information. It was like Alan Turing-style decoding.
This is me as a reporter with a magnifying glass. Poring over things they're talking about, chance details like ... what high school someone graduated from, and what year, what street they lived on in 1950, and basically one letter of a last name or one letter in the middle of the word that might be, a T or H. And using that, and enough time and a crazy reporter-historian, you can piece back together everything that they tried to keep from the public.
What lessons do you think people in Florida should learn by knowing this kind of history?
The lessons I think they should learn have a lot to do with resistance and have a lot to do with alliances and resistance.
So the NAACP was able to successfully resist the Johns Committee, gum them up through the courts, and fight all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and win because they had legal resources that they were able to pull together. They also had a brilliant legal mind named Thurgood Marshall (future Supreme Court justice).
The main lesson I see is the role and the value of queer people of color.
William James Neal, even though his name is never mentioned in a single NAACP file, either basically he was fighting not because of racial persecution, but because of anti-homosexual persecution. But I think he saw the NAACP successfully fighting in courts, and that was his model to wage his personal battle.
When you look at the parallels between the queer rights movement and the civil rights movement, it's so obvious that the civil rights movement — the most important social movement of the 20th century — became the model for what became the gay and lesbian rights movement. Now it's just called the queer rights movement.
So, as much as we can not just model off each other, but form alliances in and among these groups, that is the way that white supremacy, in the end, is defeated.
