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Martial Law In Tampa?
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Published: February 17, 2008
The date was Aug. 6, 1944, and the news release was chilling.
"Racial disorders, now in progress in Tampa, Florida, between members of the Caucasian and Negro races, with attendant riots and bloodshed, have progressed beyond the control of civil authorities."
Gov. Spessard Holland urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare martial law "in quelling the riots and restoring law and order."
The document noted, "The President acquiesced, and the Army has been assigned this mission."
City hall became military headquarters. All "liquor stores, dance halls, picture shows and theatres" closed "for the duration."
Military authority was total. Army headquarters was authorized to censor "all radio announcements, news releases and statements as to incidents." Officials suspended civil liberties and imposed harsh penalties upon civilians who defied military rule. "The congregation of more than three persons at any place is prohibited."
The race riots did not stop at Tampa's borders. The discord spread to St. Petersburg, Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. The Sunshine State was under siege.
This was not the first time Tampa had confronted martial law. Gray-haired residents recalled jackbooted Northern soldiers occupying the city after the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865. The army of occupation included freed slaves brandishing Springfield rifles and citizenship. Before that, the Confederate Army had also imposed martial law in 1862.
If the first casualty in war is truth, the second victim is civil liberty.
In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued for maintaining control during times of war. Dissent and disorder were the equivalent of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, he opined.
Events in Tampa in August 1944 seemed to meet his "clear and present danger" test.
But the news release, arguably the most explosive document in the modern history of Florida race relations, was never released.
One will search in vain for any mention of these events in Florida newspapers. There is no mention of martial law - or even the race riots - because they never happened.
The release, labeled "secret" and secured in the Florida State Archives, became available to scholars and the public only in the early 1990s.
Tampa At War
Why had authorities prepared the statement?
The answer, quite simply, is that they fully expected racial tensions to explode in Tampa and elsewhere. And for good reasons.
Depression-ravaged Tampa had been blessed by World War II, which was less than a year from ending when the release was written. Two giant airfields, MacDill and Drew, and three shipyards transformed a reeling economy into a thriving city.
Warren Bryant was one of thousands of blacks stationed in Tampa during the war. His memories are more bitter than sweet, according to a 1975 Wayne State University Press publication by Mary Penick Motley. A member of the 812th Aviation Engineers stationed at MacDill Field, he remembered Tampa as a "hell hole."
Bryant saw something amiss in a country fighting an all-out war against fascism and totalitarianism while defending discriminatory Jim Crow laws and codes of conduct at home.
After his arrival in Tampa by troop train, a "big red-necked sheriff" instructed the black troops that their social life was to be confined to one area of town, the district along Central Avenue.
On weekends, only after "all the white soldiers who wished to go had been taken to their destination," black troops "were crowded like sardines into a couple of buses and driven directly to the colored section."
Tampa newspapers underscored the tension within and outside the military bases. But they never reported this incident:
In June 1943, a "mutiny" began at MacDill when a black soldier exchanged words with a "tired, irritable white saleswoman" at the base exchange for "colored" servicemen, according to news accounts. A crowd gathered, and a fight broke out between black soldiers and white military police. Nineteen black soldiers appeared with guns that they had stowed in the barracks.
Authorities charged Frank V. Stovall and 18 others with conspiracy to riot and mutiny. Julia Padron, Stovall's cousin, begged the NAACP to defend the black troops.
"Frank thinks they got him and 18 other boys because they are from the North," she pleaded.
The soldiers received sentences of 10 years each, later reduced to five years.
Records of the events were released after the war.
Social Vice
Black soldiers complained they were subject to involuntary venereal disease checks on and off the base. Seemingly a societal problem, venereal disease acquired a racial stigma during the war.
When asked to explain Tampa's high rates of infection in 1943, Mayor Robert E. Lee Chancey replied, "If we had no Negro soldiers here, our record for social protection for military personnel would be one of the finest in the U.S."
The most serious racial clash occurred in February 1944. As Tampa police raced to a narcotics raid in the "Scrub," a slum between Central and Nebraska avenues, a black serviceman reportedly cursed Capt. T.L. Tedford, who was attempting to clear traffic. When the offender was arrested, black soldiers confronted police as they tried to free their comrade.
Within minutes, "a huge mob, estimated at more than 4,000, assembled ... and demanded that the man be released," the Tampa Daily News reported.
Three armored riot cars and all available police and sheriff's deputies "rushed to the battle scene."
The retreating mob was followed by the closing of "every saloon, juke joint, restaurant, theater and store" on Central Avenue. Police arrested 24 blacks on charges of "creating a disturbance and inciting a riot."
The NAACP's papers contain another perspective of the incident. A rare copy of the black-owned Tampa Bulletin, forerunner of today's Florida Sentinel Bulletin, carried this headline: "Innocent Church Leaders Arrested."
The Sentinel Bulletin complained of "terrorism" and police brutality. The arrest list, the paper noted, included a church deacon and usher caught outside Beulah Baptist Church.
Who is telling the truth?
The search for the truth can be complicated, as John Steinbeck so ably illustrated in "The Grapes of Wrath."
"He's tellin' the truth, awright," preacher Casey said. "The truth for him."
To learn more about this topic, read Gary R. Mormino's essay "GI Joe Meets Jim Crow" in the Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 74 (July 1994). Gary R. Mormino directs the Florida Studies Program at USF St. Petersburg. Readers with memories of wartime Tamp
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