Polk County's Racial Terror and the Fight Back
Near Lakeland, Florida
Polk County's history of racial violence is documented and specific, and it belongs in any honest account of this region. The Equal Justice Initiative has recorded twenty lynchings of African Americans in Polk County between eighteen ninety-five and nineteen twenty-one. On May twenty-fifth, eighteen ninety-five, three Black men, names unrecorded in the surviving documents, were murdered in a mass lynching. Florida as a whole had one of the highest rates of lynchings per capita of any state in the nation, and Polk County ranked among the worst counties in Florida.
The Ku Klux Klan maintained a significant presence in this region well into the twentieth century. Violence connected to the civil rights movement was attributed to Klan action during the nineteen sixties. A Klan group staged a public march in full regalia in Lakeland in nineteen seventy-nine, their last public march through the downtown.
The records go quiet in places on the specific details of organized resistance during the worst years. What emerges more clearly from the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties is the story of Madalynne Brooks, a Lakeland NAACP organizer who became one of the most consequential civil rights figures in the region. Brooks participated in lunch counter sit-ins across Lakeland, demanding access to public accommodations that state law had reserved for white customers. In nineteen sixty-three she marched in Washington alongside Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. She played a direct role in integrating Lakeland General Hospital, the downtown lunch counters, and the Polk Theatre. She organized voting rights rallies across the state and served as NAACP membership chair for years.
The sit-ins and demonstrations of the early nineteen sixties were dangerous work in Polk County. They were also successful. The public accommodations that Brooks and others forced open by standing at lunch counters where they were told they could not eat remain open today. Brooks's work is honored by the city she fought to improve.
