Advertisement

Brooksville chooses its legacy

 
Published Dec. 26, 1999|Updated Sept. 30, 2005

Hernando residents were not grateful to U.S. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, the primary sponsor of the Armed Occupation Act of 1842, for long.

In 1856, judging Benton's stand on slavery to be too moderate, they changed the county's name from Benton County back to Hernando. The same year, residents of the central Hernando settlement of Pierceville changed their town's name to Brooksville as a show of support for U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina, one of the most hardline supporters of slavery. At the time, Brooks was at the height of his reputation, having been recently censured by the U.S. House for his attack on Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist from Massachusetts.

According to Richard Stanaback's A History of Hernando County, "while Sumner was seated at his desk on the Senate floor, busily signing papers, Brooks approached him and without warning began to play a (wooden cane) upon the head and shoulders of the startled Sumner. So heavy were the blows that the cane splintered in several pieces. But Brooks continued to flail away at his victim." Sumners, Stanaback wrote, was so severely injured that he was unable to return to the Senate for three years.

Certainly there have been more racist acts than choosing to name Brooksville after Brooks. But, to some, the move seemed especially significant because of its role in establishing Brooksville's civic identity.

"It set the tone," said Imani Asukile, the minority recruiter for Pasco-Hernando Community College, who grew up in Brooksville.

Vigilantes ruled the county for several years in the 1870s, with whites killing several black residents and, according to Tampa's Sunland Tribune, burning the courthouse in 1877 to prevent prominent residents from coming to trial.

"The carnival of crime still reigns supreme in that county," said one Tribune story about the killing of two black residents in 1879.

In the 1920s, white mobs lynched or beat several black residents, most famously a man from what was then the settlement of Croom. After being charged with rape he was transported to Hillsborough County for his protection. He was released to a mob from Hernando who presented the jailer with phony documents, and was later hung near what is now the intersection of Croom and Croom Rital roads. "I can show you the tree where he was lynched," said former County Commissioner Roy Snow. In 1948, the city passed a zoning law forbidding blacks from living in parts of Brooksville, which historians say was an extraordinary action and in direct violation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Ultimately, Hernando County didn't elect a black official from the time of Reconstruction until Luther Cason was voted onto the Brooksville City Council in 1990.

The town's racial divide can be overstated, said Bob Martinez, who produces the monthly publication, Old Brooksville in Photos & Stories, and who moved to Brooksville in 1957; like many other white residents, he said the attitudes towards race in Brookville were no different than in any other part of the South. He has uncovered photographs of whites and blacks working side-by-side at Brooksville businesses in the 1930s. When Martinez was a high school student in the 1960s, his rock 'n roll band played at a night club in south Brooksville called the Blue Flame.

"Not all Southern white men were jerks," he said. "Some of them had compassion."