| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. By Paul Ortiz. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxviii, 382 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-520-23946-6.)

In November 1920, African Americans in Florida turned out to vote in numbers unprecedented since the end of Reconstruction. That action followed well over a year of careful organizing in community after community as black men and women attended discussion forums and citizens' meetings, participated in voter registration campaigns, rebuilt the Republican party, paid their poll taxes, engaged in door-to-door canvassing, and otherwise risked their lives to challenge the racial order. In the end, black Floridians' effort at voting failed. In the months preceding the election, parts of Florida "teetered on the brink of a new race war" (p. 200), Paul Ortiz concludes. A resurgent Ku Klux Klan, official and paramilitary terror and violence, arrests and intimidation, and voting fraud handily turned back the political challenge; on election day, some thirty to sixty black voters lay dead. In the following months, Congress expressed little interest in investigating the outrages. The Florida movement was ultimately "defeated by a combination of municipal, state, and federal authorities" (p. 227). Thus ended what Ortiz views as "one of the greatest democratic struggles of the nation's life" (p. 229).

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