Giddy Boy
Willie James Howard was just like – and, in some ways, different from – many other fifteen-year-old boys in Live Oak, Florida in 1944. Because of his cheerful personality, his parents called their round-face, stocky son “Giddy Boy.” A classmate described him as clean, neat and always dressed nicely because he was an only child and his parents could afford to dress him well.
Quite smart, the tenth-grader found a good job stocking shelves, making deliveries and sweeping floors at the Van Priest Dime Store. “He was charming. Everybody knew Willie James, and everybody called him by both names,” said former classmate Dorothy DePass..
During the Christmas 1943 holiday, the bright young man gave Christmas cards to his co-workers, including Cynthia Goff, another 10th-grader, who attended another high school a few hundred feet from Willie James’. He signed it “With L [love].”
Her reaction to the simple gesture remains unclear. Did she consider “With L” presumptuous? Was she angry and insulted?
Nonetheless, on the first day of the New Year, Willie James attempted an apology:
Dear Friend:
Just a few line to let you hear from me I am well an hope you are the same. this is what I said on that christmas card. From W.J.H. With L. I hope you will understand what I mean. that is what I said now please don’t get angry with me because you can never tell what may get in some body I did not put it in there my self God did I can’t help what he does can I. I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you all we want to be your all friends but you 4 want let us please don’t let any body see this I hope I haven’t made you made if I did tell me about it an I will for get about it. I wish this was an northern state I guess you call me fresh. Write an tell me what you think of me good or bad.
Sincerely yours, with L from Y.K.W. [You know who.]
To Cynthia Goff
I love your name.
I love your voice.
for a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice
How Alex P. Goff, Cynthia’s father and a former member of the Florida House of Representatives, obtained the letter remains unclear. But his reaction was fatal.
He recruited two friends, Reginald H. Scott, Sr. and Seldon B. McCullers, and drove to the Howard home. At the dime store, Willie learned that the white men were looking for him and ran home. “He knew they was going to kill him so he ran home to his Mama,” reported Willie James’ aunt, Mamie Perry.
In a sworn statement for David Lanier, a special investigator appointed by Florida Governor Spessard Holland, Lula James described what happened:
On January 2, 1944, my husband, James, had gone off to work for his employer, Bond-Howell Lumber Company; his boss was Mr. R. L. Howell. Later that morning, an automobile which contained three white men drove up to my house. The three men got out of the car; two of them stood at the gate of the house. The name of one of these men was Mr. Mac McCulla. The other man’s name is unknown to me. The third man was Mr. Phil Goff. The following conversation took place:
Question: Where is James?”
Answer: He has gone to work.
Question: Where is he working?
Answer: At the Bond-Howell Lumber Company.
Question: Where is Willie James?
Answer: He is out in the back.
Just then Willie came into the house and Mr. Goff grabbed hold of him and told him to come along. I tried to pull him away and also kept pleading and asking what Willie had done. By this time, Mr. Goff had pulled a revolver out from somewhere on his person and leveled it at me. He dragged Willie out to the car, got in with the other white men, and drove off in the direction of Live Oak. I ran after the car, which got away from me.
With pistol drawn, Goff and the others abducted James Howard, forcing him into the car with his son. On the banks of the Suwannee River, Goff tied Willie James’ hands and feet and made the boy and his father get out of the car.
Goff, acting as judge, jury and executioner, demanded to know if Willie James understood the penalty for his “crime.” “Yes, sir,” the boy wept.
“Willie, I cannot do anything for you now. I’m glad I have belonged to the Church and prayed for you,” the powerless James told his son, before fulfilling his final request – that his father take his wallet.
With his gun at the boy’s head, Goff told him to jump or take what was in the gun. Willie James jumped into the river and drowned.
The three then drove James Howard back to the lumberyard, where, after having watched his son murdered, James Howard finished his shift. “When James Howard went home that night, all that he would tell his wife was that Willie James was not coming home. It was a few days before my sister found out what happened,” reported Mamie Perry.
Willie James was abducted, murdered and buried without a church service or ceremony – all within twenty-four hours.
For over sixty years his grave was unmarked.
In a written statement prepared for Suwanee County Sheriff Tom Henry, Goff, Scott and McCullers insisted that they picked up Willie James and took him to his father to be whipped because of what he had written. They insisted that when they got to the river Willie James refused to be whipped and, in his struggle to get away, he fell into the river and drowned himself. They claimed they tried to save the boy while his father stood by and did nothing.
In “south of The South” Florida in 1944 a Black teenager was kidnapped and murdered because he dared to give a Christmas card to a white teenager with whom he was infatuated.
There are two words for that.
Lynching
History.
In a February 2015 report - “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the Equal Justice Initiative documented 3,949 racial terror lynchings of African-Americans between 1877 (the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction) and 1950 across southern states, including 700 lynchings that were previously unknown.
Lynchings were advertised and attended like state fairs. Families, including children, witnessed the torture, humiliation – including public stripping and castration - and murder of human beings; picture postcards of these extrajudicial killers were sold; and, souvenir photos of the perpetrators and witnesses were collected and shared like baseball cards.
Georgia and Mississippi had the highest numbers of verifiable lynchings of Africa -Americans – 586 and 576, but History will never know how many were simply disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. Lynching was a method of organized, socially accepted extra-judicial violence used to terrorize former slaves and their descendants. At the same time, as in the case of murder of 15-year-old Willie James Howard, no white person was ever convicted for the lynching of an African-American during the period covered by the EPI study.
The NAACP describes lynching as
“the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process… often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice… violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, …typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration… A typical lynching involved a criminal accusation, an arrest, and the assembly of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder of the victim… public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy….”
Seventy years removed from the period examined by “Lynching in America,” “conservative” and right-wing politicians and polemicists are gearing-up for the next round of state and federal elections with a new lie – protesting the teaching of “critical race theory” to America’s K-12 students.
In May 20211, Stephen Sawchuk, associate editor of Education Week, noted:
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars…
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
CRT predates Black Lives Matter, which began as a hashtag in 2013, and LGBTQ clubs in schools; it is older than diversity training across businesses and government entities and much of the rhetoric about guns and guns in schools, which began with the 1999 Columbine massacre and intensified after a lone gunman killed fourteen students and three teachers and staff members of the Parkland, Florida Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
CRT places its emphasis on outcomes – not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls for those outcomes to be examined and rectified when they violate human rights and dignities.
In a November 2021 post at Brookings.edu Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons pointed out that CRT has become:
“a new boogie man for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present… Opponents fear that CRT admonishes all white people for being oppressors while classifying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims. These fears have spurred school boards and state legislatures from Tennessee to Idaho to ban teaching about racism in classrooms… CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race.
Get ready!
With less than a year left in the next election cycle, CRT – a subject that is taught in law schools and graduate programs, but not in the nation’s high schools - will be weaponized by politicians and curmudgeons screaming about the boogie men of “hatred of whites” and socialism and communism. When that happens, hear the echoes of Alex P. Goff, Reginald Scott and Seldon McCullers.
And remember Willie James Howard, whose grave went unmarked for sixty years.