that by World War II, Florida still ranked high among the most violent states in the South. Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida history professor who studied racial violence in the South, concluded that “a black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country.” Alarmingly, despite the shocking and heinous nature of the lynchings in Florida, the crimes and the cover-ups generated little attention, let alone outrage—beyond the black newspapers. The state of Florida—that tropical vacation territory lying south of Georgia and, it would seem, of the Jim Crow
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