Prologue
The prologue recounts in detail the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. An illiterate farm worker with a wife and three-year-old son, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman with a penknife in front of her young children. Captured after a three-day manhunt, Stacy was lynched by a racist deputy sheriff and his body riddled with seventeen bullets fired by mob members. No one was charged with his murder, but the lynching prompted an effort by Black leaders and the NAACP to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill in Congress, using as a visual reminder of lynching’s horrors a photo of Stacy’s lifeless body hanging from a pine branch while several White children gaze at it. FDR refused, citing his reliance on racist southern senators for passage of his New Deal programs to combat the Great Depression. The prologue also explores the ancestral roots of Stacy and the family of the woman he was accused of assaulting. Both had ancestors among the early Virginia residents; Stacy’s were Black slaves, and his alleged victim’s were White farmers. The different cultures in which they were raised—one oppressed by the other—made Stacy’s lynching an example of White fear of Black men “violating” their wives and daughters.