The Writer's Life : An Excerpt from American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives [View all]

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. He was named 2019 Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and received a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. His first book, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, won seven awards, including an Edgar for Best Fact Crime. Fieseler's second book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Dutton), is a riveting examination of a state-sponsored campaign of surveillance and intimidation. The following excerpt is from the preface.

It's as if the forces of justice and karma break and break upon the shores of Florida. From the swords of colonizers to the whips of overseers to the dynamite of Klansmen to the attack dogs of police, the land has acted as a New World Eden for strivers with oppressive dreams. It's a place where power plays beyond ordinary rules and where some folks get away with everything.

SNIP
Bonnie Stark possessed something that shouldn't exist. She held the secret second set of the complete records of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC), also called the Johns Committee--a forgotten cabal of gerrymandered white legislators that went after Black and queer citizens in the mid‐twentieth century at the height of anti‐Communist hysteria. In the Johns Committee's path of destruction lay the freedoms of the masterminds of Florida desegregation, plus the lives and careers of more than thirty preeminent scholars, at least seventy‐one teachers, and as many as five hundred college students, whose persecution led all the way to the steps of the state supreme court and the U.S. Supreme Court. The crusades of these Florida men and their nearly decade‐long reign had all but vanished from the American story, the records sealed and then censored upon release. Names of victims were deleted by agents of the state who never had to say sorry. After all, why say sorry to a ghost?

The State of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis's Florida, labored under the belief that it possessed the only surviving copies of FLIC records under lock and key. In a land of supposed sunshine laws, state authorities hid their histories in plain sight in the Soviet pillbox-like structure of the Florida State Archives, where the establishment could monitor who accessed them and obstruct the curious few with burdensome procedures and policies. "When you get power in Florida," state senator Lauren Book forewarned me, "you can use it to pick on anyone." In a Gulf borderland where administrations become regimes on a dime, people out of power tend to get hurt.
https://www.shelf-awareness.com/sar-issue.html?issue=1293#m26065

You must scroll down to read the excerpt, it doesn't rest on its own page....well worth your time.