60 Years Later: the Klan Bombing of the Home of Donal and Iona Godfrey
Come See Hal Jacobs's New Film and Meet Donal and Iona
I can hardly think of a more important thing to discuss with you than this month’s screening of Hal Jacobs’s new film Just Another Bombing? about the Klan’s bombing of the home of six year old Donal Godfrey 60 years ago. Donal and Iona Godfrey, who survived that bombing, will be in Jacksonville at film screenings to discuss their experiences with audiences. Please read for free or consider becoming a paid subscriber to Tim Gilmore’s deadpaper to help sustain this writing venture. Either way, thank you for reading.
It’s been 60 years. Six decades ago, this month, at Lackawanna Elementary School, six year old Donal Godfrey became the first Black student. The Ku Klux Klan bombed his house. Forest Park Elementary, the Black school he would have attended, if his mother Iona hadn’t chosen to defy segregation in Duval County, had been built on an incinerator ash garbage dump.
Six decades later, Hal Jacobs, an Atlanta filmmaker, is debuting his new documentary, Just Another Bombing? and Donal and Iona Godfrey will be in attendance at screenings in Jacksonville to discuss their experience.
“The bomb blew the refrigerator through the roof,” Donal Godfrey told me in 2017. “Not too many people have survived a Klan bombing. It’s an exclusive club.” The blast shattered the windows and cracked the walls of the houses on either side. If Donal and his mother Iona, Iona’s mother Bessie, and Iona’s Aunt Mattie and Uncle George hadn’t been on the opposite side of the small woodframe house at Gilmore and Owen Streets, they would have died that morning.
It had been a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregating schools by race was unconstitutional, so Iona thought it was time Jacksonville complied. Instead of enrolling Donal at Forest Park Elementary, segregated Black, she sent her son to Lackawanna, a mile westward. Across Duval County in 1964, 12 other Black first-graders first stepped into formerly all-white schools.
When I first spoke with Donal, he hadn’t yet retired from the U.S. Foreign Service, nor published his book Leaving Freedom to Find Peace: My Life’s Journey. Atlanta filmmaker Hal Jacobs hadn’t yet made his 2024 documentary called Just Another Bombing? Donal had served in Norway, then Ghana, and had decided, when he spoke to me that day from Monrovia, Liberia, that when he retired, he’d spend the rest of his life in Ghana.
Klan attorney J.B. Stoner represented the would-be murderers in court. He asked the jury whether white people in the Klan had “as many civil rights as the NAACP.” In the second trial, the all-white jury handed the verdict down on Thanksgiving, acquitting the Ku Klux Klan, and Stoner called the verdict a “victory for the white race.” Four years later, Stoner became the defense attorney for James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1980, Stoner would be convicted of the 1958 bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, “Bombingham,” Alabama.
Tensions at Lackawanna, when the 1960s fell into the ’70s, threatened to recapitulate the Civil War, a century after the Confederate States of America ceased to exist, in the bodies of schoolchildren. Included in Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat’s first desegregation order for Duval County was the merger of Forest Park and Lackawanna Elementary Schools, a mile and a quarter apart, across the racial demarcation line of McDuff Avenue, north of Interstate 10. Whites from Lackawanna rarely went east of McDuff, cityward, and Black residents from Mixon Town and Brooklyn seldom ventured west.
On the site where Black students once attended the segregated Black school Forest Park, built on top of a garbage incinerator ash dump and beside a poultry plant, Jacksonville Classical Academy stands now. The school is a “public” and therefore tuition-free and taxpayer-funded “charter school” affiliated with the private religious conservative “liberal arts” institution called Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Hillsdale “classical” schools now dot the American landscape from Florida to Washington State and Southern California to Massachusetts, with curricula serving as the model for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” agenda, which includes the rejection of Black history classes and textbooks, the cancellation of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs, and the “hostile takeover” of New College, a small liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida, to turn it into “the Hillsdale of the South.”
Unlike Lackawanna Elementary before Donal Godfrey, Jacksonville Classical Academy has to accept Black students and forefronts them in promotional materials, but those students won’t learn much Black history, Black literature or Black cultural studies. They won’t learn the truth about slavery, the Confederate States of America, the history of racism in their town and state, or why the “flatteries” spewed at Robert E. Lee’s funeral nauseated Frederick Douglass. They won’t read Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin or Nikki Giovanni or Alice Walker or Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates. They also won’t know, by design, what they’re not allowed to know.
Donal Godfrey lives in Ghana, where he returned when he retired. Iona lives in Washington, D.C. Donal feels uneasy when he returns to the U.S., as he told Atlanta filmmaker Hal Jacobs, director of Just Another Bombing? The precise racist horrors Donal detailed to Hal in September 2022 occurred in the white supremacist mass shooting outside Edward Waters University in August 2023.
“The bombing of our house shaped my future perspective on the U.S. and its rhetoric of ‘home of the free and the brave’ and ‘freedom and justice for all,’” Donal told me in 2017. “These slogans did not ring true for me, no matter how I sliced them.”
Societies and cultures move forward through processes of Truth-and-Reconciliation. Part of that process in the U.S., in the South, in Florida, in Jacksonville, is facing the story of Donal and Iona Godfrey.
Jacksonville screenings of Hal Jacobs’s Just Another Bombing? will include talkbacks with Ms. Iona King, Mr. Godfrey, Producer/Director Hal Jacobs, and special guests.
Tuesday, Feb. 20, 1:45 p.m. - Free (Limited Student Seating) - University of North Florida, The Justice Sessions
Wednesday, Feb. 21, 7:00 p.m. - $10 (200-seat capacity) - Sun-Ray Cinema, 1028 Park St., Jacksonville, FL 32204 [ADVANCE TICKETS]
Thursday, Feb. 22, 4:00 p.m. - Registration Required (Limited Seating, LINK HERE) - Murray Hill Library, Jacksonville Public Library Screening Room Series
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