JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Ninety-seven years after Benjamin Hart was lynched on a Jacksonville roadside, online audiences will visit that site virtually Sunday to commemorate his death and the city’s history of racial terror violence.
The event – a ceremony to collect soil from the place Hart was killed – is the first by the volunteer Jacksonville Community Remembrance Project since the coronavirus pandemic ended big gatherings.
“The last thing we want to do is contribute to illness and death by bringing a lot of people together,” said Melanie Patz, co-chair of the remembrance project, an initiative of the nonprofit 904ward that encourages discussions about the history and continuing impacts of racism.
While only a few people are expected to physically attend the ceremony off Kings Road, “that doesn’t mean we can’t be emotionally connected,” Patz said. “… I think we can be spiritually connected virtually as well.”
In the ceremony, scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday, two jars marked with Hart’s name and the date he was lynched will be filled with soil from a patch of land across from Mighty Church of the Redeemed, 2311 W. 12th St.
Neither the church nor any of the buildings surrounding it today were standing when Hart was killed on Aug. 24, 1923, in the then-rural area down the road from a logging camp where Hart worked cutting wood.
An anonymous crowd of white men, some claiming to be sheriff’s deputies, had gone to the camp in Northwest Jacksonville late at night searching for a Black man who a white girl had said peeped into her window.
The girl wasn’t with the searchers, but they lined up four Black workers who had been sleeping in a cabin there, then picked Hart to put in a car and take with them.
Later, gunshots woke the few people living near Kings Road and 12th Street, who reported seeing six cars of white men leaving the area where Hart was found, handcuffed and shot from behind five times.
“They lynched an innocent negro,” Sheriff W.H. Dowling was quoted saying during an investigation where the man Hart worked for and his co-workers confirmed that when the peeping Tom was reported, Hart had been miles away, at the camp. Authorities promised arrests, but no charges were filed.
The case is one of seven Duval County lynchings – eight people were killed – that remembrance project volunteers have been researching to build local knowledge and to find descendants of the people involved.
It will be the second time the volunteers have collected soil at a lynching site, keeping one jar locally and sending the other to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., a creation of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative. Hart's name is recorded on a column listing Duval County lynching victims at the memorial in Alabama.
Like the first ceremony, last September, the event Sunday will have musical and spoken-word performances and remarks from religious and community figures.
Carrying the event online could open it up to a bigger audience, said Lynn Sherman, the remembrance project’s other co-chair, who said she was recently contacted by someone who will be out of town but wanted to be there.
Similar ceremonies are planned in December to commemorate the killings of two other men, Edgar Phillips and Eugene Burnam, who were also lynched in Duval County in 1923.
The ceremony commemorating Hart’s death is planned at the property between Kings Road, West 12th and Penton Streets. It will be carried on Zoom, with people registering to watch online at bit.ly/JCRPSoilCollection. Information about the ceremony is also posted on 904ward's Facebook page.