Peter Hagan opened the door to the jail warily.
Out of the night, a half-dozen men leveled their guns at the Putnam County sheriff's face. Another 10 or so stood behind. Hagan saw a long piece of
Peter Hagan opened the door to the jail warily.
Out of the night, a half-dozen men leveled their guns at the Putnam County sheriff's face. Another 10 or so stood behind. Hagan saw a long piece of rope. He knew which man the mob had come to torture and kill — the black prisoner locked in a cell behind him.
Hagan faced re-election in a year. And in that instant, he committed the ultimate act of political suicide for a sheriff in 1923 Florida. He smashed his pistol down like a hammer on the nearest forehead and slammed the door closed.
In the years after World War I, Florida was still a loosely policed frontier state. White Protestant mobs staged regular lynchings and beatings to intimidate black voters, drinkers and anyone else they felt threatened the social order. Sometimes they wore the hoods of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Other times they didn't bother.
Unlike the rest of the nation, where lynchings were on the decline, mob violence in Florida mounted relentlessly. By the end of the decade, Florida would be the most murderous state in the nation.
In the midst of this chaos, one lawman stood up more forcefully than anyone else.
By 1923, Peter Hagan had already used guile and threats to thwart two other lynchings in four years. But his act of defiance on the night of March 2 was almost unprecedented. In Florida, sheriffs were likely to hold the door for lynching parties, not beat them back by force.
The frustrated vigilantes poured bullets though the door and windows of the jail, where the Hagan family lived. One tore through Hagan's hand. The indiscriminate fire sprayed plaster dust on Hagan's wife's face and pierced the bedroom where their ailing daughter and her son slept.
The Palatka Daily News later declared, "The complete shutout of the mob came as a surprise, apparently, to the crowd."
Hagan's battle with the Klan was just getting started.
Peter Hagan was one of 16 children. Several of the boys became police officers, including Peter, who was elected Putnam County sheriff in 1916, as World War I raged in Europe.
Hagan policed a city that in 1916 was an oasis of racial tolerance. The city's largest theater refused to play The Birth of a Nation out of respect for its black customers. Black men named Albert Browning and Joseph Nottage were on the gerrymandered Palatka City Commission as late as 1924, which was unheard of in the South. And the city's black leaders long operated the only hospital in town.
But the Great War changed everything — for America and Palatka.
Even before Americans joined the fighting in 1917, industrialization in the North and the promise of better pay in the big city had begun to lure blacks from the mostly agricultural work allowed them in the South. White Southerners fought hard through law and violence to keep the bedrock of their labor force from leaving.
Later, when the United States entered the war, black Americans embraced the war effort with fierce patriotism.
In Florida, like other Southern states, more black draftees served than white ones. About 20 percent fought in segregated units. The rest were primarily restricted to brutal and filthy labor camps, where they died in huge numbers.
Too old to fight, Hagan served on the Putnam County draft board. On Aug. 6, 1917, his work was interrupted by news that his brother Frank, a Jacksonville detective, had been shot by a black man named Emmett Washington during a "rampage." Frank Hagan k