The Page 99 Test: Robert W. Fieseler's "American Scare"

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist

of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Fieseler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, and reported the following:

From page 99:
Approximately half a dozen Live Oak Klansmen posing as sheriff’s deputies kidnapped and tortured a local Black farm hand named Richard Cooks that June 1.¹ Klansmen tied thirty-five- year-old father of nine Richard Cooks to a tree beside the Suwannee River and whipped him for hours while threatening to feed him to the alligators and do the same to his children.² Two white ringleaders who impersonated deputy sheriffs during the abduction, local Klansmen Fred Sweat and Johnny Smith, later confessed their crimes to Sheriff Lewis.³ Yet after interviewing the victim, Sheriff Lewis declined to press charges against Sweat or Smith because Cooks, as he lay injured in bed, could not recall an exact enough description of his attackers to a standard that satisfied the lawman.⁴

Family members who witnessed Cooks’s kidnapping were not consulted by Sheriff Lewis as witnesses, and none of the whites present at the flogging could seem to remember who else was there. Determined not to capsize the lives of two local boys, Sheriff Lewis instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin to internally discipline Sweat and Smith as errant Klansmen.⁵ Griffin continued at the hearing:
He [the sheriff] says, “Well, I wish you’d give them a good scolding. Somebody around here needs talking to.” He says, “We can’t put up with stuff like this.” I says, “I don’t blame you Sheriff.” I says, “If you know anything about it, why don’t you put them in jail?” He says, “Well, I know who done it, I know who did it.” He says, “I discussed it with them,” and he says, “They admitted it to me, the two of them.”⁶
When questioned by FLIC attorney Mark Hawes on the Cooks case, state attorney William Randall Slaughter, who’d called the 1955 grand jury that failed to indict Sweat and Smith, covered for Sheriff Lewis by repeatedly complaining about a lack of resources in his rural district.⁷
The scene of brutal white terrorism detailed on page 99 of American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, involving the abduction and torture of an innocent Black father named Richard Cooks by members of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, eerily encapsulates the stakes of southern lawlessness pushing our nation to the brink of a second splintering, a.k.a. my book’s major theme.

I yearned for American Scare to impart upon a 21st century reader, presumably living outside of a 1950s “Red Scare” mindset and not yearning for a nostalgic return, what racial apartheid meant from a standpoint of white advantage as well as the moral corruption of the human spirit. Writing and researching the Cooks kidnapping sequence was, in fact, so harrowing that something of its horror imprinted on my psyche, and I began to carry it bodily.

I couldn’t sleep without petrifying nightmares. My hair started falling out. I developed odd rashes and stomach ailments. Something had to change, or I knew I’d never finish the book. I decided to stop drinking and start meditating—to sunset my joyous New Orleans habit of happy hour cocktails. Just a sip of alcohol could spin my mind onto the specifics of what those Klansmen did to Cooks, and then I’d break down weeping.

Dropping my “social spirits” habit enabled me to finish American Scare in the clear-eyed manner that the book demanded, and then I got to like the “no hangover” lifestyle’s compatibility with trauma reporting. Other historians who’ve delved deeply into the mire of racial carnage have echoed to me that getting sober is a common byproduct of covering the so-called “lynching beat” (a term scholars privately use as a form of gallows humor to preserve their own sanity through inappropriate joking).

The cruelty of southern racial violence is simply too horrific, even when imagined, for a compromised mind to bear without cracking the foundations. Such tragedy is a mental weight that must borne, however, so that its effects and aftereffects are never written out of the American story.
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¹ June 1: “Collins Given Story of Negro’s Flogging,” Miami Herald, June 25, 1955, 2; “Live Oak Negro Bares Flogging,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1.
² father of nine: Herbert D. Cameron, “Collins Asks Suwanee Official to Explain Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 22, 1955, 1; “Live Oak Negro,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1;
³ Fred Sweat: W.J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958; “Flogging Details Refused,” Tallahassee Democrat, June 26, 1958, 1.
⁴ to a standard that satisfied: Hugh Lewis, Transcript of Testimony, June 26, 1958.
⁵ instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁶ “‘Well, I wish you’d give”’: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁷ who’d called the 1955 grand jury: “Grand Jury Called in Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 26, 1955, 1; William Slaughter, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.