This February, a crowd gathered near Davie Boulevard and SW 31st Street. Fort Lauderdale leaders and dignitaries including Mayor Dean Trantalis and City Commissioner Robert McKinzie joined a crowd that also included nearly 80 relatives of a man named Rubin Stacy.
Tragically, it was not the first time people had gathered near this spot because of Rubin Stacy.
They gathered in February to rename a stretch of Davie Boulevard as Rubin Stacy Memorial Boulevard. On July 19, 1935, near the spot where the mayor and others addressed the crowd, Rubin Stacy was lynched.
After the lynching, a photo was taken of a white crowd, including children, standing around the hanging body. That horrible image would be put to work. It was one of the pictures of lynching that received national attention, first by being published in an NAACP journal, then Life magazine, as part of a campaign for a federal anti-lynching law. As people sought out images that showed the brutality Black Americans faced, they found one in Fort Lauderdale.
The events that would lead to Rubin Stacy’s murder began when a white woman accused him of accosting her at gunpoint; others later said that there was no gun and she simply panicked when he asked her for a drink of water. He was arrested and held in Fort Lauderdale until the sheriff, the notoriously racist and corrupt Walter Clark, announced he needed to be moved to a more secure jail in Miami.
Rubin Stacy never made it to Miami. In 1994, a woman came forward and said she participated in the lynching – and that it was the sheriff’s brother, Deputy Bob Clark, who led it. Rubin Stacy was hanged while handcuffed; he was also shot 17 times. A grand jury was convened, but nobody was ever charged.
In February, leaders, members of the community and relatives of Rubin Stacy gathered not just to remember the event, but also to remember the man. A niece, Eloise Pettis, told the Sun-Sentinel what she knew of him and what she thought of the day.
“Rubin Stacy was my mother’s brother,” she told the newspaper. “My mother told me he was a smart young man who loved his family. He was a nice-looking man. It’s a fine thing the city is doing to honor him. It’s a blessing, but it’s sad at the same time.”
Another niece, Anne Naves, was eight in 1935. Now 95, she told the Sun-Sentinel about how her family changed after her uncle’s murder.
“My mother’s beautiful laugh stopped,” she said. “My father’s teasing stopped. We knew something terrible happened.
“It was the most painful thing in my life. We didn’t have a funeral. The body was just dumped at the funeral parlor and they were told to bury him. We never had a chance to have a funeral.”
Today Rubin Stacy is also remembered at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Montgomery, Alabama memorial that attempts, among other things, to name every lynching victim in the United States.
That memorial opened in 2018. It would take another four years for Rubin Stacy to be remembered, permanently and publicly, in the place where he lived and died.
