Catherine McGrath

Standing in front of the John and Mary Wright home in a dense forest near Rosewood, Florida, Marvin Dunn tells the story of how scores of Black residents found shelter and safety as their community burned to the ground.

At 82, Dunn, who has spent decades chronicling the history of Black Florida, is determined to keep the stories of Black struggle, suffering and sacrifice alive. Dunn documents African American stories in his history books and teachings as a professor at FIU. Dunn fears that his books are at risk of being banned from Florida public schools with the state’s recent push to restrict classroom material. In retaliation, he has started tours to teach Black history outside of the classroom.

Dunn has brought a national spotlight upon himself by defying DeSantis’ restrictions with “Teach the Truth” tours that bus high school students across the state. Students are referred by churches and community youth groups. They visit the sites of graves, massacres, and lynching of Black people, learning about atrocities often left out of their curriculum. Dunn has conducted two of these tours.

The second Teach the Truth tour began on March 4 and each student was given a signed copy of Dunn’s “A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.” Dunn took 40 high school students and their parents or grandparents across the state for two days.

Memorializing Rosewood

The tour also made a stop at Dunn’s property in Rosewood, the infamous town that was the site of a horrific massacre in 1923. The historically Black townlocated in Levy Countywas burned down by a murderous white mob after a white woman claimed to have been assaulted by a Black man. The official death toll states at least eight people were killed. However, some studies estimate that up to 200 people were killed.

Dunn purchased a 5.69-acre property in Rosewood in 2008 with the intention of preserving and memorializing the land with a co-owner. A railway on the property was used to evacuate Black residents during the massacre.

Dunn invited Rev. Richard P. Dunn II, a former city of Miami commissioner and pastor at Faith Community Baptist Church, on the tour to lead the group in prayers at each sight.

            The reverend was most impacted by the John and Mary Wright home in Rosewood where Black residents hid from the murderous mob.

“I felt the spirits of children in there, hiding, screaming and stuff like that,” the pastor said. “I tried to go back in the time and put myself in that place during that particular time and I felt fear but I felt comfort and security, that the Wrights offered up and God bless them.”

            Dunn hosted a centennial commemoration of the massacre at his property in January. While preparing for the event in September 2022, Dunn fell victim to the same racism that destroyed the town all those years ago.

“My neighbor, who I’ve seen since 2008, when I bought this property, but never spoke to, comes out of his driveway in a truck and he stops and asks me what’s going on here,” Dunn said.

Dunn, his son, and two white contractors stood on Dunn’s property when David Allen Emanuel, 61, picked a fight about parking on the wrong side of the road. Emanuel came out of his driveway at tremendous speed, driving toward the group and screaming racial epithets.

“He’s almost killing us,” Dunn said as he recalled the close encounter.

            Emanuel has since been arrested and charged with a second-degree felony for using his vehicle as a deadly weapon. He is also being investigated by the FBI for hate crimes. However, Dunn is frustrated with the lack of urgency on the local level.

            “It was only last month when I finally called the state attorney and threatened to have people from my Facebook page start calling him, the next day they filed charges,” Dunn said.

            Since the Rosewood massacre, very few Black people have lived in the town, but Dunn said he believes that much of the community is not dangerous.

“There’s a small minority of people in that area who don’t want anything about Rosewood history talked about or seen. They are there. And they’re dangerous. But I don’t think that that describes most of the people in that area,” Dunn said. There are even some neighbors who have allowed Dunn to dig for relics on their property at his request.

“Difficult to Tell and Easy to Leave”

The recent tour made its first stop in Ocoee, Florida, the site of a massacre committed against Black residents. On Election Day, Nov. 2, 1920, many Black people living in the town had registered to vote for the first time. July Perry, a prominent member of the Black community in Ocoee, was one of dozens murdered that day. He was beaten and lynched as a warning to other Black people who dared to vote. The tour’s attendees were able to see his home, his gravesite and the site of his murder.

Carmen Morris, a longtime friend of Dunn’s and theater marketing manager at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Miami, attended the tour.

“Dr. Dunn spoke about his [July Perry] experience and how he was murdered. Dr. Dunn would always give us the opportunity to go and touch the grave of the person,” Morris said. “We just burst into tears.”

The same day the group visited Live Oak, Florida, where Willie James Howard was lynched after writing a love letter to a white girl. The next day, Dunn took the students and their families to his property in Rosewood, where they worked most of the day packing azaleas and roses.

“I’d never been to Rosewood before, and I didn’t know those stories. So, it was really interesting to hear from Dr. Dunn and then also to see the impact that it had,” Morris said. “We had kids from seventh grade, all the way up to college.”

The cost of the tours is covered by a non-profit, Miami Center for Racial Justice, that Dunn leads. “We pay for everything, lodging, food, all of that is taken care of,” Dunn said.

The most recent tour was one of Dunn’s last, but this isn’t the end for the Teach the Truth movement. He plans to pass the torch by training people to continue educating Florida’s youth. He hopes to offer the tours at least twice a month once tour guides are thoroughly trained.

While some in favor of DeSantis’ Stop Woke Act might question the value of stirring up anger about past injustices, Dunn said he believes that there are many reasons to continue these tours.

“The value is that these places where the blood has been shed have a way of evoking emotions. A lot of people cried at the places that we went. A lot of people, when we went to Rosewood, cried on that railroad track used to evacuate people during the massacre,” Dunn said. “But in no way do we point the finger at anybody going back in the past. We just want to experience what happened and carry the stories forward, because they’re difficult to tell and easy to leave.”

Dunn said another valuable aspect of the tours is purely educational.

 “If you know the bad things that happened 50 years ago, and now you see the same sort of things popping up again in our society then you should be forewarned,” he said.  

The Fight Against DeSantis

After retiring from Teach the Truth tours, Dunn plans on writing another book. He is also one of eight plaintiffs involved in a lawsuit over DeSantis’ Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act. The law restricts how public university professors teach about race but has been halted by a temporary injunction handed down by a federal judge in November.

Dunn said DeSantis has awoken young Black Americans. “I see righteous anger and healthy anger in young Black America and that’s a great step forward for the whole country.”

Dunn often attacks DeSantis on social media. On Feb. 23, he posted a picture of a rooster on Facebook with the caption, “The next president will not be a small-minded, vindictive, lying, intemperate little hypocrite who runs on scaring us rather than bringing us together.”

Dunn said America is going through a phase but that the next few years may be bloody. He gives his students hope by reminding them that this is temporary, and this is not the America he knows.

“When young kids say to me, ‘Dr. Dunn nothing changes, it’s the same as it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago,’ I say to them, look at me. I was working in the dirt as a migrant child when I was 19 years old. So, these things that benefited me didn’t just happen by accident, and they do show that we as a nation have moved forward.”

Morris compared today’s political climate to that of Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. “If there were a million Dr. Dunn’s, I don’t think Hitler would have gotten that far,” she said.