 Portrait of Manuel Cabeza in the US military | |
| Date | December 25, 1921 |
|---|---|
| Location | East Martello Tower, Key West, Monroe County, Florida |
| Participants | A mob of 15 people |
| Deaths | 1 |
The lynching of Manuel Cabeza (who is also referred to by his alias which is Manuel Head [1] [2] ) occurred on December 25, 1921, when members of the Ku Klux Klan killed him. Two days earlier, they tarred and feathered him because he was living with a mixed race woman who was regarded as Black.
Manuel Cabeza's parents were born on the Spanish Canary Islands before they immigrated to Florida. In Key West, he was known as "Isleno," the Islander, and during World War I, he served as a private in Company B of the 105th Engineers. [1] After he was ordered to report for military service during WWI, Cabeza trained at Camp Jackson, he was assigned the service number 1873913 and on the ship Talthybius, he departed for France as a Private in Company B, 105th Engineers. His unit often came under fire while it was building railways and bridges. During fierce fighting, his unit was pushed back against a river, he was part of a group of volunteers that swam across the river with a rope so the other members of his unit could cross it. He left Europe on April 1, 1919, on the USS Martha Washington and he was honorably discharged later that same year. [1]
During Prohibition, Cabeza illegally operated the Red Rooster, a bar, a coffee shop and a sporting club. It was located on Thomas Street near the waterfront. While he was operating the Red Rooster, he openly lived with a mixed race woman who was named Angela. This interracial relationship did not sit well in the Jim Crow South, and his dealing in liquor put him outside the law. On December 23, 1921, a group of hooded men loaded five cars, kidnapped Manuel Cabeza, beat him half to death, and tarred and feathered him. [3] Cabeza recognized two of the kidnappers and hunted them down the next day.
Ex-soldier Cabeza was able to track down one of the kidnappers, William Decker, the manager of a cigar factory, and he was also able to shoot and kill him. After the public killing of Decker, he was arrested and detained at the local county jail in Jackson square. [4]
For a while, Marines guarded the jail until Sheriff Roland Curry sent them home. [5] On Christmas Day, December 25, 1921, not long after the Marines left the jail, a white mob of fifteen men burst into the jail and beat him with blackjacks. He was then dragged out of the jail, attached to a car and dragged through the streets of Key West to the East Martello Tower where he was hanged from a palm tree. The mob then riddled his body with bullets. A newspaper article published on December 26, 2021, reported that Manuel was forcibly removed from his cell at approximately 2:15 am. His body was reported discovered at 6:15 am.
After his death, Angela, the mixed race woman who lived with him, allegedly used her voodoo religion to "curse" the Klansmen who killed him and during the next few years, they supposedly all died under mysterious circumstances. [3] In 2019, the city of Key West gave him a memorial service and a military headstone. The service was attended by city officials and members of his family, including his 99-year-old niece. [4]
Cabeza's lynching is referenced in Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not . Also in Carl Hiaasen's Wrecker (Knopf, 2023).
Notes
References
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of several historical and current American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organizations and hate groups. Various commentators, including Fergus Bordewich, have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. Their primary targets, at various times and places, have been African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
David Curtis "Steve" Stephenson was an American Ku Klux Klan leader, convicted rapist and murderer. In 1923 he was appointed Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and head of Klan recruiting for seven other states. Later that year, he led those groups to independence from the national KKK organization. Amassing wealth and political power in Indiana politics, he was one of the most prominent national Klan leaders. He had close relationships with numerous Indiana politicians, especially Governor Edward L. Jackson.
William Joseph Simmons was an American preacher and fraternal organizer who founded and led the second Ku Klux Klan from Thanksgiving evening 1915 until being ousted in 1922 by Hiram Wesley Evans.
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr.. Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was adapted first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.
William Dudley Chipley was an American railroad executive and politician who was instrumental in the building of the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad and was a tireless promoter of Pensacola, his adopted city, where he was elected to one term as mayor, and later to a term as Florida state senator.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
William David Upshaw served eight years in Congress (1919–1927), where he was such a strong proponent of the temperance movement that he became known as the "driest of the drys." In Congress, Upshaw was a staunch defender of the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in his congressional district, and lost reelection because of major KKK scandals in the mid-1920s. In 1932, he ran for President of the United States on the Prohibition Party ticket, finishing the race in fifth place.
Hiram Wesley Evans was an American dentist and political activist who served as the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist group, from 1922 to his resignation in 1939.
The United Klans of America Inc. (UKA), based in Alabama, is a Ku Klux Klan organization active in the United States. Led by Robert Shelton, the UKA peaked in membership in the late 1960s and 1970s, and it was the most violent Klan organization of its time. Its headquarters was the Anglo-Saxon Club outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The Indiana Klan was a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society in the United States that organized in 1915 to promote ideas of racial superiority and affect public affairs on issues of Prohibition, education, political corruption, and morality. It was strongly white supremacist against African Americans, Chinese Americans, and also Catholics and Jews, whose faiths were commonly associated with Irish, Italian, Balkan, and Slavic immigrants and their descendants. In Indiana, the Klan did not tend to practice overt violence but used intimidation in certain cases, whereas nationally the organization practiced illegal acts against minority ethnic and religious groups.
John Walter Stephens was an assassinated state senator from North Carolina. He was stabbed and garroted by the Ku Klux Klan on May 21, 1870. This killing began the Kirk–Holden war.
Ku Klux Klan activities in Inglewood, California, were highlighted by the 1922 arrest and trial of 36 men, most of them masked, for a night-time raid on a suspected bootlegger and his family. The raid led to the shooting death of one of the culprits, an Inglewood police officer. A jury returned a "not guilty" verdict for all defendants who completed the trial. It was this scandal, according to the Los Angeles Times, that eventually led to the outlawing of the Klan in California. The Klan had a chapter in Inglewood as late as October 1931.
The New York World's exposé of the Ku Klux Klan brought national media to the operations and actions of the Ku Klux Klan beginning on September 6, 1921. The newspaper published a series of twenty one consecutive daily articles, edited by Herbert Bayard Swope, that discussed numerous aspects of Ku Klux Klan including rituals, recruitment methods, propaganda, and hypocrisies in logic. At least eighteen other newspapers nationwide picked up the coverage, which led to national discourse on the activities of the group. These publications included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Sun, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), New Orleans Times-Picayune, Galveston News, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, Milwaukee Journal, Minneapolis Journal, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Toledo Blade, Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, Syracuse Herald, Columbus Enquirer-Sun and the Albany Knickerbocker Press. The New York Times ran ads for the article series to increase exposure, while other large papers like the Baltimore Sun quickly picked up the article series instead of advertising for The World. The Ku Klux Klan announced shortly afterward that it would take legal action against all the publications that ran the article series for libel, seeking total damages of over $10 million. Following the exposé, Klan membership significantly increased.
Peter Monroe Hagan was an American law enforcement officer who served as Sheriff of Putnam County, Florida, in 1916–1924 and 1928–1930. He is known for opposing the Ku Klux Klan and mob violence in the county in the violent period between 1915 and 1930. His thwarting of lynching attempts and his winning the pivotal 1928 election became a referendum against Klan and mob violence.
The Ku Klux Klan is an organization that expanded operations into Canada, based on the second Ku Klux Klan established in the United States in 1915. It operated as a fraternity, with chapters established in parts of Canada throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The first registered provincial chapter was registered in Toronto in 1925 by two Americans and a Canadian. The organization was most successful in Saskatchewan, where it briefly influenced political activity and whose membership included a member of Parliament, Walter Davy Cowan.
Jim Williams was an African-American soldier and militia leader in the 1860s and 1870s in York County, South Carolina. He escaped slavery during the US Civil War and joined the Union Army. After the war, Williams led a black militia organization which sought to protect black rights in the area. In 1871, he was lynched and hung by members of the local Ku Klux Klan. As a result, a large group of local blacks immigrated to Liberia, West Africa.
Howard Goodloe Sutton was an American newspaper editor, publisher, and owner. From 1964 to 2019, he published The Democrat-Reporter, a small weekly newspaper in Linden, Alabama. Sutton was widely celebrated in 1998 for publishing over four years a series of articles that exposed corruption in the Marengo County Sheriff's Office; he received awards and commendations and was suggested as a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2019, Sutton once again became the focus of national attention when he wrote and published an editorial suggesting the Ku Klux Klan be revived to "clean out" Washington, D.C. He already had a local reputation for other, similarly inflammatory racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic editorials.
Roy Elonzo Davis was an American preacher, white supremacist, and con artist who co-founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Davis was Second Degree of the KKK under William J. Simmons and later became National Imperial Wizard (leader) of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He worked closely with Simmons, and was a co-author of the 1921 KKK constitution, bylaws and rituals. Davis spent decades as a KKK recruiter, at one point being named "Royal Ambassador" and an "Official Spokesperson" of the KKK by Simmons. Davis and Simmons were both expelled from the KKK in 1923 by Hiram Wesley Evans, who had ousted Simmons as leader. Simmons started the Knights of the Flaming Sword branch of the KKK and with Davis's help retained the loyalty of many KKK members. Davis was later reappointed second in command of the national KKK organization by Imperial Wizard Eldon Edwards, a position he held until being elected national leader by 1959.
Filmore Watt Daniels [sic] and Thomas F. Richards [sic] were lynched near Mer Rouge, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana by black robed Ku Klux Klan members on August 24, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary they were the 47th and 48th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States. There were five lynchings in the state of Louisiana and of the 61 lynchings they were 2 of 6 white victims.
The Knights of Liberty was an American volunteer nationalist secret society and vigilance committee active circa 1917–1918, claiming responsibility for violence against perceived disloyalty during World War I. They are known for the 1917 Tulsa Outrage in Oklahoma, the 1918 lynching of Olli Kinkkonen in Minnesota, and a spree of 1918 tarring and feathering events in Wisconsin and California.