A black man's death has split Belle Glade along racial lines. While an inquest ruled it suicide, many contend he was lynched.
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Published August 28, 2003
BELLE GLADE - The tale bears elements of another era: a black man's death by hanging, rumors of intimacy between him and a white woman, and palpable racial tension and distrust.
But the setting is not Jim Crow Mississippi. It's this modern-day Everglades farming town of 15,000 on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee in western Palm Beach County.
The first spark flared one rainy morning in May when Bernice Golden found her 32-year-old son hanging from a schefflera tree in the expansive yard outside his grandparents' home.
After the medical examiner ruled Feraris S. "Ray" Golden's death a suicide, after investigators insisted no evidence of foul play turned up and after a circuit judge took the extraordinary step of holding a public inquest and concluded Golden killed himself, some still refuse to accept the official version.
Insisting police botched the investigation, they leave room for the possibility that someone lynched Golden, that his 5-foot 6-inch, 131-pound body became, in the words of singer Billie Holiday, strange fruit.
Three months later, Golden's death and the outcry that followed have crystallized divisions among Belle Glade residents, largely along racial lines. With some exceptions, black and white residents have retreated into two visible camps: The former, suspicious of a nearly all-white Police Department, believes Golden could have been lynched, possibly for dating a white policeman's daughter. The latter thinks Golden committed suicide and that should be the end of it.
A black state representative has called for the resignation of the city's white public safety director. A white city commissioner called the representative an outsider, prompting comparisons to segregationists who used the word to deride civil rights activists. The public safety director has accused some of exploiting the issue for political gain. Now, agencies outside Belle Glade, including the FBI and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, are investigating.
The events also have lifted the cover of calm off the city's stark racial disparities.
"Golden's death is shedding light on ghosts from the past," said Linda Johnson, president of the Belle Glade Area Chapter of the NAACP. "There are things we never really dealt with as a city. The tension and issues were always there. This just gave people the opportunity to say what they really wanted to say years ago."
Golden was a twice-divorced father of four. Unemployed at his death, he worked the last harvest season on Dubois Farms, a family owned vegetable grower. He lived with his grandparents, and financial problems, including back child support payments, plagued him. A psychiatrist at the inquest gleaned from court records that he was "depressed" and "despondent."
Johnson and others say the media have portrayed him as an unemployed, drug- and alcohol-addicted lowlife. But there was more to the man who elicited laughter, they say.
"The big misconception is that no one seems to know the other side of Ray," Johnson said. "They don't know the father who spent time with his children and had lots of friends, who was supportive of those friends and was the life of the party."
Golden left no note. Hours after his mother discovered his body, speculation that he might have been lynched began circulating. A local underground newsletter claimed Golden's hands had been tied behind his back, that he had been dating a white girl, and suggested the Ku Klux Klan killed him.
Golden's death might not have attracted worldwide attention if not for certain facts: He was black, he died by hanging and the tragedy occurred in Belle Glade, a town where dormant division and mistrust provided fertile ground for controversy to grow.
Not long after this area, once populated by Seminole and Calusa Indians, was incorporated in 1928, a thriving black business district formed in the southwest section. Houston's Grocery and Pharmacy, the Cozy Queen soda shop and Taylor Funeral Home, which Cartheda Mann's father owned, lined the streets.
"People ... couldn't go outside the community to get things," said Mann, 54, who is among those who believe police didn't investigate Golden's death thoroughly. "But when they had an opportunity to go outside, they did," the former Glade Central Community High School English teacher said, referring to changes brought by integration.
While a few businesses from that time, such as the rickety Blue Bell Bar and the funeral home, remain, another commodity now thrives in the area: illegal drugs. Along streets such as Martin Luther King, graffiti-covered storefronts and three-story apartment buildings, where railings function as clotheslines, stand as backdrops to men and women milling around. Some sell drugs, police say. Others buy them. Some do neither; they're there because they simply have nothing else to do.
"When I speak for myself, I know I'm speaking for a lot of other people: The town needs more jobs," said Jamall Anderson, a 19-year-old high school dropout whose girlfriend delivered their twin boys in June.
He was standing outside Billy's Market last week with a half-dozen other young men shortly before the start of what would be a heated City Commission meeting. Anderson is among those who don't believe a black man would take his own life even in the face of daunting personal problems.
"There's a lot of people struggling around here," Anderson said. "When the field season is out, what do they have to turn to? It seems like you're trapped and can't do anything or go anywhere."
State Rep. James "Hank" Harper represents the area and has likened the 4.5-square-mile city with one zip code to a plantation. Instead of cotton, the West Palm Beach Democrat said, residents work in vegetable and sugar cane fields.
With the harvest season's start still two months away, many Belle Glade residents sit on chairs along sidewalks watching passing cars. There's no entertainment. The closest major shopping mall and movie theater are an hour east in West Palm Beach.
Some residents believe the powerful sugar industry blocks major development from Belle Glade to ensure a ready supply of workers. A spokeswoman for the Sugarcane Growers Cooperative of Florida and others deny the allegation. They cited the industry's support of development, including an industrial park and a community college campus, in the city.
Belle Glade's median household income is $22,715, according to census figures, compared to $45,062 for Palm Beach County, which includes enclaves of the ultrarich. The 15 percent unemployment rate for blacks in Belle Glade is seven times that of whites. Nearly one of every three people 25 and older have less than a ninth-grade education, compared to 5.5 percent for the county.
The city got its name from admirers who considered it the "belle," or the most beautiful, of the Glades communities. But to those outside, its image has not been particularly inviting.
Edward R. Murrow filmed part of Harvest of Shame, a 1960 documentary about migrant farmworkers, in the city.
In addition, the city has yet to fully shake its mid 1980s appellation as the nation's AIDS capital. At the time, the city had the highest per-capita AIDS rate in the country although the actual numbers were relatively low. Still, Belle Glade teenagers endured taunts in neighboring communities. People referred to Glades General Hospital as AIDS General and to the city as Belle AIDS.
There were racial incidents in the mid '80s, too, including a neo-Nazi white supremacy group that harassed and assaulted black residents, using an ax handle in some cases.
"We know there are still disparities," said Robert Walker, a 57-year-old Baptist deacon who works for the We Help Community Development Corp. in Belle Glade. "We are a far cry from what we should be given all we've been through."
At the public inquest, held in July at a courthouse across from sugar cane fields, blacks and whites generally sat segregated.
Photographs of Golden showed no cuts or bruises, other than around his neck, suggesting no struggle. A police videotape showed Golden's hands at his sides. Golden's aunt gasped when authorities displayed the twin-sized bed sheet used in the hanging; it had come from his grandparents' home. An expert talked about the shame and stigma that often underpin denial of a relative's suicide.
But despite all the expert testimony, reports, photographs and the judge's nonbinding ruling of suicide, some left the inquest unconvinced.
Led primarily by the local NAACP, many still have questions: How did a man with a 0.33 blood alcohol level and cocaine in his system manage to climb a tree and make a noose of a bed sheet? Why wasn't the sheet tested for DNA? Why were police calling the death a suicide before the medical examiner finished the autopsy? Did someone untie Golden's hands?
Why didn't police look into Golden's rumored involvement with Judi Stambaugh, the daughter of police Lt. Curtis Stambaugh, who lives with her father across the racially integrated street from Golden? Judi Stambaugh has denied involvement with Golden but said she was probably one of only a few whites in town who believed he was murdered.
Authorities defend their investigation.
"The truth will come out and whatever that truth is we're going to accept it," said public safety director Michael Miller. "We did a credible investigation. Could evidence come out that changes results? Yes, there could be an individual out there that knows something we don't know. But we've done everything humanly possibly and followed acceptable protocol in this case."
With questions still swirling after the inquest, the FBI's Miami office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Southern Division of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began investigations.
"There were inconsistencies between what we discovered in interviews with individuals down there and what came out of the inquest," said Bobby D. Doctor, regional director of the civil rights commission's southern division based in Atlanta. The full commission will use his report to decide whether a full-scale investigation is warranted.
Meanwhile, tension remains high. At last week's City Commission meeting, uncertainty and suspicion about the investigation and inquest combusted with the outpouring of support for police.
During the three-hour-plus meeting, primarily whites cheered when Miller received a plaque of support from his fire and police employees. Mostly blacks applauded when someone spoke of perceptions of a problematic Police Department - where three of 43 sworn officers are African-American in a city with a black majority. A black commissioner spoke of a "very powerful, rich, political machine in this town" that was planning to "unseat some of us."
A resident asked the commission to publicly apologize to Harper, the state representative, because of the "disrespect" the commission's two white members showed him at a previous meeting. The two members balked and said Harper, who had called for Miller's resignation because of allegations of police abuse, owed the director and city apologies.
One of the white commissioners then sought to send the state attorney a videotape showing the black vice mayor talking with a city police officer about her illegally parked car. The motion failed 3-2, split racially.
But even with open animosity between races, there was unpredictability, such as when Mary Richmond, a 73-year-old white woman, got up to speak.
"It may be a murder," Richmond said. "It may be a suicide. We don't know. We all want to get to the bottom of it."
Richmond lives two blocks from Golden's home. "I see those flowers in that tree everyday," she continued. "My heart bleeds for him and his family. But that doesn't give us any excuse to turn on our police force, to call in outsiders."
Mattie Harmon, a 62-year-old black woman who mediates with police and the city's African-American communities, said she supported the department. "We don't need to pick on the police," she said.
Still, the race gap dominated. Larry Simmons, a 44-year-old white property owner said, "I don't really feel that we have a racial problem here." Later, in a prayer near the meeting's end, Commissioner Gwendolyn Asia-Williams, who is black, asked that "we acknowledge and address the racial issues in this city." Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s Aug. 28, 1963, "I Have a Dream" speech calling for racial equality, residents of the Belle of the Glades find themselves struggling to move beyond a death that stirred unpleasant thoughts of another era.
"In the 21st century we still have some healing to do," Mayor Steve B. Wilson said.
