Florida’s “Second Reconstruction”: The Knights of Labor and Interracial Politics in Jacksonville, Florida, 1887–89

In April of 1887, Jacksonville’s white progressives wrested control of the city from an older Bourbon elite and embarked upon an aggressive program of urban development.  Seeking to establish the city as the metropole of northeast Florida, they annexed the black suburbs to extend their control over what they saw as sites of urban disorder and disease. However, annexation had also transformed Jacksonville into a majority-black city; these new Jacksonvillians promptly allied themselves with the Knights of Labor, which represented more than 3,000 workers locally.  That December, embracing an explicitly interracial electoral strategy the Knights-backed ticket won the mayor’s office and elected thirteen of eighteen city council members, including five black candidates.  Despite tensions within this coalition, black electoral strength compelled the white members of the Knights to share real power with their black allies.  The new government hired black police officers and firefighters, and appointed prominent black men to the positions of police commissioner and municipal judge.  Additionally, they expanded the urban development agenda of the city’s white elites, making plans to extend paved streets and sidewalks into the former black suburbs.  However, this “second Reconstruction” would prove short-lived.  In August of 1888, yellow fever struck Jacksonville, allowing the city’s deposed white progressives to retake the city.  Linking the epidemic to a racialized understanding of urban disease, they took control of the city through a privately organized Sanitary Commission.  After the fever had subsided, they convinced the state legislature to replace Jacksonville’s elected government with an all-white city commission appointed by the governor, ending the city’s brief experiment in interracial politics.  Jacksonville’s interracial government could never have survived; however, their struggle for the future of the city at the dawn of the Jim Crow era reveals an alternate history of southern progressivism in which interracial urban politics was possible.