Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In 1963, Mark Hawes reported to the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee that the University of South Florida (USF) acted in "a pattern of softness on communism," assigned "obscene course reading materials," expressed "anti-religious sentiments," and allowed "rampant homosexuality perpetrated by faculty, staff, and students."Also known as the Johns Committee, for which Hawes served as chief legal counsel, this legislative body was a virtually unregulated, veritable "police force," a sentiment expressed by Florida state representative Robert E. Knowles that same year.As a result of this one report, USF fired two professors and expelled dozens of students.The Johns Committee "tormented Florida education for nearly a decade."After losing in its efforts to dismantle the Florida branch of the NAACP in a bid to halt the pace of desegregation, the committee had shifted its focus to sexual minorities and higher education.I learned all of this, and more, from an undergraduate student's research project in my Theory and Historiography of Race and Police seminar-a paper titled "From the Johns Committee to the DeSantis Administration." 1 In the race and police seminar, my hybrid class of undergraduate and graduate students completed individual research projects using the university's special collections.My syllabus promised that students would be able to, among other objectives, "discuss how historians produce knowledge about policing," and that they would be able to "write microhistories of policing using physical archival materials" at the university's library.I did not explicitly frame it as a course or project of southern history.However, we were in "the South," and thus without prompting, 1 The student has given permission to cite their work by name: Nicholas Geller, "From the Johns Committee to the DeSantis Administration: Florida's Unrelenting Mission to Eradicate Racial Diversity and Queerness in Education," December 9, 2024 (quotations).See also "Mark Hawes Reporting on Probes by Johns Committee-Tallahassee, Florida [Photo]," April 18, 1963 (Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida), https://www.floridamemory.com/
Source: The Journal of Southern History
Author: David Ponton
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415656628
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