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Using thorough and stark statistics, Kennedy describes a South emerging from World War II, coming to grips with the racism and feudalism that had held it back for generations. He includes an all-out Who’s Who, based on his own undercover investigations, of the "hate-mongers, race-racketeers, and terrorists who swore that apartheid must go on forever." This first paperback edition brings to a new generation of readers Kennedy’s searing profile of Dixie before the civil rights movement. ... Read more

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In the history of St. Augustine, the story of the Minorcans, who still today exert tremendous political and social influence, rivals the drama of the Jamestown or Plymouth settlements. Patricia C. Griffin describes their first twenty years in the New World, including the hardship of their arrival in British East Florida in 1768, their starvation and suffering on an indigo plantation, and their revolt and flight to sanctuary in St. Augustine.

There, survivors of this devastating experience pieced back together their Mediterranean heritage. In time, they became farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, mariners, and fishermen. "Mullet on the beach," their freedom cry, signaled the emigrants’ release from plantation captivity. As the Floridas reverted to Spanish control and were later acquired by the United States, the Minorcans became the core population of St. Augustine, settling into a quarter next to the city gate and south of the old Spanish fort which is now known as the restored area.

Griffin brings alive this remarkable colonial venture through her use of documentary sources, archaeological evidence, and topographical and climatic data. Students of Florida history and the Spanish borderlands, specialists in migration studies, ethnohistorians, and the general reader will value this solidly researched study of a folk community’s struggle and triumph in the New World. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Saga Worth Telling -- A Tale Well-Told
I devoured Patricia Griffin's well-illuminated history of the Minorcans in British East Florida's New Smyrna colony. Of all the materials written on this subject, her treatment is more comprehensive and more on-the-mark than any I've encountered, including Jane Quinn's Minorcans in Florida published a quarter century ago.

In 1768, some 1,403 souls left the deep-water, sheltered port of Mahon, capital city of Minorca, second largest of Spain's Balearic Islands south and east of Barcelona in the Mediterranean Sea. Approximately one thousand were Minorcan peasants enticed to voluntary servitude that would last nine years in order to buy passage to the New World with the hope of escape from a multi-year famine in their homeland. The other 400 were comprised of Greeks, Italians sprinkled with a handful of Spanish, French and others, equally indentured.

Their promised land turned out to be a mosquito swamp on Florida's east coast a few miles south of present-day Daytona Beach's hedonistic party place. Their new-found "paradise" turned out to be a reeking, stinking indigo plantation created by Scotsman Andrew Turnbull. (His smirking portrait appears on page 79.) Their nine years of slavery turned out to be a hell none of them could have imagined while standing on the wharf at Mahon that fateful spring of emigration.

By the time the survivors of Turnbull's failed plantation straggled 75 miles north to St. Augustine after nine years of brutal servitude, fewer than half of them survived.

The remnant swelled St. Augustine's populaton of 1,200 in 1777 by 50%. Over the intervening two centuries and a quarter, the Minorcans (including Greeks and Italians) have made their mark on America's oldest city.

All in all, Mullet on the Beach is a gripping epic well-treated by a knowledgable author. It's an excellent glimpse into a true saga--another golden thread in the rich tapestry of America. ... Read more

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Genealogy of Tampa Florida with Portraits ... Read more