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Friend,
On the third floor of a quiet history museum in Pensacola, Florida, stands a relic from the past that may disturb visitors: a figure dressed in a Ku Klux Klan uniform – a white, visibly worn robe with a tall, pointed cap and a hood that drapes around the face.
Also on display at the Pensacola Museum of History at the University of West Florida (UWF) are patches that adorned Klan members’ uniforms and a copy of a Klan handbook known as the Kloran. Behind the figure is a cross, nearly destroyed by fire – a relic of the Klan’s infamous calling card.
The uniform is only one part of a large cache of memorabilia and documents associated with a man named T.T. Wentworth – a prominent local politician in the early 20th century, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and a once-highly regarded preservationist known as “Mr. History” in this Gulf Coast city.
In the 1920s, Wentworth had another title – that of “exalted cyclops,” designating him the leader of the local “klavern” of the Klan.
That revelation came in 2020 amid a debate over the future of the city’s towering Confederate monument. Along with a historian’s examination of Klan documents that lay hidden within Wentworth’s personal collection for decades, the discovery has ignited an effort to reckon with the city’s history – particularly the history of its vibrant Black community.
The leader of a now-defunct historical foundation that once heralded Wentworth’s version of the past – which ignored the contributions of Black people to society – has embarked on an educational campaign to tell the truth about Black history and to provide scholarships for aspiring Black college students.
The city’s racial reckoning gained steam after Jamin Wells, an associate professor of history at UWF, spent a year digging into Wentworth’s collection, which came into the possession of the UFW Historic Trust in 2019. They included a membership ledger, correspondence, photographs and a variety of other documents. The documents provided a rare look at the inner workings of the Klan in the 1920s, a period of Klan resurgence, when the group claimed several million members nationwide and marched 25,000-strong in full regalia down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
In his report, Wells wrote, “‘Mr. History’ didn’t tell the whole story. The most glaring omission relates to African American history. With a few notable exceptions, Wentworth did not collect material related to African American history nor did he meaningfully include the African American experience in his histories of Pensacola.”
The explicit omissions obscure the contributions of Black people to the region’s economic development and have had a significant impact “on community identity, politics and policy,” Wells wrote.
“Some may wonder, ‘Why does this story matter?’’ Wells said in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Some may say, ‘Who cares, it was 100 years ago, and he’s dead, so what’s the point?’ But our community’s defining storyteller left enormous gaps and holes in the history he wrote. And those gaps have profoundly shaped what this city thinks it was and, by extension, what it might become.”
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Sincerely,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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