Descendants of Oscar Mack, slain Klansman meet in person at UF documentary premiere
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When the descendants of Oscar Mack and Stewart Ivey gathered Tuesday night, it was all hugs and joyful tears. By the following morning, inside a conference room at the University of Florida’s Pugh Hall, surrounded by sandwich wraps and other refreshments, it was as though they were lifelong friends.
The moment would have been unthinkable in 1922, when Mack shot and killed Ivey and Eugene Reinhardt, two Klansmen who went to the Black veteran’s home to kill him the night after he began working his new job as a postal worker, which he earned in a federal bid. Together in person 101 years later, months after they first connected on a video call arranged by the Orlando Sentinel, the two sides shared a table, hours before the premiere of a documentary about the ordeal.
“I was always interested in my mother’s side of the family,” said James Brown, Mack’s great-grandson whose story he learned from his grandmother in 2001, decades after Mack had passed. “I never thought it would come to being at this event.”
Renee Bronson, Ivey’s great-granddaughter who knew the story but assumed Mack had been killed until she was approached by the Sentinel last year, said her ancestor’s activities with the Ku Klux Klan brought her great shame, but she was honored to be with Mack’s family. “I don’t know what Ivey would think of me right now, but I don’t care.”
“Renee, I am so honored by your courage to be here,” said Vanessa Bonner, Mack’s great-granddaughter.
The lead-up to the premiere of “Oscar Mack vs. The Ku Klux Klan,” produced by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, had another special guest: Juanita Lesesne, whose grandfather — Scipio Lesesne, foreman and interpreter at a sugar plantation in St. Cloud — is said to have helped Mack escape by hiding him for weeks as a white mob hunted him before driving him to Georgia.
Lesesne, who knew Bronson when they were children growing up in Kissimmee, said she learned about Mack’s story in 2018, but she didn’t know her own family’s connection to his escape until after the Sentinel published its article documenting Mack’s life in hiding.
Her ancestor’s role revealed for the first time in the film, she joined the families after traveling from Atlanta, where she works as a teacher.
“[Scipio Lesesne] hid him in the ... rumble seat or equivalent [of the car] and drove him to the state line,” Lesesne said in the documentary. She also shared photos of the elder Lesesne’s family home, located on the same block where Mack lived, which purportedly show the location of his house.
The nearly hourlong documentary, which premiered at the MacKay Auditorium, was about a decade in the making, starting with a student project at Rollins College by then-history professor Julian Chambliss and Democracy Forum researcher Curtis Michelson, who found a single newspaper clipping about Mack’s escape under a pile of material about the 1920 Ocoee massacre. But it wasn’t until Brown reached out Michelson nearly a year after he posted the project’s results online that the cameras began rolling.
By 2017, the film’s production team joined Mack’s descendants at Glendale Cemetery in Akron, Ohio, where Mack’s grave under his alias, Lanier Johnson, was rededicated to return to him his true identity. And years later, more information was still being uncovered.
“Even just five years ago, I don’t think we could get to this point,” Deborah Hendrix, who led the documentary’s production, said before the screening. “A lot of this film is finding answers. ... There’s so many moving parts in this thing, you leave anything out and the thing that follows doesn’t make any sense.”
Though it is available online, “Oscar Mack vs. The Ku Klux Klan” will be screened April 29 at Solid Rock Community Church in Kissimmee, an event organized by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and the Osceola County NAACP.
The documentary’s reveal about Scipio Lesesne’s role begins answering a central question of how Mack escaped, previously believed by the family to have happened with Mack traversing Florida’s swamps before meeting with his later-wife and stepdaughter.
But many others remain unanswered. Another pertains to Mack and his wife’s letters to Meta Wideman, a Daytona Beach woman who was somehow related to William Mack Jr., Oscar Mack’s brother with whom she lived, according to census records.
Wideman, who died in 1982, mentioned periodically visiting the Johnsons in Akron. Brown and his family don’t recall her being around as they grew up, and at some unknown point before Mack died, the letters stopped arriving.
Mack’s life story, documented by the Sentinel and UF’s oral history program, reflects the trials of millions of Black families in an era of heightened anti-Black terrorism. What happened affected his stepdaughter, Florida Hurt, who married young after years of moving from city to city, often prompted by her mother’s nightmares of being caught by the mob searching for Mack.
In the years before Mack’s death in 1960, Hurt would also search for him in the street after he would escape from a nursing home, hustling away as if still running from the lynch mob.
“She didn’t bond with us until late in life, because of the fear she lived under — the fear of losing us, like she lost her mother, like she lost her father — but she kept fighting,” Bonner said. “That’s why it’s so important that we learn how to love and to heal.”
Reconciliation is a goal of Mack’s family, which continued as they spent time with Bronson, who apologized again for Ivey’s role in sending Mack on the run. They also call for a reckoning of American racial relations, because, Brown said, “We are greater than fear and we are greater than skin color.”
“I want all of you in the room today to walk away, hopefully enlightened that each one of you have been called to this planet for a purpose and for a reason that might be even greater than you can even begin to imagine,” Brown said. “But we all have a pivotal part to play in working to reconcile the wrongs that have been done. Not only to Blacks, but to women, to Native Americans, to Asians, to poor whites. They have been disenfranchised, as well.”
