Man accused of racist attack on Black historian in Florida town faces assault charge

A man accused of screaming the N-word at a prominent Black historian and others and then threatening to run them down in Rosewood, a small Florida town with a notorious racist history, has been arrested.

According to an arrest report from the Levy County Sheriff’s Office, David Allen Emanuel, 61, was arrested and charged Monday night with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Police determined he threatened Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus of psychology at Florida International University, and his group with his pickup truck last week while they were gathered on the side of a public roadway.

Dunn spent the past week hounding the sheriff’s office for what he perceived as inaction after the unprovoked altercation with Emanuel, a neighbor who Dunn said had nearly run over his son after screaming N-words at them.

On Tuesday, Dunn, a prominent South Florida Black historian, said he finally felt appreciated and that a constant stream of urgent emails he had been sending to the Levy County Sheriff’s Office would stop.

“I feel more respected,” said Dunn. the author of several Black history books, who said he had sent a stream of emails to the sheriff’s office in Levy County, which handles law enforcement in Rosewood. Over a decade ago, Dunn bought piece of a 5-acre property in the historic town that was almost wiped off the map during race riots in the early 1920s.

“I feel as if I got listened to,” he said. ”The police did their job.”

Emanuel’s arrest report was brief and didn’t offer much new information. It said he was arrested and charged with the third-degree felony Monday night after a judge signed off on a warrant. His bond was set at $50,000. His arrest history, according to state records, has been clean since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the state dropped charges against him for burglary and fleeing from police.

Calls to the Levy County Sheriff’s Office were not returned. Emanuel hadn’t been contacted by late Tuesday morning.

Dunn, a professor emeritus of psychology at Florida International University, had been tweeting about last week’s incident to his almost 12,000 followers. On Tuesday morning he posted about Emanuel’s arrest, saying “They got him” and “America works.”

Dunn, his son Doug Dunn and six others were outside the property he owns off State Road 24 last week when the group said Emanuel approached angrily and asked what they were all doing. Not content with their answer, the group said, Emanuel got into his Ford F-250 pickup and made several dangerous passes — almost striking Doug Dunn at close to 50 miles per hour, according to one witness — while repeatedly screaming the N-word.

Bobby Prevatt, a contractor from the area working with Dunn, called the Levy County Sheriff’s Office about the incident. Prevatt said he was so worried at one point that he put his hands “on my personal defense to defend myself.” Dunn said he contacted the FBI, calling Emanuel’s actions a hate crime.

Unhappy with what he perceived to be a delay in taking Emanuel into custody, Dunn spent the next week firing off emails to Levy County Sheriff Bobby McCallum. In one email the historian said the pace of the investigation led him to believe the department was “grossly incompetent or racially biased.” In another, Dunn asked for security during a press conference he said would take place on his property on Wednesday. The press conference has been canceled.

Dunn and the group were in Rosewood last week with Prevatt to discuss clearing part of the five acres for an event the author will host next year commemorating the 100th anniversary of race riots that tore apart the small town. The historian, who bought into the property for its historical value, also uses it to occasionally give local students tours.

Rosewood, near Florida’s Big Bend and about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville, was but a whistle-stop along the Seaboard Air Line Railway until it was left in ruins after riots broke out in January 1923. The unrest began when a Black resident was lynched after a group of whites accused a Black drifter of raping a white woman in an adjacent town. Several hundred whites stormed the city and burned it to the ground. Despite its notorious past, the city’s history was largely forgotten until the 1980s.

Though the official death toll after the riots was six, it’s believed that as many as 100 people or more were killed during the rampage that saw all the city’s buildings burned to the ground. It is now recognized as one of the worst racist attacks on a predominantly Black community in U.S. history.

Dunn, 82 and the son of a Volusia County fruit picker, has written several books about Black history in Florida and in Miami, where he lives. More recently, he has taken to Twitter and other forums to lash out at what he brands as racist education policies supported by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Dunn said the FBI contacted him Tuesday after Emanuel’s arrest, asking who he’d been in contact with at the sheriff’s office and saying the U.S. Department of Justice was aware of the incident.