Man targeted Black men on Florida road, feds say. Now, he’s convicted of hate crimes
A white man has been found guilty of federal hate crimes for a 2022 attack on a group of Black men surveying land next to the roadway in a Florida town with a history of racial violence, federal officials said.
In September, Marvin Dunn, a prominent Black historian, was with his son and four other Black men on his Rosewood property when they were approached by a white man in a truck, according to a July 27 news release from the Department of Justice.
Dunn, a professor emeritus in psychology at Florida International University and author of multiple books addressing racial issues in Florida, was with the group off State Road 24 to discuss how to clear five acres of his property for an upcoming event, McClatchy News previously reported.
The man in the truck was 62-year-old David Emanuel, according to the release.
“My neighbor comes out in a pickup and says, ‘What’s going on here?’” Dunn told McClatchy News in 2022.
Emanuel then yelled racial slurs and expletives at the men, including “(racial slur) get out of these woods,” according to the release.
“Then he makes a U-turn out of his driveway, comes back at us and almost kills my son,” Dunn told McClatchy News last year.
Emanuel was in his truck when he drove directly at the group of men, nearly hitting one of them, according to the release.
“He accelerated with everything he had. He was probably going 50 miles per hour by the time he reached us. He was only inches from (Dunn’s son),” Bobby Prevatt, owner of land-clearing company Prevatt Earthworks and one of the men with Dunn on his property that day, told McClatchy News in 2022.
A witness testified at trial Emanuel said he “came at those (expletives),” and he would have “(expletive)d up all those Black (expletives),” the release said.
A racist past
Dunn’s property is in the rural north Florida town of Rosewood, an area haunted by a deadly racist past.
A hundred years ago, Rosewood was a growing, predominantly Black, community 125 miles north of Tampa, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
But on Jan. 4, 1923, an unfounded claim that a Black man had attacked a white woman sparked a race riot, and dozens of armed white men descended on the town, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Black residents ran for their lives, hiding in nearby swamps or in the homes of sympathetic white families, Encyclopedia Britannica said. The town was burned to the ground. The official death toll from a 1993 study totaled eight, but some estimates of the number of Black people killed in just a few days is upwards of 200.
No one was charged with a crime.
The history has hung heavy over the community since, leading to the 1997 film “Rosewood,” and 1994 state legislation that offered financial compensation to massacre survivors for property loss.
Dunn, 83, bought the property for its historical significance, he told McClatchy News, before he, too, was a victim of a racist attack in the same town a century later.
Sending a strong message
Emanuel was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon Sept. 12, McClatchy News reported, and Dunn was approached by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In March, additional federal hate crime charges were added, including willfully intimidating the victim, identified by officials only as “F.D.D.,” and attempting to injure and intimidate the victim through the use of his vehicle because of the victim’s race and color, according to federal officials.
He was charged with the hate crimes against all six men present, the release said.
Emanuel was convicted on the charges July 26 after two hours of jury deliberation, the release said.
Dunn took took to Twitter, which has been rebranded as X, to celebrate the conviction.
“Today a white man in Alachua County, Florida was found guilty on six counts of hate crime for using his truck as a weapon to attack me and a group I was with in Rosewood last September as he yelled racial slurs,” he said in a tweet. “It was an all-white jury. His dream lives.”
Accompanying the tweet was the cover photo of a Martin Luther King, Jr. biography.
“As we marked 100 years since the horrific 1923 Rosewood Massacre, this verdict should send a strong message that violent, racially motivated conduct will not be tolerated in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in the release.
Officials did not release whether Emanuel had been sentenced.
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