In the Trump administration’s wild purges of histories relating to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from Department of Defense Web sites this spring, photographs of the Enola Gay B-29 aircraft, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, were somehow included on a list for possible deletion. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a review of the U.S. Navy vessels bearing the names of prominent civil-rights leaders such as Cesar Chavez and Harriet Tubman, going as far as ordering the renaming of a ship named for Harvey Milk, a former lieutenant who was the first openly gay elected official in California prior to his assassination, in 1978.
The fact that central aspects of 20th-century history would be subject to potential erasure highlights the reality that, in an era of theatrical patriotism and politicized information, large swaths of the American past are going missing as part of ideological warfare. Exhibit A: while writing my latest book, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, a history of the fallout from the red scare in segregated Florida, I discovered with shock that a gay Black Korean War veteran named William James Neal sued the state of Florida in 1961 for firing him from a teaching position at a junior college due to his sexuality—and won, in large part, by hiding his race from the courts.
Why is Neal’s story not included and celebrated in our national curricula? The major beats of this man’s life provide some clues, given that the written record of his so-called lifestyle would likely be censored today by the anti-D.E.I. conservatives at the Department of Defense.
Neal was born in 1927 in the segregated village of New Smyrna, on Florida’s Atlantic coastline. When young “Willie” was six, his family of six moved to urban Orlando, where his father found work as a hotel bellhop. In Orlando, Neal began playing the piano, and at the age of 18, he received a scholarship to study music at the segregated Fisk University, in Nashville. After graduating in 1945, he served 24 months of active duty with the infamous 3rd Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Fire Brigade,” in the Korean War.
After returning Stateside following an honorable discharge, Neal received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University on the G.I. Bill and began touring nationally as a solo pianist for major orchestras. When Pinellas County, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, decided in 1957 to open the Gibbs Junior College for Black students rather than integrate the all-white St. Petersburg Junior College, Neal was recruited to lead the music department.
While in Florida, Neal, who had a pencil-thin mustache and a penchant for mambo dancing, concealed his preference for the sexual company of other men, letting the mask slip only on trips back to Columbia University, in New York City, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. as part of a program helping Black southern teachers earn Ivy League graduate degrees. It seemed nothing could slow the man’s ascent, but soon he would face a legal system designed to reign in Black ambitions.
On October 13, 1960, William James Neal was ordered into the office of the Pinellas County School Board. A bullish investigator from the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, an extrajudicial body organized by a group of Dixiecratic Florida legislators known as “the Pork Choppers” to identify homosexuals in Florida schools and universities, interrogated Neal without a lawyer, concerning his suspected sexual habits, for more than four hours, until, at the goading of his white boss, Neal made a verifiably false confession to participating in a gay-cruising scenario with another man in another state. When the Florida Department of Education jettisoned its own statutory procedures so as to peremptorily fire him and strip him of his teaching credentials, Neal sued in state court.
To avoid being lynched during the Neal v. Bryant trial proceedings, Neal hired a team of white attorneys, packed his bags, and fled the Sunshine State in order to hide his face from the public eye. As I detail in American Scare, “Neal’s lawyers filed their complaint on June 2, 1961.... Neal’s race was not made explicit in his team’s legal documents nor in the state’s rebuttals, and Neal was not expected to appear or take the stand.” With Neal’s racial status cloaked in legalese, neither potential advocates within the Florida N.A.A.C.P. nor enemies within the Florida White Citizens’ Council could fully fathom the intersectional stakes of what seemed like a random complaint concerning gay teachers in Pinellas County.
After 10 months of paper-shuffling, a conservative Florida Supreme Court ruled five to two in favor of Neal, and his teaching certificate was immediately reinstated. Neal’s legal victory, which admonished Florida officials for failing to follow their own laws in the firing of suspected homosexuals, helped shut down similar persecutions of queer educators throughout the early 1960s by the Pork Choppers’ notorious committee.
To protect his safety and privacy in a region where Black civil-rights figures commonly met violent ends, Neal eluded news photographers, avoided public statements, and never moved back home. With his credentials restored, he quietly found employment teaching music in the Maryland public-school system until his retirement, in 1987. When he died, in 2008, Neal did not receive an obituary in any major publication, and the inscription on his gravestone simply reads, Beloved Friend.
In summary, a gay Black military veteran defeated his white oppressors during segregation using their own biased judicial system, outfoxed his would-be lynchers, and died peacefully at the end of a dignified life. “As you grow older,” Neal reflected to the Tampa Bay Times in his one interview, in 1993, “those scars from the past become stripes of success.”
Though William James Neal’s saga has largely remained unknown, his story encapsulates many of our nation’s finest principles: service, courage, humility, aptitude. The American people deserve to learn about civil-rights pioneers such as Neal, rather than have those stories excised by those keen to prune our past. As I write in the final words of American Scare, “Perhaps the greatest liberty in any country is the freedom to know one’s country.” Only by unburying the American histories secreted away and threatened with erasure by leaders with totalitarian instincts can “We the People” appreciate who “We the People” are—and always have been.
Robert W. Fieseler is an American author and journalist covering marginalized groups
