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Lynching victim Rubin Stacy’s story being told by his family in film screening at NSU

Anne Naves knew something bad had happened to her uncle when her male relatives came home from fishing, each wearing a pall of silence. Dad wasn’t cracking jokes like usual. Grandfather looked grave. And her uncle, Rubin Stacy, hadn’t come back. The next day, someone from the funeral home said a body had been dropped off.

Naves, 8 years old at the time, only discovered the full gruesome truth about her uncle years later. On July 19, 1935, acting on an unproven accusation from a white woman, a masked lynch mob strung up Stacy under a Fort Lauderdale tree, hanged him and shot him 17 times as spectators gawked and children laughed.

The brutality and silence of Stacy’s lynching is revisited in the new documentary, “Rubin,” which will screen on Tuesday, Oct. 3, at Nova Southeastern University. In the hourlong film, the farmhand’s death is recounted through the eyes of his surviving descendants, but mainly through Naves, who was the last living eyewitness to the trauma — and to the secrecy — that followed.

The film, the first to be made by relatives of Stacy’s family, also chronicles the history of lynchings in America, used as a tool of punishment and to foster silence.

“I think (my family) knew that, without telling us (kids) what really happened, they would save us a lot of trauma,” Naves says in the documentary. “The neighbors and our church members respected our silence, too, because they knew that if it could happen to our family, it could happen to theirs.”

For “Rubin” director Tenille Brown, who is a cousin of Rubin Stacy, the film has in recent weeks also morphed into something else: a posthumous tribute to Naves. After filming her interviews for the documentary, she died on Sept. 18 at age 96, leaving behind a strong legacy: She was a Broward County educator for 25 years, teaching at Pines Middle and other schools.

“The biggest piece of the film was Anne,” Brown says in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Without her, there’s no story. She’s the driving force. She was ready to talk. She told me to record her. She really pushed me when I didn’t feel confident and said, ‘Record me anyway. Just go.’ ”

The rest of America witnessed the cruelty of Stacy’s lynching long before Naves did. A series of photos immortalize the moment when a white crowd gathered around Stacy’s body hanging from a tree. These images ran in newspapers nationwide, were published by the NAACP, Life magazine and National Geographic, and are now archived in the Library of Congress.

It was a tale of Jim Crow-era racism that Fort Lauderdale would’ve rather forgotten — the brother of a corrupt Broward County sheriff participated in the lynching — but city officials have made strides in recent years to acknowledge the tragedy by placing memorial markers around Fort Lauderdale. One is on Davie Boulevard and Southwest 31st Avenue, also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, near where Stacy took his last breath. There’s another on the 800 block of Northwest Second Street, where he lived, and a third at Woodlawn Cemetery, his final resting place. In February 2022, a section of Davie Boulevard was renamed Rubin Stacy Memorial Boulevard.

“I’m glad they acknowledged it,” says Brown, of Pompano Beach. “These stories make some people in the state uncomfortable, but if they are based on fact, we need to tell the truth. You can’t turn your head. These are things you can’t ignore.”

For Brown, it was these memorials — and Naves’ willingness to break her silence — that motivated her to reconstruct Stacy’s story. To do so, she also interviewed Ken Cutler, Parkland commissioner and historian, and Tameka Bradley Hobbs, library regional manager of Fort Lauderdale’s African American Research Library and Cultural Center.

“My family didn’t want to talk about it out of fear for years,” Brown says. “There was shame. There’s an element of hurt, and you can hear that emotion in Anne’s voice. Now it feels freeing. This is a story that was suppressed for years and by sharing it, this is how we overcome.”

Michael Anderson, a producer for “Rubin,” says the film also tackles what too many school textbooks don’t stress enough: the history of Black lynchings.

“For Black youth to know their stories, they have to know the history of lynchings,” Anderson says. “They still don’t know how lynchings were used as a weapon to keep a community quiet. That’s exactly what it did to Rubin Stacy’s family.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Rubin”

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 3

WHERE: NSU’s Rose & Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center, 3100 Ray Ferrero Jr. Blvd., Davie

COST: Free, but tickets must be presented for entry

INFORMATION: 954-462-0222; MiniaciPAC.com