My son and his family live in Polk County, Florida. I usually warn him to watch out for Sheriff Grady Judd, whose officers once poured 68 bullets into a suspected cop-killer while firing 110 rounds. When asked why his deputies shot so many times, Judd replied:
“I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that’s all the ammunition they had. We were not going to take any chance of him shooting back.”
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office has had multiple accusations of racism, including a civilian complaint by the vice chairman of the newly formed Lakeland Police Department Citizens Advisory Board.
My grandchildren in Polk County have been homeschooled the entire time they lived there, and I have never been more grateful since I discovered what happened a few days ago at Floral Elementary School in the city of Bartow.
A Black six-year-old was celebrating his sixth birthday. The class sang the traditional “Happy Birthday” song to him. Not the Stevie Wonder version dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., but baby steps, as it was Bartow. Bartow schools ignored the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education for over a decade, until they were forced to integrate through a federal consent decree.
Lynchings were common in Polk County. Historians and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) have documented at least 20 lynchings of Black men in Polk County between 1877 and 1950. These killings were part of the estimated 4,400 racial terror lynchings across the South during that period. Victims were often accused of crimes against white people — sometimes without evidence — and denied due process.
One notable lynching was of Fred Rochelle (1901, Bartow): A 16‑year‑old Black teenager accused of killing a white woman. He was captured by a mob, chained to a tree, and burned alive near the Peace River Bridge east of Bartow. His lynching was witnessed by hundreds, including a young Ossian Sweet, who later became a civil rights figure in Detroit. Contemporary newspapers described the event as a “barbecue” and noted that hundreds of white residents attended. His lynching was a public spectacle, consistent with the era’s racial terror practice.
Back to Floral Elementary School. After the original version of Happy Birthday was sung, his white teacher asked the student, “Would you like the funny song now that I sing to you?”
The boy eagerly nodded his head yes, and the teacher launched into the “funny song” in a jazzy, upbeat style.
Happy Birthday to you,
You live in a zoo,
You look like a monkey,
And you smell like one too.
Did I mention that the teacher recorded her performance and later posted it on social media? Millions of people have viewed the teacher calling the boy a monkey and critiquing his odor.
The teacher has her defenders, who claim the song originated from the movie Madagascar and wasn’t racist then. But in Madagascar, Alex the lion, Gloria the hippo, and Melman the giraffe are singing to Marty the Zebra, and they all actually live in a zoo. It was a group of friends having fun, not an authority figure calling one of her few Black students a name with a long racist history.
Yasmeen F.
This incident at Floral Avenue Elementary isn’t just about one teacher or one classroom — it’s a reflection of Polk County’s long, unspoken legacy of racial trauma. From the lynching of Fred Rochelle in 1901, burned alive while hundreds watched, to the decades of defiance against school integration after Brown v. Board, the county has repeatedly failed to protect Black children from systemic harm. That a six-year-old was publicly mocked with lyrics historically weaponized against Black people — inside a school that once resisted desegregation — reveals how the past still echoes in the present. In Polk County, history isn’t buried; it’s rehearsed. And unless accountability is more than performative, the next generation will inherit not just the wounds, but the silence that allowed them to fester.