Nobody talked about it.
Donal was the Black child who was the first to integrate the neighborhood elementary school, Lackawanna, in Jacksonville, Fla. His mother, Iona, was a 24-year-old single mom working full-time as a housekeeper who decided on her own to enroll him, not part of any plan, because she thought her government would keep him safe.
I was a white child who lived four streets over in the segregated middle-class neighborhood. I attended a parochial school a few miles away that didn’t admit Black students, which is the way my adopted parents wanted it.
Placed ten feet over, the bomb might have killed Donal and his five family members. Black newpapers used the word “miracle” in the headlines to describe the close call. White newspapers duly reported another house was bombed.
I only learned about the bombing a few years ago thanks to an article by Jacksonville writer Tim Gilmore and his interview with Donal, who had self-published a memoir and was living in Ghana at the time.
In the year that followed, I met Donal while he was staying with his mother in Washington, D.C. We sat down at the kitchen table and talked about what led up to the bombing and what followed. Months later, we met in Jacksonville at the site of their former home and visited the fenced-off Lackawanna Elementary School (ironically, a white school designed by a Black architect in the 1910s).
We also stopped off for ice cream at a neighborhood institution, the Dreamette. For me it was an easy bike ride to get dipped ice cream cones or ask for 10-cent “mess-ups,” frozen-solid sundaes or banana splits that weren’t customer-worthy. For Donal it was a trip to “Klan Country,” as he wrote in his memoir, but a trip he made nonetheless because he and his mother refused to be boxed in.
Our 25-minute film, in time for the 60th anniversary of the bombing on February 16, 2024, is much more than a story about a domestic terror attack. It’s about the enduring spirit of Donal and Iona, and how the past informs the present, even if it makes people uncomfortable.