Before you vote, please read and share with your friends.
In 2020, local historian Tom Garner found proof in the T.T. Wentworth Museum’s archives that Wentworth, an Escambia County official from 1920-1940, helped lead the county’s “rebirth” of the Ku Klux Klan.
- The first Klan formed after the Civil War and was crushed under the Grant administration. The revived Klan needed more enemies than the first one had, and it found a convenient one in the Roman Catholic Church.
Wentworth’s vitriol for Catholics filled his correspondence. He called Pensacola “a city that is controlled by Rome.” He complained that “Catholics have a boycott on my business” and that Protestant preachers were afraid of losing a dollar if they lined up with the Klan. He even blamed the Catholic Church for “teaching equality” to Black Pensacolians. In the heroic history he wrote for the Klan newspaper, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization, were the villains and Klan leaders the persecuted heroes.
Recruiting With Fear
The Klan didn’t just sell hatred. It sold Protestants the idea that their neighbors’ church was a foreign threat to their way of life. It used fear of someone else’s faith as its recruiting tool.
- The Klan also understood that power runs through the ballot box. Wentworth wrote that he had to keep his men from showing up at the polls in “robes and helmets.” He preferred to win “with ballots rather than bullets.” Wentworth won election as county commissioner in 1920 and, eight years later, as tax collector, a post he held until 1940.
I thought of Wentworth when I read a mailer targeting Joe Vinson.
As early voting began last week, the mailer, backed by Commissioner Ashlee Hofberger’s allies, photoshopped Vinson between Kamala Harris, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom. The flip side said Vinson is “out-of-sync with our values” and shared clips from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola’s website as evidence. They include a calendar listing for a trans support group, a talk about safety in a diverse community, a statement on how the church views God, and a talk on the local immigrant community.
- None of it has anything to do with the Escambia County Commission. Its sole purpose was to win votes for Hofberger by telling voters that Vinson’s house of worship makes him suspect.
Understand the Playbook
I am not calling Hofberger a Klansman. But attacking a candidate’s religion is part of a political playbook rooted in how the Klan became a political force in Pensacola a century ago. Voters should know where it originates.
- Take a candidate’s church, strip away context, label it alien to “our values,” and let fear do the rest. Wentworth did it to Catholics. The October 2026 mailer’s claim that Vinson’s ideology is a better fit for San Francisco than Pensacola Bay labels him as an outsider. He doesn’t belong here.
End Religious Scapegoating
Hofberger and her supporters have pulled this stunt before. In 2024, the same Committee to Protect Florida sent a mailer darkening the photo of Walker Wilson, whom Hofberger beat by 413 votes in the GOP primary. The committee is run by Tallahassee consultant Mark Zubaly, who, in 2023, agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a Santa Rosa County commissioner’s lawsuit over an inaccurate mailer.
- Reasonable people can disagree about Vinson. He’s running without party affiliation, and he has a long list of endorsers, including former mayors, council members and school board members. Voters who want to measure him can review his record, positions, and answers on growth, taxes and county spending. His church shouldn’t be on that list.
Pensacola spent years with Wentworth’s name on a museum before the archive told the full story. A community that learned in 2020 the evils of religious scapegoating should recognize the playbook when it shows up in the mailbox.
