TL;DR
Nat Glover’s memoir of growing up in segregated Jacksonville, joining the police department that once refused to protect him, and becoming the first Black sheriff elected in Florida since Reconstruction. It’s also one of the few books written by a Florida sheriff.
On a Saturday in August 1960, a seventeen-year-old dishwasher left his shift at Morrison’s Cafeteria in downtown Jacksonville and walked straight into a riot. A mob of white men, some of them Klansmen, was beating Black sit-in protesters near Hemming Park with ax handles and bats. The teenager went to a white police officer for help. He didn’t get any.
Glover has said in interviews that he was told to get out of town or be killed. He made himself a promise that afternoon: he’d never run from a fight again. Then he did something nobody who saw that day would have predicted. He joined the police.
Striving for Justice: A Black Sheriff in the Deep South is the story of what came after that promise. Forefront Books published it in August 2023, days before the anniversary of the day Jacksonville now calls Ax Handle Saturday.
How did Nat Glover go from dishwasher to sheriff?
Slowly, and against resistance from inside the department as much as outside it. Glover grew up under segregation, played football at Edward Waters College on a scholarship and joined the Jacksonville Police Department in 1966. The book describes the racism he met from fellow officers in those early years.
He made detective in 1969 and sergeant in 1974. He became the city’s first hostage negotiator and was named police officer of the year four times by four different organizations. By 1991 he was director of police services, and in 1995 the voters of Jacksonville and Duval County elected him sheriff. He was re-elected in 1999 and served until 2003.
No Black sheriff had been elected anywhere in Florida since Reconstruction. The book is honest about what that meant, for him and for the people who’d watched him rise.
What did Glover change as sheriff?
He built the office around community policing. He banned choke holds and brought in de-escalation training for officers dealing with people in mental health crises, years before either became a national conversation. The book’s publicity credits his eight years with a 17 percent drop in crime.
He tied all of it back to that day in 1960. A frightened kid had asked a cop for help and been turned away, and Glover spent his career trying to build a department that wouldn’t do that to anybody.
What did he do after law enforcement?
He ran for mayor of Jacksonville in 2003 and lost. Then he went home to Edward Waters, his alma mater, as president, first on an interim basis in 2010 and permanently from 2011 until he retired in 2018. He told one interviewer that handing out diplomas to eight graduating classes felt like a kind of redemption. Florida named him a Great Floridian in 2016.
How has Striving for Justice been received in Jacksonville?
As a piece of the city’s own history. Jacksonville’s television stations covered the launch, the public library and the Jacksonville Historical Society hosted him, and public radio’s In Black America gave him two full episodes.
Glover’s last chapters turn from his own career to the country. He writes about what justice requires of police and of the communities they serve, and about how a divided nation heals. Coming from a man who stood on both sides of that 1960 police line, first as the kid who was turned away and later as the sheriff, those pages carry more weight than they would from almost anyone else.
What Striving for Justice shows a leader planning a book
Florida has 67 sheriffs, and almost none of them write books. Glover’s shows what one can be.
He structured it the way a good memoir should be structured. One afternoon from his youth sets up every decision that follows, so the reader understands why each choice mattered to him. He also did something generous with it: the proceeds go to a need-based scholarship at Florida State College at Jacksonville. He’d already been funding it from his own pension. He’s credited as the sole author, and he said in interviews that colleagues had urged him for years to tell his story before he finally did.
Any Florida sheriff thinking about writing a book should start with this one.
Keep reading
Hiring a ghostwriter for a sheriff’s or police chief’s book: how law enforcement leaders turn a career into a book, and what has to stay out.
- Nathaniel Nat Glover writes book about his life growing up during segregation, First Coast News
- Striving for Justice, Forefront Books
- Glover stepping down as Edward Waters College president, Jacksonville Daily Record
- Jacksonville's First Black Sheriff In More Than A Century Is Latest Great Floridian Awardee, WFSU Public Media
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