Plot

Just Another Bombing?: This is Donal and Iona's Story takes audiences on a poignant journey through a little-known incident of the 1960s Civil Rights era. Iona Godfrey King and her son Donal Godfrey share their deeply moving account of surviving a Klan bombing of their home with three other family members on February 16, 1964, in Jacksonville, Fla. The reason for the bombing? Six-year-old Donal was the first Black student to enroll in the neighborhood Lackawanna Elementary School. The documentary (25 min.) relies on interviews with King and Godfrey, archival footage, and FBI and court documents to explore moments leading up to and after the domestic-terror attack. Ms. King was a 24-year-old domestic worker at the time. She says that she acted on her own to send her son to the whites-only school believing he would be safe. She knew nothing of a NAACP plan in the works to integrate Jacksonville's schools. To the media, it was just another bombing of another Black family. "It was expected," says Ms. King. The silence from city and school officials was deafening. No one talked about it. The incident is seldom included among historical accounts of school desegregation in Jacksonville. Filmmaker Hal Jacobs, the same age as Donal, lived a few streets over in the segregated white section of the neighborhood. He only learned about the incident a few years ago from an online article by Jacksonville author Tim Gilmore.