A black Jamaican man, who is married to a white Danish woman and lives in Orlando, Florida says his experience with racism in America gave him a heart attack.

André Brown spoke candidly with the Jamaica Observer about the ordeal he faced and still faces because of his marriage to a white woman.

Brown, his wife Rita and their three daughters are one of a few black families who live in the mostly white community of Windermere in Orlando. The family has learnt to live with racial taunts and acts of racial hate that dates back to the days of Jim Crow and segregation.

Brown said he has woken up to find the racial epitaphs ‘Nigger’ and ‘Nigger-Lover’ spray painted on his driveway and dead, decapitated animals on his lawn.

“We have had our home racially vandalised. Think of the effect. You wake up one morning, you go outside, you see decapitated animals, you see garbage strewn across your lawn, you see ‘nigger’ and ‘nigger-lover’ being spray painted on your home and on your driveway, your cars are painted, your cars are vandalised,” Brown said.

The racial attack on the Brown family were occurring too often for his liking and the stress and uncertainty of not knowing who the perpetrators were, or what they might do next became too much to bear, and after about six months of the abuse, his heart gave way.

“The scariest part is, you don’t know who did it and what’s next. In fact, coming out of that situation, six months later I had a heart attack because the stress level was just too much. There were nights when I literally was sleeping on my roof with a weapon. Waiting, watching,” he said.

Brown, who is a tennis coach, eventually recovered from his brush with death, but said he still faces racial hatred in the Southern state on an almost daily basis.

“Racism is very much alive in America. You have people who drive their trucks on to my lawn and do doughnuts (drive in circles) before driving off,” Brown said.

He told of incidents in public when white men would try to accost him, thinking he was coming on to the white woman next to him, his own wife.

Blacks in the US have said for decades that there are many white men in America who take great offence when a black man has any sort of relations with a white woman. Brown, says that deep seated resentment is still alive and well today.

Brown’s 19-year-old daughter Simone, has faced her fair share of racism, being born to a white mother and black father. The rising tennis star said she was rudely awakened to the fact that she was not half black, half white at a tender age as she came to realise that she is just seen as black by racists in the land of her birth.

“The first time I was called a nigger was when I was 10. I was playing against a 12-year-old in a local tennis tournament and I was beating this girl, when her mother started calling me little nigger girl,” Simone Brown said.

“The good thing is she won the match,” her father added.

Brown said he has tried to desensitise his children to the racism that surrounds them by using the word ‘nigger’ to them as reverse psychology in a move that may be seen as controversial.

“If I call her (Simone) ‘nigger’ and she knows I love her, when they call her ‘nigger’ she will think they love her too,” he said.

But the experience of dealing with racism on a daily basis seems to have strengthened Michelle Brown who says the attempts by bigots to ruffle her feathers has really made her stronger.

“As I grew older I found out that it is the bullies who are insecure, those people don’t matter,” she said confidently.

But it is not just white people who have directed hatred at the Browns, many black people also frown on their mixed marriage.

The tennis ace said even in his own family he was faced with consternation when he announced that he was going to marry a white woman.

“African-American women resent it when a black man gets married to a white woman. Even my own mother,” he confessed.

His mother, communications expert, Doreen Brown, was present during the interview and confirmed that she was very concerned when it was revealed that her son was about to exchange nuptials with a Caucasian woman.

However, she said those feelings of apprehension have long faded as Brown’s wife has proven herself to be “a wonderful human being who sees doesn’t see people through colour”.

“She has proven to be a wonderful mother and there are no more undercurrents in my family,” Brown said, stating that he had found the Dutch “more liberal when it comes to colour.”

“People don’t realise that Florida is the South,” he told the Sunday Observer, pointing to the history of violent treatment of Blacks in that part of the US.

The Browns live about 30 miles from the town of Rosewood, where dozens of black people were lynched, burned and shot to death in January 1923 after a white woman, Fannie Taylor, falsely accused a black man of brutally raping her. In fact, she was beaten by her white lover — who her black housekeeper’s granddaughter and other blacks in the community witnessed leaving her house on the day in question.

But the woman’s accusation incensed white townspeople, who formed a large posse and started what is now known as the Rosewood Massacre.

Only nine black persons in the town survived the violent racial attack which saw them having to flee to the swamps where they hid for days while their homes were burned to the ground and their relatives murdered. Two white men were killed and four others were wounded as a black man, Sylvester Carter, opened fire on the lynch mob what kicked in his door. The mob killed Carter and his mother Emma Carter, who told the seething posse of white men that it was one of their own who had violated Taylor.

Thirty years after Rosewood, in 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was dragged from his bed and beaten to death by two white men after he winked at a white woman in Money, Mississippi. His body was thrown in the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan, he had been tied to it with barbed wire.

The two white men, Roy Bryant and his brother John Milam were charged with kidnapping and murder but were freed by an all-white jury, who declared that the court could not ascertain the identity of the badly bludgeoned body which had a gunshot wound to the head.

The survivors of Rosewood were compensated for the horrific act by the US Government in the 1990’s.

Next week, Brown’s Danish wife Rita tells her side of the story