Welcome to Jay

Jay is a predominantly white town in the rural countryside of northwest Florida. Ask anyone who lives in the area – Black or white – and you’ll likely hear that the town simply does not welcome black people and almost no one, inside or outside the community, knows the origins of the town’s reputation. It simply persists. In 2010, Gus Benjamin, a Black teen from Brewton, Alabama, attended a party in Jay, only to wind up dead, a gunshot from a hunting rifle through his back. Robert Floyd, a young white man, is arrested and put on trial for second degree murder. The truths that emerge rip open deep wounds from the past between the black and white communities and lead towards reckoning with a dark history of racial violence that includes a shockingly similar fatal shooting that took place almost a century before.