Opinion | These Towns Built on Black History Shouldn’t Be for Sale
In 1887, Eatonville, Fla., a neighborhood close to Orlando, was among the many first all-Black cities to include — making it an outlier within the post-Reconstruction South. Its leaders went on to discovered the Robert L. Hungerford Regular and Industrial Faculty, the primary college for Black youngsters in Central Florida, with the assistance of Booker T. Washington. The writer Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, fictionalized her hometown within the novel “Their Eyes Had been Watching God.”
Whereas the varsity has closed, the city has advanced right into a heritage-tourism vacation spot, even because it stays a functioning neighborhood. Its inhabitants of roughly 2,500 remains to be majority Black, with small companies, church buildings and historic markers lining its principal visitors artery. Each January, hundreds of individuals come from all around the world to attend the ZORA! Pageant, which celebrates the writer, her hometown, and the cultural achievements of African People.
The Orange County Faculty Board now owns the tract of land that was as soon as the positioning of the varsity. In March, it was poised to promote 89 acres of this property, representing roughly 14 % of the city’s landmass, to a developer. Some members of the city council initially supported the measure, on account of the income and financial growth it will have introduced, however the proposed sale additionally drew extensive condemnation from different residents. N.Y. Nathiri, the director of the Affiliation to Protect the Eatonville Neighborhood, advised me residents fearful the housing growth would have develop into a “city inside a city,” the place longtime Eatonville residents couldn’t have afforded to stay. Over time, she predicted, it will have pushed up property taxes and compelled poorer residents out.
The developer has since backed out of the settlement, following a lawsuit the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle helped file to cease the transaction, and a backlash that caught the eye of the media. However the way forward for the land tract — and by extension, the neighborhood — stays in query.
Eatonville is a microcosm of the conflicts that animate the preservation and extension of Black historical past and historic locations. For a faculty board to think about such measures in Florida, of all locations, comes as no shock. Over the previous yr, the state’s political leaders have blocked an Superior Placement course in African American research, eliminated books from college libraries and rejected textbooks that train “woke math.” On this case, the purpose has been to herald income to improve or construct new faculties and get the property again on the tax rolls, to not suppress Black historical past as an act of political theater — however the impact could be the identical. Nonetheless, this additionally speaks to a broader downside.
Eatonville is among the many scores of cities and settlements all through america that have been established by previously enslaved individuals throughout and after Reconstruction that stay intact — not as relics, however as locations the place individuals stay and work, reflecting the legacy of their founders. Lots of them are dealing with comparable peril.
When cities like Eatonville should dump items of the previous to underwrite the current, we lose one other piece of important Black historical past. These locations needs to be acknowledged as treasures — not solely as wealthy communities unto themselves, but additionally as residing monuments, extra beneficial than any statue we may erect.
Shortly after the Civil Battle, a number of the survivors of the Clotilda, the final documented slave ship to achieve america, established Africatown. Ms. Hurston hung out within the historic neighborhood three miles north of downtown Cell, Ala., within the Nineteen Twenties, doing analysis on what would develop into her posthumously printed ebook “Barracoon.”
Over time, factories and refineries expanded alongside Africatown’s waterfront periphery, surrounding the central residential neighborhood, polluting the air and waterways. Residents imagine the poisonous emissions have contributed to a most cancers epidemic. Then within the Eighties, the principle enterprise district was bulldozed to construct a five-lane freeway. Now that the wreckage of the Clotilda has been recognized within the Cell Delta, supporters have a significant probability of remodeling the place right into a vacation spot for heritage tourism. However to this point their efforts to have the economic presence scaled down haven’t been profitable.
The Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa — the previous “Black Wall Avenue” and the positioning of the notorious 1921 race bloodbath — offers a 3rd case research. Between the devastation that occurred then, and the city renewal tasks that adopted, little of its historic structure stays standing. It took the residents years to get Greenwood added to the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations — a feat they solely achieved final yr. Nonetheless, the neighborhood stays fragile, and alternatives for financial growth are comparatively scarce.
Making a nationwide registry, because the scholar Andrea Roberts, who based the Texas Freedom Colonies Venture when she was instructing at Texas A&M College, has completed regionally, could be a beneficial first step towards preservation. The African American Cultural Heritage Motion Fund is within the early levels of planning a mission alongside these traces that will even catalog historic buildings, cemeteries, and different artifacts.
Within the meantime, students on the College of Texas at Arlington are additionally engaged on a “playbook” of methods these communities can use, based mostly on these deployed at historic Black districts within the Dallas space. These embrace recording the reminiscences of longtime residents, to protect neighborhood historical past; specializing in efforts to assist residents hold their land; and instituting a vetting process for any exterior teams that wish to are available and assist.
Ms. Roberts additionally recommended there might be a “blanket designation” for these communities, akin to the Native American Graves Safety and Repatriation Act, which says that anytime Native American stays are found, sure restrictions take maintain relating to what could be completed with the land. “You don’t have the equal for African People,” she identified.
Whereas these large-scale measures would certainly assist, although, a lot of the work of preserving has been completed on the grass-roots degree. Within the years since Eatonville was based, for example, residents have resisted forces that might have wiped their neighborhood out — together with the state, when it tried to show the principle thoroughfare right into a freeway, some 35 years in the past. On this approach, these cities are monuments not solely to their founders, but additionally to succeeding generations which have engaged in comparable struggles.
Nick Tabor is a contract journalist and the writer of “Africatown: America’s Final Slave Ship and the Neighborhood It Created.”
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