When 1000’s of festivalgoers descend on Eatonville, Florida, this month to have fun the legacy of literary big Zora Neale Hurston they are going to, by their presence, honor the group dubbed “The City That Freedom Constructed” for its proud historical past as one of many oldest included Black communities within the U.S.
However whereas they’re having fun with the annual competition that since 1990 has introduced stay music, literary symposia, theatrical productions and artwork reveals to Eatonville, the place Hurston grew up, the 135-year-old city will likely be getting ready to a choice that may decide its future.
• TIMELINE: Historical past of Eatonville, Florida
On Feb. 7, simply days after competition tents are dismantled, the city council may decide the destiny of a large improvement that, if permitted, will reshape and – activists and historians concern – erase the legacy of Eatonville.
At stake is the destiny of the Robert Hungerford Preparatory Faculty property, the place the leaders of Eatonville established a faculty in 1897 on about 300 acres. The varsity was modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Regular and Industrial Institute, now Tuskegee College, in Alabama. Attracting Black college students from up and down the Japanese Seaboard, it was for generations the beating coronary heart of a group the place, in an period of Jim Crow and lynching, Black residents managed to construct, govern and preserve their very own Black-majority city.
Julian Johnson and N.Y. Nathiri communicate throughout a gathering final fall a couple of proposed residential-commercial improvement on a 300-acre parcel in Eatonville, Florida. Residents teams as an alternative need the land to turn into dwelling to a cultural, instructional and tourism hub that may honor the city’s historical past. (Credit score: Victor Watkins)
The Southern Poverty Legislation Middle’s Financial Justice Undertaking is working with the Affiliation to Protect the Eatonville Group (P.E.C.). The SPLC is supporting the P.E.C.’s efforts to make sure that the land is utilized in a approach that advantages the group and safeguards its future.
“What we’ve carried out has been awakening the roots of Eatonville,” mentioned Julian Johnson, a 29-year-old monetary providers skilled who grew up within the city and returned to stay there after faculty. Johnson mentioned he found the event proposal when, involved in investing within the city, he attended a planning assembly.
“For too lengthy, the descendants of the individuals who attended that faculty, who’ve roots in Eatonville, have felt unvoiced. Now our story is getting on the market, and our group is studying what’s happening and the way they are often efficient within the struggle,” Johnson concluded.
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Coalescing opposition
The proposal requires constructing greater than 300 residential housing models, each multi-family and single-family, together with intensive business, workplace and retail house, on a tract that makes up greater than 15% of the 1.6-square-mile city that’s 6 miles north of Orlando. Till now, at the same time as surrounding communities within the booming space have been reworked by high-priced developments, Eatonville, the place 73% of residents are Black, has retained its modest panorama of historic, wooden body properties.
The event plans got here to fruition quietly throughout the top of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, largely unnoticed and unremarked. However in latest months, opposition to the proposal has coalesced. Eatonville residents have packed informational conferences sponsored by Mayor Angie Gardner in partnership with the P.E.C. Residents, together with city elders, have taken the microphone to talk passionately about their reminiscences of the city’s previous and their fears for its future.
What’s extra, activists have picketed outdoors the places of work of the Orange County Public Colleges (OCPS), which is in search of to promote the property to a improvement group for $14.6 million. In 1951, the college district bought the Hungerford college property from the trustees who owned it, beneath a deed restriction that the college would proceed for use to coach Black kids. The varsity district later bought off a portion of the property as a result of development of Interstate 4.
The remaining parcel retained the deed restriction till June 8, 2022, when it was launched via a settlement settlement between the City of Eatonville, OCPS, and the successor trustees of the Hungerford belief. Underneath the settlement, the college district agreed to pay $1 million to the Robert Hungerford Chapel Belief for the discharge of the deed restriction. Nonetheless, beneath a 2019 gross sales contract, the college district agreed to promote the property to the city for $10 million plus the reimbursement of sure prices, together with the $1 million for the deed launch.
Now a number of residents teams, comprising a broad vary of Eatonville residents, are crying foul. They need the land to turn into dwelling to a cultural, instructional and tourism hub that may honor the historical past of the city, which is inextricably linked to the legacy of the unique Robert Hungerford Preparatory Faculty. A few of these residents teams have established web sites opposing the sale of the property, and greater than 1,300 individuals have signed an on-line petition.
In the course of the week after Christmas, citizen activists put up 60 yard indicators emblazoned with “Landback!” on streets surrounding the Hungerford property and on Kennedy Boulevard, the city’s foremost road. Different teams are holding group conferences and planning protest occasions throughout the Hurston competition. Some activists marched within the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Opposition to the event has been the topic of stories experiences and has been circulating extensively on social media. On Feb. 14, probably the most outstanding historic preservation group in Eatonville, the P.E.C., will maintain the primary of a sequence of group conferences on land improvement points and the way forward for Eatonville.
‘Democracy in motion’
In October, Johnson and two different Eatonville residents drove to Orlando with plans to talk out in regards to the improvement of the Hungerford tract at a gathering of the OCPS Board. Once they weren’t permitted to talk as a result of they’d not made preparations prematurely, they stood outdoors with placards.
“Save the Hungerford Property!” learn one.
John Beacham, 64, carried an indication that learn “Don’t let Eatonville down! Give again the land.”
A panorama contractor, Beacham was born and raised in Eatonville. He calls the plan to promote the Hungerford property “a shame.”
“That land was donated for the schooling of Black individuals solely twenty years after the top of slavery,” Beacham mentioned. “I believe the city council doesn’t know the entire story of Eatonville. They consider that OCPS owns the property, and so they assume OCPS is doing them a favor. However that is our land. That is land that we’ve a relationship with. This land was taken from us, and we would like it to be given again. The best way it was taken was predatory. The thought was to take the land from individuals they categorised as simply these uneducated Negroes. It’s about greed. It’s about financial injustice. It’s a kick within the face.”
The rising consciousness stands in stark distinction to the second the undertaking first got here earlier than Eatonville’s city council in September. At that time, few Eatonville residents have been conscious that adjustments is perhaps afoot for the old fashioned property, lengthy overgrown and shielded by chain hyperlink fencing. The land had stood quiet since 2009, when, amid falling enrollment, the college district closed Hungerford Excessive Faculty.
In 2020, the college board demolished the college constructing. Council members, all with deep ties to the city, have been introduced this previous September with plans that appeared to vow financial revitalization. They have been break up on whether or not to approve the rezoning that paves the best way for the event to maneuver ahead. Three members permitted the measure, citing a priority that Eatonville’s financial improvement is being left behind amid a blistering actual property market. Two members, together with the mayor, voted towards it.
Since then, the founder and government director of the P.E.C., N.Y. Nathiri, and others have labored arduous to deliver the main points of the event proposal to gentle.
“The contract with the developer was the catalyst, it was the wake-up name when it comes to the should be far more proactive, far more aggressive when it comes to defending the city’s historical past and its future,” Nathiri mentioned. “That is the quintessential democracy in motion. Individuals have been placing strain on their elected officers. This isn’t a carried out deal.”
Historic roots
Final month, urged by residents to offer the event proposal a better look, the city council pushed again the second listening to on the measure, in addition to amendments to its common complete plan and zoning adjustments which can be wanted to clear the best way for the plan to proceed. If there’s a vote on the proposed zoning and complete plan adjustments on Feb. 7 and that vote goes their approach, builders may shut on the contract with the college district by March 31.
Solely a real awakening from the residents of Eatonville can hold that from taking place, mentioned Vera King, 85, who has lived in Eatonville for many of her life. Born within the city, King attended the Hungerford college from eighth via 12th grade. As an grownup, she labored as a bookkeeper, first for the college after which for the general public college district, for 28 years.
King and her era are a bridge to the Eatonville of reminiscence. The city was one in all 2,000 Black settlements based within the U.S. within the years after the Civil Conflict by newly emancipated individuals hoping to determine communities the place they may thrive in relative security. Merchandise of excruciating discrimination and segregation, the settlements grew to become, for his or her residents, facilities of independence, self-worth and, in each sense of the phrase, the pursuit of happiness.
Of the settlements, fewer than 200 grew to become all-Black included communities with autonomous Black metropolis governments. Eatonville, included by 27 Black males in 1887, was one of many first. The institution of the city was made doable partly by New York philanthropist Lewis Lawrence, who managed to bypass the reluctance of native white residents to promote to Black consumers by buying 22 acres from a buddy and former captain within the Union Navy, Josiah Eaton. Lawrence subdivided the land into small, reasonably priced heaps and designated by deed that they be bought “to coloured individuals solely,” in accordance with the needs of the Black consumers that the land turn into a middle of Black self-government.
“A few of the issues that the council is presenting and outsiders are presenting would quickly make us fade away,” King mentioned. “We’re being closed in already by the companies which can be coming in. We don’t even have our personal ZIP code. We’re dropping our id and until we get the group, together with our council, getting in the identical route, nicely, earlier than lengthy there will likely be no Eatonville. It’s going to have been completely taken over, and the one factor left would be the reminiscence.”
These reminiscences are sturdy to a lot of King’s era. Once they have been rising up, Hurston, whose father was Eatonville’s third mayor, was already a legendary determine within the Harlem Renaissance, having written of the city’s founding via the eyes of her foremost character in her most well-known novel, Their Eyes Have been Watching God. The Robert Hungerford Preparatory Faculty was a middle of Black studying in Eatonville, and the city was dwelling to a profitable music membership that hosted Black performers, together with B.B. King, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and James Brown.
Eatonville is “a remarkably well-documented, traditionally Black township with ties to a significant Black literary determine, and people two issues collectively give it a significant punch,” mentioned Scot French, an affiliate professor of historical past on the College of Central Florida who has spent years finding out the group. “All that I believe is endangered by this improvement, as a result of there is no such thing as a effort being made to make sure that a way of this nice historical past, this present, will likely be constructed into it. Persons are simply drained. They don’t assume sufficient consideration has been given to the chances.”
Pondering huge
Louise Franklin is 86. She grew up within the neighboring city of Maitland and walked 10 minutes via the woods each morning to get to the Hungerford college. She spent a part of most Sundays in Eatonville, on the Methodist church she attended together with her household.
In these days, Franklin mentioned, she felt surrounded by individuals who appeared like her and who shared her experiences.
“It was only a lovely campus,” Franklin mentioned. “There was a boys dorm, a women dorm, a lecturers dormitory. You felt good strolling there. You felt good going strolling beneath the timber. They’d cows, the younger boys they went out and planted a backyard. Oh sure, we did all the pieces the old style approach.”
As of late Franklin lives in Maitland together with her niece in a house her mother and father purchased after the home she grew up in was destroyed by a hurricane.
“I’m simply so sorry that is taking place,” Franklin mentioned of the proposed improvement. “I’m so dissatisfied that it happened.”
This isn’t the primary risk to Eatonville’s existence. In 1987, a deliberate freeway widening would have lower 5 lanes of pavement proper via the middle of city. The widening was scuttled after Nathiri, a former college librarian and group faculty writing trainer who had been raised in Eatonville, rallied residents towards it, founding the preservation group the place she is now government director. Kennedy Boulevard, which runs via the guts of Eatonville, stays a two-lane street.
Quickly after, Nathiri helmed efforts not solely to protect the city however to realize recognition of its historic significance. In January 1990, the primary Zora Neale Hurston Competition of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA! Competition) attracted greater than 10,000 individuals to lectures, an artwork exhibition and an outside competition. It has been the cultural centerpiece of the city ever since.
As of late, Nathiri is making an attempt to get city leaders to assume huge once more. As an alternative of ceding the Hungerford property to builders, she envisions the creation of a Zora Neale Hurston Campus for the Arts, Humanities and the Sciences, the place as an alternative of condos and franchise shops, cultural heritage vacationers would deliver vitality – and assets – to the city.
‘Purchased out, shut out’
About 130 miles from Eatonville, a state historic marker stands the place a spot named Rosewood as soon as thrived. Like Eatonville, Rosewood was a middle-class, predominantly Black city pleased with its historical past. A century in the past, in January 1923, it was worn out, burned to the bottom by white townspeople from surrounding communities, its Black males, ladies and youngsters both murdered or compelled to flee.
On a latest day, John Anderson, 83, was interested by Rosewood, and about Eatonville.
Anderson grew up on the Hungerford property, a quiet, studious boy whose mother and father taught on the Hungerford Preparatory Faculty. Whereas different boys have been taking pictures marbles, he recalled, he was dwelling along with his books. Anderson graduated at 15 from highschool and at 19 from faculty. He served within the U.S. Military and labored for years in metropolis authorities in Washington, D.C. Now he lives in Rockledge, Florida, about 6 miles east of Eatonville.
From his vantage level, Anderson says, it’s obvious that Eatonville faces a risk to its very existence.
“You take a look at Rosewood. All that’s left of Rosewood is that marker,” Anderson mentioned. “Rosewood acquired burnt to the bottom and Eatonville nonetheless survives. There’s sufficient cash and there’s sufficient spirit to assist protect Eatonville whether it is carried out proper.”
If not?
“Eatonville will likely be worn out,” Anderson mentioned. “As a result of individuals need that land. It will likely be simply one other bump within the street. It’s going to have the identical shops and the identical homes as all over the place round it, and new individuals will are available and they’re going to elect who they need to elect. Eatonville will likely be forgotten, purchased out, shut out, until somebody who has the endurance is keen to struggle for it.”
Image at high: A proposed improvement in Eatonville, Florida, threatens to erase the city’s legacy as one of many oldest included Black communities within the U.S. “A few of the issues that the council is presenting and outsiders are presenting would quickly make us fade away,” says Vera King, 85, who was born in Eatonville. (Credit score: Alfonso Duran)