In the 1890s, the Florida city in which I live was a small village getting ready to put a branch of railroad in from the mainline on the opposite side of the bay. Black laborers were imported from south Georgia to lay the track and build the passenger and industrial facilities in town. Up until that time, there was only one local black family, headed by an orchard man who, for the previous twenty years, had lived and worked a large section of land he had homesteaded that stretched from the south edge of town to the bay. History shows the patriarch, Gillespie, took part in commerce and was respected by town merchants and by his neighbors, all white homesteaders.
In came the black railroad laborers and, soon after, their families arrived. They settled at the south edge of town on Gillespie’s land in a dogpatch of self-built shacks. A community of sorts was formed. The women soon found employment as domestics. When the railroad was completed, many of these families stayed on and this became the town’s segregated black section.
Over the next twenty years, they built churches and developed their own small business section. They provided common labor and domestic help for the wealthy and middle class of he city and, at times, they were a political football for the powerful. Unemployment was traditionally high in the black section and sometimes there was trouble. To many poor and working class whites, the black people of the south side of town represented serious job competition and were considered an expendable nuisance.
I have found documentation of two lynchings from this period. In one newspaper article from 1919, a black man was hung from a telegraph pole on the south edge of downtown and while still alive, beaten, cut upon (ears, nose and privates were taken as souvenirs) and shot numerous times. The article states that a “woman in furs known to us all” arrived in her chauffeured sedan with the top down, stood up from the back seat and emptied a revolver into the pulverized body hanging from the pole. He was then lit on fire. The man was left hanging there for two more days until the town constable cut him down and took him to the black section of potters field.
So, as the village became a town and the town became a city, both the white and black sections grew. It became imperative around 1920 that a natural gas tank storage farm be placed near town to feed the white homes (Most black homes were on dirt roads, had no plumbing and certainly no electricity or gas at this time). The Gas Plant was plopped down right on top of this black section and caused the relocation of 90% of its population further south into the old Gillespie homestead—further from the white community in which most of them worked.
Eventually, over the next 40 years, this black diaspora became a string of well defined neighborhoods with two culturally rich business sections with one containing a small, but popular nightclub that, because of the connections of its owner, often featured major headliners such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Charlie Bird Parker and eventually Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis when they were travelling through the chitlin circuit in Florida. Whites, except for some bohemians or beats such as Jack Kerouac (his mom lived in town), rarely patronized this club.
In the late 1960s the city decided it needed an overhead freeway feeder through to downtown. They put it through the areas that were historically black neighborhoods. This caused the expected noise and localized air pollution and general blight on the edges of the freeway, cut neighborhoods in half and killed two black, culturally rich, business areas. Today, if you look on a city map, you can see how contorted the freeway is; almost as if the planners were determined to hit every black neighborhood south of town.
By the mid 70s, these had become mean, isolated ghettos with no cultural foci. Today, this is where one goes to buy crack cocaine. The rapid staccato of automatic weaponry can be heard some nights coming from this side of town and police will not enter some of these areas unless absolutely necessary. There have been riots. It has become a black hole for federal, state and municipal improvement funding.
You can ask most people in town today, both white and black, from the mayor on down, about the old Gillespie Homestead, the Gas Plant, the famous little night club in the thriving black business section and the strange contortions our branch of the freeway takes through the south side of town, and they won’t know what you are talking about.
That’s Deep South environmental racism.
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