Is Eatonville or St. Augustine the right spot for a Florida Black History Museum?

After months of lobbying and debate, the choice has come down between Eatonville and St. Augustine, the clear front-runners to be home to the first Florida Museum of Black History. The two appear to be neck-and-neck in the view of a splintered task force which must recommend a site by the end of next month.

Separated by 100 miles, the communities — one in Central Florida, the other in the northeast corner of the state — each make a spirited claim to be the best spot for the museum, proposed by Orlando Rep. Bruce Antone, approved by the Legislature and signed off last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis. But their bids have sharply different strengths and appeals.

How do they stack up?

Backers of Eatonville’s bid, ranked tops by five of the nine task force members, insist the museum would be more successful in the small Black town because of its proximity to Orlando, the nation’s tourism capital, while St. Augustine supporters say their location is more appropriate because of its tapestry of African American history dating back centuries to the continent’s first free Black settlement.

While both historical significance and the ability to be self-sustaining financially are key concepts, the task force has other issues to consider. The panel closely evaluated eight bids across seven categories including appropriateness of location, regional demographics and education resources.

The average score of task force members favored St. Augustine/St. Johns County over Eatonville by about 1.5 points, skewed by a Jacksonville-area panelist who gave St. Augustine a perfect score while ranking Eatonville 32 points lower, the town’s lowest total. No other bid is within 10 points of the top two.

The panel, chaired by state Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, head of the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture on South Street in Parramore, meets Tuesday, its second-to-last scheduled session before the recommendation is due July 1.

How much deference the legislature and governor will give that recommendation is yet to be seen.

Thompson noted the legislation creating the museum requires the task force’s report to include a plan to sustain it, one reason the selection of a site is critical.

“The state doesn’t want to perpetually fund the museum,” she said.

HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE

Eatonville, established in 1887 by newly freed slaves, is the oldest incorporated Black municipality in the United States.

Demetrius Pressley, Eatonville’s chief administrative officer, describes the Black-run town as “living history.”

While that distinction is significant, St. Augustine has more history to tout.

“Most of the people who come here are looking for history,” said Gayle Phillips, a task force member and executive director of a Black history museum in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighborhood, established in 1866 by former slaves. “People going to Orlando are looking for Mickey.”

St. Augustine figured prominently in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin.

The city was a site of lunch counter sit-ins, marches and other demonstrations, including an incident at the Monson Motor Lodge downtown where Black and White “integrationists” jumped into the motel pool in protest of segregation. The motel manager then poured muriatic acid, a cleaning agent, into the water and photographers documented the scene.

The images outraged President Lyndon B. Johnson who said the incident “underscored the need for civil rights action.”

Within weeks, Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center boasts a trove of Civil Rights artifacts, including the fingerprint card of the era’s most iconic figure, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was arrested in St. Augustine in June 1964 with other Black leaders for requesting service at a segregated restaurant.

Before his arrest in St. Augustine, King visited Orlando in March 1964, addressing a crowd of 2,000 people at Tinker Field, according to an account at the Orange County Regional History Center.

The History Center notes, “For members of the black community, the rally marked the first time they were allowed to sit in the ‘whites only’ grandstand.’ The structure was torn down in 2015 to make room for work at the adjacent sports venue, now know as Camping World Stadium.

The St. Augustine/St. Johns County proposal also boasts Fort Mose (pronounced Moe-zay), a sanctuary in the 1700’s for slaves fleeing bondage in British colonies in the Carolinas. Once unknown, the outpost on the Atlantic coast, rediscovered in the 1980’s and now a national landmark and state park, is recognized as the first legally sanctioned free African settlement in what would become the United States.

Enslaved people who made their way to Fort Mose in Spanish-controlled Florida, a journey of 300 miles for many of the 100 estimated Blacks who risked their lives to come, could win their freedom by pledging allegiance to the king of Spain and converting to Catholicism.

While advocates for St. Augustine contend that Eatonville’s history can’t match theirs, the town nine miles north of Orlando cites a pair of important race-related Central Florida injustices in its bid, the Ocoee Massacre of 1920 and the ordeal of the Groveland Four.

Sparked by a dispute at a polling site on Election Day 1920, an armed and deputized White mob attacked a Black neighborhood in Ocoee, setting fire to homes, churches and fraternal lodges, killing a still undetermined number of people and lynching Julius “July” Perry, a Black landowner and labor broker who had registered Blacks and women to vote. No one was prosecuted for the killings.

In the Groveland case, documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, four young Black men were wrongfully accused of raping a White woman on a roadside in rural Lake County in 1949. One was murdered by a posse, another was shot to death by Sheriff Willis McCall, and two were convicted by all-white juries.

Judge exonerates Groveland Four in notorious rape case from 1949

Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights lawyer who would become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, represented one of the accused, Walter Irvin, in a retrial. The famed jurist stayed in Orlando at the Wells’Built Hotel, which was listed in “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book,” a register of hotels and restaurants that welcomed people of color in a hostile and segregated South.

Though none of the Four lived long enough to see justice prevail, they were exonerated in 2021.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Both St. Augustine and Eatonville claim Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, now regarded among the 20th century’s most influential writers for her novels and short stories which often depicted African American life in the South. Her best known work, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” is set partly in Eatonville, Hurston’s childhood home.

But she served as an instructor in the 1940’s at the Florida Normal Industrial and Memorial College in St. Augustine, which would become Florida Memorial University. She also was married to a musician at the St. Johns County Courthouse in 1927, but the union lasted just three months.

Since 1990, Eatonville has staged the annual “ZORA! Festival” in Hurston’s honor. Organizers tout it as “the nation’s longest running arts and humanities festival celebrating the cultural contributions that people of African ancestry have made to the world.”

In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote, “I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back–side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town–charter, mayor, council, town marshal town.”

Will a Florida museum on Black history tell whole story? Some worry it won’t.

TODAY’S SETTING

Eatonville’s best argument to be the museum’s home is the crowds it can draw.

“From my experience with theme parks, we always studied a destination before we built anything,” said Terry Prather, a former president of SeaWorldOrlando with nearly three decades experience in the tourism and hospitality industries. “We made sure we understood who was there, who would come there, how they’d get there and will they spend money.”

Situated in Orange County, which welcomed 74 million visitors last year and set a new record with $359 million in tourist-tax collections, Eatonville has a clear advantage over St. Augustine.

Its proposed site, 10 vacant acres carved from the former Hungerford School property and owned by Orange County Public Schools, is easily visible from the eastbound lanes of Interstate 4, and is 20 miles from Orlando International, the state’s busiest airport. The school district and Eatonville are working out details of a lease-purchase agreement for a nominal fee.

The museum also would be 19 miles from the Orange County Convention Center, a potentially abundant source of visitors.

The meeting place, the nation’s second-largest, hosted 1.6 million visitors in 2023, including large gatherings for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Society of Black Engineers, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., Love United Global, and Potter House, whose attendees would presumably be interested in the state’s rich Black history and a new museum to showcase it.

Prather said the task force understands the nexus between tourism and the museum’s success.

“Locating it in the number one visitor’s destination in the U.S. gives you the highest possibility of connecting with the most people,” he said. “If you hope to sustain it, you’d want to put it where you can get the most customers.”

St. Augustine, in contrast, has chosen a location on its west side that once was part of a large sugar plantation which relied on slave labor. It’s an hour’s drive from Interstate 4, the nearest major highway, and 90 minutes from Interstate 75. The closest airport is Jacksonville International, a good hour away.

The proposed 14.5-acre site, owned by Florida Memorial University, would be leased to St. Johns County by the historically Black college which relocated to South Florida amid racial unrest in the 1960’s.

According to the St. Augustine/St. Johns County museum bid, the county welcomed 10.2 million tourists in 2023. That’s about 14 percent of the Orlando area’s total.

POLITICS

Like any selection process — and especially one involving elected officials — the choice of a location for the Black History Museum has strong political undertones. Each site may win support for reasons other than sheer merit.

Thompson, the task force chair, is clearly an Eatonville partisan, though she is credited with running a fair process. To many who have watched the task force work, the most obvious bias has come from panelist Kiyan Michael, because of the wide gap between her evaluations of St. Augustine and Eatonville.

Michael, a Republican legislator from Jacksonville Beach, awarded St. Augustine/St. Johns County a perfect score of 110, but gave Eatonville just a 78, the lowest mark for the town’s bid of any task force member.

“Her scoring was inexplicable to me,” Thompson said.

Michael, appointed to the panel by Speaker of the House Paul Renner, whose district includes St. Johns County, did not respond to an email or phone calls.

It is difficult to say how much the task force’s scoring will matter in the end.

The legislation creating the task force calls for it to report its recommendation to the governor, the house speaker, the senate president, and the ranking minority members of each chamber. It does not say that they must follow the recommendation, or even create a process for them to consider it.

If politics matters, though, it’s worth noting that St. Johns County is overwhelmingly Republican in its makeup, as is most of Florida’s political leadership. Orange County, in contrast, is among the state’s bluest locales.

shudak@orlandosentinel.com

Comparing sites

Eatonville/Orange

1st incorporated Black town

Home of Zora Neale Hurston

74M tourists annually

Leans Democratic

St. Augustine/St. Johns

1st free Black settlement

Civil rights battleground

10.2M tourists annually

Heavily Republican