And its present isn’t anything to brag about either.
On a cloudless, post-Christmas morning, I put on my walking shoes and parked my car at Orange Avenue and 19th Street, the takeoff point for a self-guided tour of Newtown put together by Newtown Alive, a nonprofit devoted to preserving the history of Sarasota’s African-American neighborhood, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014.
The walking tour, created by Vicky Oldham, a Newtown native and consultant, consists of 15 markers noting historic homes, churches and businesses, with archival information supplied on each one; a free mobile app offers brief recorded oral memories from community elders as well.
Most Sarasotans know that Newtown came into being after residents of Overtown (what we now know as the Rosemary District), the original African-American neighborhood, were systematically displaced via a "slum clearance" project beginning in the late 1950s. As did those displaced residents, I headed north, reading along the way about the Celery Fields and Turpentine Camp where many of Newtown’s residents worked and the Jim Crow laws that forbade them being on the streets after sundown.
At the corner of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way (formerly 33rd Street) and Maple, I took a picture of the Wright Bush house, the first in Newtown to have electricity; it became a gathering place for community residents in Newtown’s early years. Bush, who owned a store in Overtown, was an advocate for education for black children and recruited Emma Booker as the first principal of Sarasota’s first African-American school.
The marker across from what used to be Miss Susie’s Social Club revealed that Mondays were the busiest shopping day on the MLK Way economic corridor, which, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, featured more than 100 thriving businesses, all African-American owned. Mondays, it seems, was the only day women serving as domestics for Sarasota’s white families had off from work.
Plenty of the markers gave reason for dismay. I wasn’t aware that Florida led the Southern states with 161 people lynched from 1886 to 1912. Or that Sarasota continued to honor segregation for a full seven years after Brown vs. Board of Education, until the local NAACP chapter filed suit. It was a shock to learn that it was just over 35 years ago that the electoral process was changed — again by legal action — to allow for the first African-American city commissioner, Fredd Atkins.
The markers also documented examples of an admirable community resiliency and cohesion. When residents boycotted the school busing of the 1970s, they developed "freedom schools" at Newtown’s dozen churches. When "Caucasian Only" signs shut them out of services for health care or economic development, they formed their own "self help" organizations and mutual aid societies, like The Charmettes, the Colored Women’s Club and the Lily White Security Benefit Association, which provided door to door public nursing.
At least two dozen residents offered a bright "Good morning!" as I walked along, including two women who called me "Honey," a few older men who looked surprised but happy to see me, and a half dozen kids on bikes who saw me as an obstacle in their path. (I was.) One woman with three kids near Booker High School inquired if I knew what time the Salvation Army served lunch, then hustled off in that direction. A young man outside the King Meat Mart politely asked for 75 cents; it was hot out and he wanted a soda pop.
The tour took me most of the morning, though I lingered a lot, and it might have been shorter if I’d not followed the numerical order on the app, which suggests a rather counter-intuitive and circuitous route. When I got done — though it wasn’t an official part of the tour — I drove to the old Overtown Cemetery at 6th and Central (now the Rosemary Cemetery), not far from where Lewis Colson, a former slave who later founded Newtown’s first African-American church, Bethlehem Baptist, drove the first stake at Five Points to plot the city of Sarasota in 1884.
Most of the city’s early civic leaders are buried here. The oldest gravestone was dated 1886, the year the cemetery land was set aside by the city; the most recent I could find was 2012, which looked to be part of a multi-generational family. The cemetery was instrumental in forcing the original Overtown residents north; white residents who wanted to visit their relatives’ grave sites objected to having to travel through "Black Bottom."
Colson and his wife, Irene, are the only African-Americans among the dozens buried there. I wondered who had granted that special dispensation and if it had caused any dissension.
I didn’t grow up in the South. Segregation was not an in-my-face reality and neither was diversity; my Michigan high school imported one black student every year so it could claim to be integrated. I did grow up, however, with the teaching that people of all colors are equal. So, by the end of my tour, I was feeling pretty rotten, and it had nothing to do with the unseasonable heat.
I’d often felt the same way during visits to Native American reservations in New Mexico, my home of 20 years. There too, the results of our country’s history of racism and discrimination were painful to a "white girl" who’d grown up with plenty of privilege.
Call it what you want — white guilt, ancestral regret, entitlement remorse. Or simply the kick-in-the-gut recognition that, had I been black, I probably would not be writing this column right now. Worse was realizing that not only does the town I now proudly call home have a painful past, its present isn’t anything to brag about either.
During the more than three hours and several miles of my Newtown tour, I saw about 50 people. Four of those were white; two of those were in cars.
If you think segregation no longer exists in Sarasota, you are sadly mistaken.
Contact columnist Carrie Seidman at 941-361-4834 or carrie.seidman@heraldtribune.com. Follow her on Twitter @CarrieSeidman and Facebook at facebook.com/cseidman.