In Hurston’s Florida hometown, development plans inspire a revolt

My nominee for the title of the Toughest Florida Writer Ever is Zora Neale Hurston. She’s the writer of the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.,” during which she famously described the 1928 hurricane as a “monstropolous beast.”

In the Thirties, when it was uncommon to see a Black lady behind the wheel of a automotive, Hurston drove a speedy roadster everywhere in the state. She visited mines, sawmills and turpentine camps, gathering anthropological information by pretending to be a bootlegger on the lam. Quite a lot of the parents she interviewed had been armed with knives, razors and pistols.

She later wrote that her life was in peril a number of instances: “If I had not learned how to take care of myself … I could have been maimed or killed.”

Hurston discovered that confidence whereas rising up within the Central Florida city of Eatonville, simply a few miles north of Orlando. It occurs to be the oldest incorporated Black town in America.

These days Eatonville itself is grappling with a “monstropolous beast,” the one which’s destroying huge swaths of the state: uncontrolled development. In Eatonville, the problem got here to a head in a city council assembly final week — and yielded a stunning outcome.

All over the state, authorities officers are giving the inexperienced mild to rapacious builders. All over the state, persons are preventing again towards development plans that they imagine will break issues about Florida they maintain pricey — their rural life-style, for example, or the pure magnificence that attracted them to the realm.

In Eatonville they’ve one other concern, which recently elected Mayor Angie Gardner spelled out in a December interview with the Orlando Sentinel: “One of the fears is that the wrong development can pretty much cancel out our culture here,” she mentioned.

And you understand how a lot our present state leaders hate “cancel culture.”

‘Something strange’

Gov. Ron “I Only Care About the White Folks Who Watch Fox News” DeSantis would object to me telling you this, however <appears to be like round fastidiously, then lowers voice to a whisper> February is Black History Month.

Florida has a complete bunch of Black historical past to rejoice, too. To title a few, there have been the bloody St. Augustine protests that led Congress to move the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the profitable 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott, and the 1961 “wade-ins” that ended segregation on the seashores of Fort Lauderdale.

The founding of Eatonville predates all of that.

After the Civil War, newly freed slaves flocked to Central Florida, the place they discovered work clearing land, constructing homes and planting crops, in accordance to the town’s official history. But they needed their very own place to dwell as free women and men, the place they had been the voters and managed their very own authorities.

Two white males, Northern philanthropist Lewis Lawrence and native Navy veteran Capt. Josiah Eaton, subdivided greater than 100 acres to get the city began (it’s now greater than 700). The residents formally integrated as a city in 1887 and, at Lawrence’s suggestion, they named it in Eaton’s honor.

“Thus the first town to be organized, governed and incorporated by African-American citizens in this country was born,” the historical past says.

Central to the city sense of neighborhood had been two establishments: a church (the St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal) and a college.

Eatonville’s Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School, based in 1889, was a exceptional place. Back then there weren’t that many colleges of any type round Florida, a lot much less colleges for Black children. Most kids had been anticipated to work, not examine and be taught the best way they did at Hungerford.

Modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Hungerford attracted college students not simply from round Florida, but in addition from Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It even grew to become one thing of a vacationer attraction.

“The whites who came down from the North were often brought by their friends to visit the village school. A Negro school was something strange to them.” Hurston wrote in her 1942 autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road.”

But by 1950, enrollment had dropped and the college had fallen into disrepair. As a outcome, in 1952 one thing I can solely classify as “shady” occurred: The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the privately owned college property should be handed over to the Orange County School Board to run as a segregated public college for Black kids.

Why would the state’s highest court docket do such a factor?

You could discover a clue in the truth that one of many justices — in actual fact, the one who wrote that 1952 opinion — was a former legislator who, in accordance with his official biography,” led an unsuccessful effort to exclude Black residents from the Democratic major election in 1947.” He had “also opposed racial integration at the University of Florida when a qualified black student applied to the law school.”

Gee, what would the controversial Critical Race Theory make of a white supremacist Supreme Court justice main his white colleagues in taking a Black college away from its house owners in a Black-run city and giving it to a white-run college system?

Oh effectively, Florida’s leaders don’t want us to pay any attention to CRT so I assume we’ll by no means know! Sorry!

Anyway, the college board now desires to promote that 100-acre Hungerford parcel to builders, and the builders need to construct one thing that’s not allowed by Eatonville’s complete plan.

Eatonville’s leaders had been nice with that — till they heard from their constituents.

A ‘culture of corruption’

A college board spokesman despatched me a chronology that exhibits that they’ve been working to unload this property for fairly a while. At one level, again in 2010, the college board was even going to promote the land to the town, however then it didn’t.

When I requested why that deal fell by, the spokesman, Michael Ollendorff, mentioned, “I believe they didn’t have the funds to pay for it.”

Apparently, no Northern philanthropists stepped ahead to assist this traditionally Black city give you the dough to purchase the location of the now-demolished college. Go determine.

The present deal, as outlined in that December story within the Sentinel, requires the college board to promote the property for $14 million to a Winter Park-based actual property developer named Hungerford Park LLC.

Corporate information present Hungerford Park LLC is a joint operation of two white guys: Kyle Sanders  of Sovereign Land Co. and Allan Keen of the Keewin Real Property Co.

Sovereign’s website boasts that it’s no novice in terms of actual property wheeling and dealing: “Since 2011, Sovereign has sold over $200 million in real estate, including 2,000 acres of land and 5,000 home sites, to some of the largest and well-established homebuilders, developers, and investors.”

But Sovereign is a piker in comparison with Keen. Thanks to a faculty buddy’s connections, he wound up as the exclusive real estate broker for Universal Studios theme park when it first arrived.

Keen has additionally been a public servant — form of.

He served as chairman of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority for 4 years however resigned amid a rising scandal. Then a 2009 grand jury discovered that, whereas he was chairman, he used a couple of longtime authority consultants to lean on corporations doing enterprise with the company and lift a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} in political contributions for such candidates as U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez.

As a longtime Florida scandal-watcher, I’ve to say that you realize issues look dangerous for you when your legal professional has to insist to the local paper that there was no “culture of corruption” on the company you led, regardless that the grand jury makes use of these actual phrases. However, Keen was by no means charged with any crime.

At the Eatonville college website, Keen and Sanders (to not be confused with the British comedy duo French & Saunders) have proposed constructing about 350 new housing items. It’s a mixture of flats, townhouses, and single-family houses. They additionally plan new shops, eating places and a grocery.

The retail, eating places, and grocery will not be a drawback. But to construct all that upper-echelon housing would require altering the town’s complete plan for the realm’s future progress.

Quite a lot of Florida cities and counties rush to alter their well-thought-out comp plans to accommodate the desires and whims of builders, particularly when these builders are marketing campaign contributors. They are prepared to miss any indicators that the developer isn’t on the up and up, or the venture is on sh-sh-shaky (or soggy) floor. There’s the added worry of a Bert Harris Act go well with towards them in the event that they dare to say no.

So, it’s comprehensible that, at first, the Eatonville Town Council voted 3-2 in favor of adjusting its comp plan to what the developer needed.

But then the folks of Eatonville spoke up.

The proper form of development

I known as up Mayor Gardner to ask her about what occurred. It seems that she’s a pretty affected person individual, even in coping with inveterate sensible alecks like me. She needs to be affected person in her common job.

As far as I do know, she is the one elected official within the state who’s additionally an elementary college trainer. Imagine if one of many characters from the TV present “Abbott Elementary” needed to run a metropolis council assembly, and you may see the similarity of needing a particular set of skills.

I requested her if wrangling a bunch of second graders by a college day was good preparation for coping with the madness of Florida politics. She mentioned each required being prepared to talk up when needed. Then I in contrast a group of short-attention-span children to the Florida Legislature. She received a snicker out of that however properly supplied no remark.

When I requested her what modified in Eatonville after the council’s preliminary approval of the Hungerford venture, she mentioned, “Between the first and second vote, the citizens started expressing their opinions.”

Eatonville residents had been involved that the town was permitting well-connected builders to place up housing that nobody on the town may afford. New folks would transfer in who wouldn’t know a factor in regards to the city’s tradition and heritage — step one towards demolishing it the best way Orange County demolished the old-fashioned.

Gardner agreed with these considerations.

“I’m for development,” the mayor instructed me, “but I’m for the right kind of development, for the right reason.”

Prior to the council’s second vote on the venture final week, the Sentinel reported, Gardner herself made an impassioned speech towards the comp plan change. In it, she “leaned on history to make her point as she rattled through a list of Black settlements and municipalities that, like Eatonville, were founded after the Civil War. The others, however, had long since become just a memory, their futures either taken by force or erased by violent attacks, migration and development.”

She warned towards approving something that will put Eatonville on a comparable path. She additionally mentioned she had “attempted to meet with School Board Chair Teresa Jacobs for several months to discuss the future of the land but her requests have been ignored.”

Ultimately, the council voted 4-1 last week against approving the comp plan adjustments sought by the builders.

What occurs subsequent? Ollendorff, the college board spokesman, instructed me repeatedly that the land deal remains to be scheduled to shut on March 31 and that’s all that company cares about. Gardner mentioned the builders are free to construct issues that jibe with the comp plan, and nothing that doesn’t.

I reached out to Keen and Sanders and their legal professional, Derek Bruce, replied on their behalf.

“The team is evaluating its options and has not made a decision about how — or whether — to move forward with closing on its acquisition of the Hungerford site at this time,” Bruce mentioned.

I hope they go together with the council’s needs, relatively than making an attempt to struggle this in court docket or pull strings with their political connections. After all, they knew what the comp plan mentioned after they agreed to purchase the land.

But in the event that they do search some form of revenge on Eatonville, I hope the ghost of Zora Neale Hurston haunts them, cackling of their ears, giving them stressed nights and rotten desires. Maybe she’ll even pursue them in her speedy roadster, like some form of monstropolous beast.