By John Bozzo | News-Journal Staff Writer

DAYTONA BEACH — No maps of Volusia County show New Town, Silver Hill, Waycross and Midway. They're ghost towns from this city's past.

No visible trace remains of those towns that Samuel Rogers, Oliver Perkins and Robert Thompson reminisced about recently in a recreation room at Mount Zion AME Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

"We were segregated," Rogers said. "We were segregated in schools. Limits were put on our ability to pursue our dreams, if we had any. There wasn't anything to do but work for white people."

The railroad tracks were the dividing line between white and black communities from Savannah, Ga., to Key West, the men said as they rested on metal folding chairs in the church. In Daytona Beach, the four distinct black neighborhoods were clustered between Shady Place and George Engram Boulevard.

"Our parents created situations for us to grow and develop. Church was the heart of our community. It was where we worshiped, where we socialized and where we wore our good clothes," Rogers said.

Rogers, 70, grew up in Daytona Beach and graduated from Bethune-Cookman College. He taught school in Miami for about 10 years and finished his career as a university and county administrator there. He returned here after retiring about six years ago.

Growing up, Rogers said, life seemed normal until he got to segregated Campbell High School and wound up wearing hand-me-down football uniforms from white Mainland High.

"At that point, I really started thinking something was wrong," he said.

Perkins, 81, was raised in Daytona Beach and graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He retired after 25 years of teaching at Daytona Beach Community College that included being chairman of the math department and dean of arts and sciences. He recalled flourishing businesses in the black community years ago, groceries, billiard parlors, restaurants, clothing stores.

His mother worked "on premises." That meant she lived in and took care of a home for a white family. That also meant he had more access to the beachside.

"After school, instead of going to our house, I would go across that wooden bridge to Silver Beach," he said. "Everybody knew we were on premises."

Perkins said that he, his friends and the community made the best of things.

"Growing up here enabled me to see how things should be and also how we could employ ourselves to make things better," he said.

Thompson, 75, grew up in Daytona Beach and graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in business administration. After a stint in the Army, he worked for the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C., for 13 years and the Customs Department in Miami for 20 years before retiring in 1982 and moving back here.

"You weren't permitted to do things," he recalled of segregation. "In our own little group, you knew there was a problem. You knew the other side existed, but you couldn't cross over."

Attending Campbell High School drove the point home. Students were issued old books, castoffs from Mainland High.

Thompson said his pet peeve was not being allowed to go to the beach in the city limits. Black people were only allowed to go in the water south of New Smyrna Beach.

"My mom was the attendant at the powder room in the Bandshell," he said. "I went with her to work and couldn't even go to the beach and put my foot in the water. I tried it once and the sheriff warned me not to do it again."

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