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day, February 6, 2005
Ex-church now houses important pieces of past
By MELANIE STAWICKI AZAM | News-Journal Staff Writer
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — Mary Harrell isn’t sure how she became head of the committee to save St. Rita’s Catholic Church — and later the director of the Black Heritage Museum that it now houses.
“I was either elected or selected,” the 71-year-old woman said with a laugh. But Harrell, who happens to be a Methodist, said somehow she came to adopt, like an orphaned child, the old wooden church where blacks worshipped before desegregation.
When she’s not working at the museum, she’s seeking a grant for it or organizing a community event to raise funds for its upkeep. Through painstaking research about the community, she has created exhibits about the local black community’s history, leaders, landmarks and culture.
“It’s just a part of me,” Harrell said, looking around the museum.
Built in 1899, the small wooden structure housed the original Sacred Heart Catholic Church for the city’s white population. But in 1956, it was moved to Duss Street in the West Side community and became St. Rita’s, a mission for the city’s black Catholic population. They worshipped there until the Sacred Heart parish, on Turnbull Street, integrated in 1969. Later, the building was used as a day-care center, until it eventually was boarded up and condemned by the city.
It may be fitting that St. Rita is the patron saint of the impossible. St. Rita’s was slated for demolition in 1999 and a local committee of both whites and blacks fought to save it and raise funds to restore it. The restoration was successful, even securing state grants.
The only problem was no one wanted to take over the building and maintain it afterward — neither local colleges, churches nor the city itself, said Harrell, who chaired the restoration committee. Even fellow committee members had their doubts whether there would be enough money to maintain it, she said.
So Harrell, founder of the community’s Black Heritage Festival, volunteered herself and her husband, Jimmy, to maintain it. The building was put under the umbrella of the nonprofit Black Heritage Festival, an annual event since 1992 that grew out of Mary Harrell’s efforts to document the area’s history. Some funds from the three-day festival starting going to help fund the museum’s operation.
As for its daily upkeep, that falls to the Harrells, residents of New Smyrna Beach since 1960.
“So here we are,” Mary Harrell said. “I’m stuck on the inside and he’s stuck on the outside. And so far, we’ve been making it.”
She smiled as she recalled one local youth asking her how much she got paid for the job.
“I said, ‘It costs me money to stay here,’ ” Harrell said with a chuckle.
But the retired educator has her reasons for her work. Harrell’s great-grandmother was born a slave in Georgia. Later generations were free, but still suffered the pain of segregation and inequality.
“I always thought that we, as a people, didn’t get the credit (we deserved),” she said. Harrell recalled working as a teen at a cafeteria — stuck in the back kitchen with the other blacks and paid less than the whites working out front. As a young pregnant wife in Sarasota, she remembers, a white man offered her his seat on the bus. The bus driver stopped and refused to continue driving until she got back up.
Slavery and discrimination may be ugly, but the stories of the past — both good and bad — need to be told, she said.
“I want the children to know that was life then, and if you’re not careful, you’ll slip right back to it,” Harrell said.
Former City Commissioner Oretha Bell said the museum is also a glimpse into the history of the West Side and its residents, as well as holding its genealogical archives.
“St. Rita’s is the reference point for our community,” she said.
Bell, also a longtime West Side resident, said she’s worked with Harrell at the museum and is amazed by her passion for local history. The museum director would go to all sorts of creative lengths to obtain biographical and historical information about the community, including collecting old funeral programs, she said.
“We are proud to have this wealth of information about our local history available to our youngsters,” Bell said. “Our history was left out of the books.”
St. Rita’s also holds a lot of memories for West Side residents like Montez James, a member of the old congregation. She recalled organizing fish dinners on Fridays, playing the organ and celebrating Christmas and Easter with the tightknit congregation of about 20 families.
“I have wonderful memories of baptisms, confirmations and first Communions there,” the 84-year-old woman said.
James was a member of the Madonna House, which was a Catholic chapel for blacks in an old neighborhood boarding house, and then St. Rita’s Catholic Church. It was depressing to think the old church would be torn down, after the tiny congregation had devoted their offerings for years to maintain it and she said she was so pleased it was preserved.
“To have that physical reminder there still existing . . . it’s a comforting reminder,” she said.
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