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Saturday, February 25, 2006

Early area histories ignore blacks

By RONALD WILLIAMSON
Daytona Beach News-Journal Columnist

The shadowy figures hold shovels or sit in wagon seats behind mules. Some are in orange groves, others near a turpentine still.

They’re scattered in the backgrounds and on the edges of many photographs in the history books that tell stories of the place we live. They’re the anonymous, uncredited players in our common heritage.

That’s not because they are unimportant in our history. It’s because the contributions of African-Americans were for many years marginalized, or simply absent.

The absence is particularly blatant in books published before the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. Since then, a greater effort has been made to create more inclusive histories. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re light years ahead of earlier efforts, and future histories will be even better because of it.

The two earliest histories of this area, published in 1927 and 1937, ignore settlers and citizens of African-American descent. Slaves are mentioned, but only in the context of white owners. No details are offered of a slave’s life or of black society in the early days.

In 1953, the Volusia County Commission appointed eight members to the new County Historical Commission and directed it to publish the official history of the county’s first 100 years. The little green book was the “Centennial History of Volusia County, Florida.”

It is, in fact, the Centennial History of White People in Volusia County. Except for about four pages telling the inspirational story of Mary McLeod Bethune — and her white benefactors — references to blacks are meager.

Athlete Jackie Robinson gets part of a sentence, as does a nameless black patriot hanged in the Civil War. A “Negro” hospital in Daytona Beach gets two sentences. Two “colored” kindergartens get a sentence as projects of a white club. White churches are detailed; black churches ignored.

The white county commission appointed white citizens who wrote a white history. It was a product of the times. Probably no one questioned it.

Which is too bad. Researchers not only lost irretrievable opportunities, but hampered later efforts. Most histories rely on previous histories, and biases can be perpetuated again and again.

The African-American population in Volusia and Flagler counties is a little less than 10 percent — much more, and much less, in different cities. If 10 percent of our written histories were about black history, we would have a more accurate view of the place we live. The absence of that history gives the false impression that black people, and their contributions, are of little value.

Finding black history isn’t as easy as finding white history because it’s not written. It’s mostly oral, in the minds and memories of living people. It’s in family stories, passed down for generations.

There are people here whose mothers and fathers, as children, knew relatives who were born as slaves. They heard firsthand stories of migration to Florida and the hardships of building a life as farmers, carpenters, doctors, merchants, ministers and teachers.

In the 1970s, an ancient, dusky little man in Seville named Ike Ward, aged 112, stopped hoeing in his garden to tell me stories he heard from his slave-born parents. He was a living link to what seems ancient history.

The past is not as far past as we sometimes think.

Gina Gillislee-Hickman knows this.

The artist’s brush strokes record black history as she creates murals in Spring Hill, the largest historically black community in West Volusia. Her murals on walls near Beresford Avenue bear the faces of some 100 black citizens of her community.

The information she gathers doesn’t come from books, but from family albums and older residents who heard stories told by parents and grandparents. That’s where the real black history is, she told me.

It’s understandable that Black History Month, now almost over, is controversial. Black history is American history and shouldn’t need a special month. But it does. We all need that focus as an impetus to catch up.

Contributions of black Americans have been so neglected that there is much to get on the record. The special month inspires many who write the first rough drafts of history for newspapers and magazines to forget about libraries and published books and, instead, seek out untold stories from living repositories.

This month I read a News-Journal story about the remnants of Red City, a once-vibrant black neighborhood near downtown DeLand. It has been here 100 years, but I suspect no one had ever written about Red City. Now, its existence, and those who lived there, is in the written record.

Future historians will find that story and others, and use them to create fuller, more accurate narratives about this place we live. When that happens, Black History Month will be obsolete.

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