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By Henderson Bazley
Posted: 7/11/2007 4:06:42 PM
African-Americans have made significant contributions to the development of Florida from the earliest settlement in St. Augustine to key roles in our cultural heritage. They paved the road in Florida's Black History.
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Harry T. Moore
Harry Tyson Moore was a teacher who founded the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Florida. He later helped organize a statewide NAACP organization in Florida.
With the help of the NAACP, Moore filed the first lawsuit in the Deep South in an attempt to equalize pay between black and white teachers.
He and his wife, Harriette V. Moore, were killed on Christmas Eve, 1951, by a bomb; it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Learn more about Harry Moore. |
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Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls, now Bethune-Cookman College. She was active in the fight against racism and served as an unofficial advisor to President Roosevelt. |
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Zora Neale Hurston
Born in the small all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston was to become, the most prolific African-American woman author in the United States for 30 years. Despite this, Hurston and her work drifted into obscurity until her rediscovery in the 1970s. Much of the neglect can be attributed to the controversy that always seemed to surround this independent and free-spirited woman.
Learn more about Zora Neale Hurston.
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James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing, the national anthem to millions of black Americans. He was widely known as a man of many talents, all of which he used in some form to help shape America’s history. Johnson was a poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, lawyer, civil rights leader, editor, educator, and songwriter.
Learn more about James Weldon Johnson.
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The Rev. James Page
The Rev. James Page became the first black ordained minister in Florida, as the first pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Tallahassee, Florida. |
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Virgil Darnell Hawkins
Virgil Hawkins graduated from Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1930, and returned to Daytona Beach to become a teacher and principal. He later became public relations director for Bethune-Cookman College. |
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Rep. Carrie Meek
Rep. Meek wore this prophetic t-shirt in the House chamber. She was later elected to the Senate and then to the U.S. Congress. Meek was the first African-American woman to be elected to the Florida senate. She was a 1992 Florida Women's Hall of Fame inductee.
Learn more about Carrie Meek. |
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Belvin Perry, Sr.
Perry was one of Orlando's first African-American policemen. He joined the Orlando Police Depeartment in 1950 after his discharge from the Army. His legacy lives on through his son, Belvin Perry Jr., a circuit court judge in Central Florida.
Orlando Black School
Located in an old frame building at the corner of Garland Avenue and Church Street, the Orlando Black School was the first African-American school. The school was moved to the corner of Jefferson Street and Chatham Avenue and renamed Johnson Academy, in 1904.
Dr. William Monroe Wells
Dr. William Monroe Wells, one of Orlando’s first black physicians, came to the area in 1917. In 1926, he was issued a building permit to begin construction of the Wells’Built Hotel, to provide lodging to African-Americans during an era of segregation when accommodations were not available to them in other areas of Central Florida.
The hotel has been transformed into a modest museum exhibiting memorabilia from its heyday, in addition to photographs and historical artifacts chronicling the struggle of black people in this city. For more information, visit the official Wells' Built Museum website.
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Lift Every Voice and Sing
Lift ev'ry voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land. |
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