Eatonville and Zora Neale Hurston, Parramore's Wells'Built Hotel and the memory of Ocoee.
Eatonville And Zora Neale Hurston
Six miles north of Orlando, Eatonville was officially incorporated on August 15, 1887, one of the first self-governing, all-Black towns in the United States. Zora Neale Hurston's family moved there in 1894, when she was very young, and she always called it home. Her father was elected mayor in 1897, and the town appears in many of her stories as a place where Black Americans could live as they wanted.
Eatonville keeps her name alive. In 1990 the town founded the Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Fine Arts, and every winter it stages the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.
Parramore
Parramore grew up as Orlando's segregated African American neighborhood and is still a historic home for the city's residents of African descent. In 1929 Dr. William Monroe Wells, one of Orlando's first Black doctors, opened the Wells'Built Hotel there for Black travelers shut out of the city's hotels. Black stars who played the city stayed in Parramore and danced at the South Street Casino next door. Since 2001 the hotel has been the Wells'Built Museum of African American History, at 511 West South Street.
Interstate 4 was later built directly between Parramore and the city's wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods.
Ocoee, 1920
On November 2, 1920, presidential election day, Mose Norman tried to vote in nearby Ocoee. White mobs from Orlando and Orange County responded by lynching July Perry and burning at least twenty-five Black-owned homes, two churches and a Black fraternal lodge. In 2019 a historical marker to Perry was dedicated in Heritage Square, and in 2020 Florida passed a law to include the massacre in the teaching of African American history.
Black Orlando Today
On the west side of Division Avenue in Parramore, grocery stores, barber shops and soul food restaurants carry on the neighborhood's business life, and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Orlando.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Orlando on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Eatonville Town Hall. Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons The Holden-Parramore Historic District. Photo: Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons