Ybor City's Afro-Cubans, Clara Frye's hospital and the music of Central Avenue.
La Unión Martí-Maceo
In late 1900, as Jim Crow laws took hold, Ybor City's Cuban club began shutting out its Black members. In October that year twenty-four Afro-Cubans formed a society of their own, Los Libres Pensadores de Martí y Maceo, named for José Martí and Antonio Maceo, leaders of the Cuban War of Independence. It grew into La Unión Martí-Maceo, a mutual aid society and social club at the center of Afro-Cuban life in Tampa. Its hall, built in 1908, was demolished in 1965 under an urban renewal program.
Clara Frye
In 1908, after nursing Black patients informally, Clara Frye opened a hospital in her own home, at the time the only hospital in Tampa that admitted Black patients. The Clara Frye Memorial Hospital in West Tampa, open from 1938 to 1967, carried her name, and in 1991 the original Tampa General Hospital building was renamed in her honor.
Central Avenue
Central Avenue was once the heart of Tampa's African American community, a thriving Black business district and entertainment hot spot. The Cotton Club there hosted Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, and Hank Ballard wrote The Twist after watching young people on Central Avenue doing a new dance. Ray Charles drew inspiration there too.
The street was taken by eminent domain and razed for interstate construction and a park. The Cotton Club, the last business standing in the historic Black section of the avenue, closed in 1974. A historical marker on the grounds of Perry Harvey Sr. Park now tells its story.
Black Tampa Today
From Ybor City to the park on old Central Avenue, Tampa's Black and Afro-Cuban history is part of the city's map, and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Tampa.
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