Monday March 22, 2021
Friends,
Welcome to the inaugural posting of my new Blog.
Issue #1
Conversations About Race
My goal for this Blog: To foster racial healing, reconciliation and, yes, forgiveness while laying out the painful truths that remain, often hidden, in our collective history.
In order to heal, we must first acknowledge our wounds. In order to discover the correct remedy, we must first acknowledge the true nature and depth of those wounds.
A Picture of History
This photograph has special meaning for me and for this Blog. It's the dining room of Jacksonville's luxurious St. James Hotel in the 1870s.
These men --- and the women and children in families recently freed from slavery --- also hint at the possibility of racial reconciliation. Their obvious pride foreshadows the healing and forgiveness that we must discover together today in order to move forward.
In 1876 – 1877, my great grandfather, Noah Rollins, was a member of this elegant waitstaff. While I don’t know whether he’s is in this photo, the spirit of the picture captures his life and the lives of his parents, Susan and Charles Rollins. They lived in Tallahassee where Noah was born enslaved. He was freed at Emancipation, in 1865, and moved to Jacksonville 11 years later, at age 22.
The photo conveys family life for many Blacks following Emancipation --- women, men and children recently liberated who, as the old African American folk saying goes, “found a way out of no way.”
The Headwaiter at the hotel was James Johnson, the father of James Weldon Johnson who wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Looking at these men, I realize the power of community that produced that regal anthem.
Following the Civil War, the 500-guest St. James Hotel attracted thousands of wealthy white northerners every winter season. It was a centerpiece of Jacksonville’s economic prosperity.
I love the obvious pride of these men. It embodies my stake in the success of this city after living here for 23 years. Jacksonville will never be a Tier One city until we deal with race. This begins with open conversations, and the acknowledgement of the gross disparities in our history and in our current conditions. Collectively, we can create a new consensus on the depth of our racial crisis and lead the change.
Talking frankly about race can feel painful, emotional and even risky. However, when people gather in a circle where it's safe for them to be who they are, their conversation, when facilitated with skill and sensitivity, becomes a sacred engagement. It has the power to liberate and, ultimately, to heal.
In the words of 12th Century poet Jalal ad—Din Mohammad Rumi:
Out beyond all notions of wrongdoing and righting
there is a field
I will meet you there.
Empathy and understanding enter the room whenever people gather in a circle that's free of judgment to engage in deep listening. This happens because our interconnectedness as human beings is our preferred and natural state. Our wholeness, not our divisions, are the basic reality — Dr. King's "inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
As things stand, it's as if Blacks and whites in America live in two different worlds. Because historically we've been kept apart, not only physically, but also empathetically. In many ways, at the collective level we've lost our feeling for each other . How else to explain the hard fact that the tragic disparities in Black neighborhoods do not enrage whites living in neighborhoods a mile away? We haven't created vehicles to truly know each other.
Recent studies by the Pew Research Center and Gallup polling organization suggest that a majority of both whites and Blacks believe race relations are bad and getting worse.
Why is that?
Jacksonville as a Model for Change
The Disempowerment of LaVilla
The history of the LaVilla neighborhood of Jacksonville is a prime example of the impact of the past on today's disparities.
In the late 1800s, Jacksonville was a predominately-white city of 19,000. The neighboring city of LaVilla was predominately Black, a city of 3,200 led by freed slaves who had flocked there from surrounding plantations after Emancipation.
Freed slaves moved to LaVilla because it was a safe city. It had its own police force and a government that included former slaves. Freedwomen and men were protected from violence in the surrounding countryside. Frequently, LaVilla’s Mayor, city Treasurer and City Council members were Black. Its business leaders, faith leaders and leaders of social organizations were also Black.
Blacks owned successful businesses - a blacksmith and wheelwright shop on Forsyth Street, a shaving salon and public bath, a saloon and furniture store, and several restaurants and grocery stores. Freed slaves had purchased their own homes, often on lots with renewable 99-year leases.
The community was held together by five churches, including the earliest Black Baptist and AME churches in Florida. Its active social organizations included a chapter of the Prince Hall Masons, founded in 1870. Two schools --- Stanton Normal Institute and Cookman Institute — both educated children in the first generation of Blacks legally taught to read, write and count.
While many freed slaves struggled to survive in their newfound freedom, many found work and were paid for the first times in their lives. Some were employed by Black-owned businesses. Others worked for white-owned companies — loading ships on the city's busy docks; laboring in sawmills, planing mills and tack shops; serving in the homes of whites; or working in the St. James Hotel.(1)
Then something happened
Then, in 1888, 23 years after Emancipation, the segregationist white leadership of Jacksonville appealed to the Florida State Legislature to incorporate LaVilla into Jacksonville. Against the wishes of most Blacks in LaVilla, the Legislature granted Jacksonville's leaders their wish.
Overnight, LaVilla became part of Jacksonville. A vibrant, successful Black community was seized, robbed of its autonomy. Its growing power and self-sufficiency was blatantly taken away by Jacksonville's white commercial and political leaders.
The pattern of disempowerment included racial terror lynchings. In Jacksonville, eight Black men were brutally murdered by white mobs. In each of these horrendous killings, extending between 1877 and 1950, Jacksonville police and leaders of government and business looked the other way. No person was ever convicted for any of these brutal murders. Other killings remain undocumented in a countryside where angry former confederate soldiers continued to roam free.
This reign of terror pattern and legal manipulation pattern in Jacksonville played out in Black communities across the country.
According to the National Alliance of Historic Black Towns and Settlements, freed slaves created more than 1,200 successful, self-governing communities. Like LaVilla, they were destroyed or forcefully seized following Reconstruction.
Approximately 40,000 freed slaves settled on 400,000 acres of land. By 1910 Black ownership grew to 14% of American farms with 210,000 Black farmers owning a total of 14 million acres. Today, Blacks own a mere 1% of American farms. The systematic terrorizing through lynching, murder and political manipulation succeeded.
An estimated $3.7 billion in Black assets wound up in the hands of whites. A Congressional Committee is currently exploring reparations to compensate Blacks for land that was stolen through terrorization, fraud or racist policies by the government, banks and insurance companies.
The story doesn't end there. The disempowerment of Blacks that occurred in LaVilla post-Reconstruction was repeated in the consolidation of 1968. Jacksonville, approaching a Black voting majority, was consolidated with the surrounding majority-white towns. As in 1888, a white-dominated State Legislature approved the consolidation. The 1968 consolidation once again decimated growing Black political and economic power.
Last year, in June 2020, Times-Union columnist Nate Monroe published an analysis that was stunning for its historical accuracy and insight. Monroe sums up the consequences of the 1968 consolidation and the betrayal of Black neighborhoods. It's required reading: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2020/06/02/nate-monroe-broken-promise-that-broke-jacksonville/41742035/
The article enumerates some of the institutionalized exclusionary laws, tactics and practices that prevented Blacks in Jacksonville from becoming fully empowered. This systematized racial bias stands like a wall between our communities, with too many Black people unable to build any sort of economic stability, keep a roof over their heads and build a life.
A few years ago a Pew Research study indicated that half of the Black people in America who moved out of poverty in the 1980s and 1990s fell back into poverty — creating a revolving door of impoverishment and instability as opposed to a stable, Black middle class.
Our culture has a difficult history. While it is largely unknown or unacknowledged by whites, the inequities are an old story and enrage most Blacks. Even Black people unaware of the historical details feel the pain and trauma in their everyday lives. For some, it runs so deep we dare not even acknowledge our anguish. It's called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy deGruy.
How do we engage Jacksonville residents in productive, healing dialogue about this history? This is important because the dehumanizing conditions and tragic disinvestment in many Black neighborhoods today are a result of this past.
Can we capture this moment to create a new consensus on the need for change? Can we engage in dialogue that strengthens our interconnectedness, deepens empathy and promotes healing? Of course we can. We can when we decide we will.
As Amanda Gorman wrote in her powerful Inauguration Poem, "The Hill We Climb:"
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it
If only we're brave enough to be it
Then, "How" becomes the question
Fortunately, there are strategies that answer our question:
Local leadership setting a clear vision and placing a priority on racial reconciliation, equity and inclusion.
Small Groups convening on a Massive Scale to listen, learn and understand each other deeply.
Creating a Consensus Agenda for Action — setting goals that commit us to creating a new future together.
In a future Blog I'll discuss in detail why scaling up small-group dialogue — small groups on a massive scale - is redemptive, and crucial to sustainable change.
I'll also discuss the importance of collective, visionary city leadership to break the historic patterns of denial, resistance and disempowerment.
Small group racial dialogue session
904WARD - Jacksonville (Photo by Toni Smailagic)
A Hunger for Reconciliation
A coalition of the willing already exists among citizens today who yearn for Jacksonville to be known for its compassion, unity, caring and inclusion of all --- Dr. King's Beloved Community.
For many, this is a deep spiritual longing. They require only a safe space to express that longing.
Jacksonville is primed for this moral, political and economic transformation. If not now, when? If not us, who?
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(1) Patricia Drozd Kenney, "LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community" - University of Florida Doctoral Dissertation, 1990
Notes:
Thanks to Patrick Mason of Tallahassee, Rollins Family Historian, for many valuable contributions to family stories. Still living on the old family property from Reconstruction days.
Thanks to Tim Gilmore and the group at JaxPsychoGeo for your Facebook Posts and other documentation recalling post-Reconstruction Jacksonville.
Historic photos from The Florida Archives.
Coming soon:
My memoir evoking my journey through contemporary history: "The Slave in My Mirror."
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For more information
www.bryantrollins.com
www.stetsonrollins.net
email: bryantrollins@me.com
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