"This is sacred land," said N.Y. Nathiri, a third-generation resident of Eatonville, Fla. "It's special for us. It's who we are. And we're not going to let them take it away from us, no."
Nathiri heads the association to preserve the Eatonville community, a town founded in 1887 by Joe Clark. That it even happened was remarkable. After the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved African Americans flocked to central Florida to work. White property owners refused to sell them land, until Clark convinced two White Northerners with homes in the area, Lewis Lawrence and Josiah Eaton, to make available plots they could buy in what became Eatonville, one of the first Black towns to incorporate.
"There was a lot of resistance from the surrounding communities," said Everett Fly, a landscape architect, "because if they could incorporate, that meant that they could vote. They could have their own law enforcement. They could manage their own business."
Fly has spent more than four decades researching Black towns. "By 1915, there were less than 60 incorporated Black towns in the entire United States," he said.
And how many of those are left? "I think probably 20, 25 is all that's left," said Fly. "More than 90% of it is about racism. It's everything from, 'Oh, it's not important,' or 'They won't know the difference if we move them out or erase them, no one's gonna do anything.'"
Eatonville today is struggling. The median income is around $27,000 a year. A Family Dollar is the only store. There's no supermarket, no gas station, no pharmacy.
What's different about Eatonville is perhaps the anthropologist and noted writer Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up there. She was the great teller of Eatonville's story. "What we have the ability to do here is to leverage the genius of Zora Neale Hurston and the authenticity of Eatonville as a cultural and historical space," said Nathiri.
"Zora tourism" exists already, with the Zora Neale Hurston Museum. The Zora! Festival (which Nathiri's preservation group puts on every year) regularly attracted over 50,000 people before COVID. Fewer now.
But Eatonville would like to leverage something else: 100 acres of land, ten minutes from downtown Orlando, half an hour from Disney World, valued at more than $20 million in 2019, certainly worth much more now. Nathiri said, "As a small community of 2,500, it's sitting on the largest undeveloped parcel of land in Orange County. It's sitting in a very sweet position geographically."