Mount Zion Update, part 4: Preserving the Shade with the Light
Mount Zion is part of Mount Dora’s outside history. We can’t go forward without it
By David Cohea (savemtzionchurch@gmail.com)
Note: 2016 comes to a close with Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church with renewed hope for a future in the Mount Dora-Tangerine community. Originally reported on last September, this series provides an update on the work done so far.
What was Mount Dora like for its African-Americans, back when Mount Zion was first built? The past was certainly not past. Jason Byrne writes in “The Illusion of Freedom: African Americans in 1890s Florida,”
Despite being granted their freedom some thirty years prior, freed slaves in turn of the century era Florida were still barely unshackled. Having been set free (13th Amendment), granted equal citizenship (14th Amendment), and the right to vote (15th Amendment) didn’t mean very much once the Union soldiers pulled out after the Great Betrayal of 1877.
Wealthy landowners and politicians were then loosed to pass all kinds of laws and discriminatory practices. Town developers in the booming Sunshine State could deny land ownership rights or ban “negroes” altogether. Most of the white populous certainly had no intention of seeing blacks as much more than cheap labor, much less as equal citizens.
As a white citizen of Mount Dora who has lived in suburban comfort here for the past twenty years — gifted with a newspaper career that still has a pulse and living on a white middle-class neighborhood where only the rare after-hours party or unmowed lawn disturbs the veneer — it’s hard to imagine conditions where slavery was gone but all of its harsh conditioning (and many of its intentions) remained intact. (But then, there are those today who see parallels between post-Reconstruction and Trumpism.)
Mount Dora was said to be a more harmonious environment than elsewhere in Central Florida, but it had to feel the heat of racial purging riots in nearby Ocoee in 1920 and Rosewood in 1923. Black residents living in area of what is now downtown Mount were forcibly removed to East Town around 1920, and several black churches burned down in the early 1920s, including Mount Zion. The lash of Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall was more brutal in places like Groveland in the late 1940s and ’50s, but his dogs were unleashed in Mount Dora as well, mauling to death the 18-year-old son of an East Town church elder who had been arrested on charges of rape. Beaulah remembers a cross being burned in front of Mount Zion some time during the 1950s, and only three counties nationwide had more lynchings during the Jim Crow era than Orange County, where Mount Zion sits.
Novelist Robert Lee Bowie, a Mount Dora high school football standout in the glory years of the ’50s, says white kids like him just kept their heads low and let all that racial foment blow round them. Twenty years after Mount Dora High school was integrated, in 1966, Mount Dora’s Pine Forest Cemetery was still refusing lots to black residents of the city. Sewage plumbing was decades later coming to East Town than in the rest of the city, and to this day there isn’t adequate stormwater drainage.
For twenty years my wife and I have answered the door on Halloween to black kids from East Town, but I never ventured over there until I found out a couple years ago how great the barbecue was at Sugarboos. The Northeast Community Redevelopment Agency (or NECRA) has been trying since 1989 to bring economic revitalization to the community, but they still struggle to get Lake County residents (or Mount Dora’s for that matter) to visit. I’m not qualified to take the temperature of the racial climate in Mount Dora, but I will venture that perspectives vary wildly.
If Mount Dora’s African-American community has dispersed — leaving abandoned places like Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church and Simpson-Mount Carmel Cemetery — does its history yet have any ongoing part in the identity of Mount Dora? Maybe folks are still sensitive to the area’s troubled past relations, but for me, letting the excluded and neglected and marginalized simply face into the underbrush or get razed and built over in for development isn’t much different than those ladies of the French Revolution who blithely knitted while heads rolled off the guillotine. If we don’t intercede, it never stops.
This year marks the opening of Smithsonian African-American history museum in Washington. Also, the Equal Justice Initiative is building a national memorial to victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama, scheduled to open in 2018. And recently, three prominent historians called on outgoing President Obama to create a national monument to Reconstruction in Beaufort, South Carolina, to recognize this country’s first faltering attempt at bi-racial democracy.
All of these signify an attempt to right the record before the record is erased. That can happen — I call it whitewashing the history — and it can be done as effectively from the White House as the local Waffle House.
Preserving Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church is to me an important expression of the community’s commitment to its full history. It takes many roots to sustain the canopy; it takes all of the narratives, combining into a dynamic mix which is never fully settled because it’s always growing. “No public presentation that fails to convey this diversity — or to convey the diversity of opinions about history that is its inevitable result — can be deemed fully adequate,” writes Ned Kauffman in Place, Race and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (2009). He continues, “preservationists and their partners (should be urged) to support multiple narratives than can bring the special insights of an ethnically or culturally specific point of view to bear on the city’s history as a whole.” Only what the poet Wallace Stevens called “the complicate amassing harmony” can suffice.
Is Mount Zion Primitive Baptist church a notable structure on the order of, say, the Donnelly House? In a strictly architectural sense, of course not. But a church which served for 150 year years has dimensions more importance to its community than the house where one of the city’s richest elders lived and who bequeathed it for exclusive use by Masons. “The challenge is often to look past the architecturally oriented criteria of value that many of us bring with us, and to recognize historical significance in its many guises,” Kauffman writes. He continues,
Saving our history will require a broader understanding and appreciation of our city’s built forms. In fact, many people already appreciate buildings for reasons beyond those considered valid by the majority of professional architectural historians or preservationists: Association with historical events, tradition, symbolism, communal identity, and the fondness that comes with long familiarity and use all can make a building or urban place significant in people’s lives. These meanings are all part of our cultural inheritance; they constitute what has been called the “social value” of our built environment. (ibid.)
Is Mount Zion and the African-American community it served the only missing narrative in our town? Of course not. There are Hispanic residents whose story has never been told, as there are Native Americans who have lived here since end of the Second Seminole War. (I am told that there was a fairly large number of them living among African-American residents in the Wolf Branch area, and the abandoned cemetery next to the Country Club may have interred a number of them.) There are narratives of women who never had the same opportunity as their male counterparts in Mount Dora; how difficult it must have been to be a Mabel Norris Reese, editor of the Mount Dora Topic in the 1950s, standing up to the likes of Sheriff Willis McCall and residents sullenly opposed to de-segregation! And more currently, there are narratives of gays and lesbians of who had to keep their public and private Mount Dora personas segregated.
I wonder if there’s a way to tell the story of all those who only live in Mount Dora partially; and what about the narratives people left behind to relocate here? There are natural narratives, too — don’t we owe our beloved trees room for their story? — and for that matter, what integral stories link Mount Dora with its neighbors in Eustis and Tavares? I’ve been in conversation with library director Stephanie Haimes and adult services librarian Cathy Lunday at the WT Bland Library, and they’re embarking on a digital preservation program which could prove an effective way of storing and curating these experiences.
One way to sum the value of Mount Zion Primitive Baptist church is the collective fondness that passerby have felt for this old historic structure, as mentioned above and exhibited by the outpouring of material and volunteer support in achieving the first stage of preservation in such short order. Simply the act of telling a story and then presenting the community the opportunity to participate in saving history can make something nearly lost come alive again.
But an even more convincing argument for the preservation of Mount Zion was made on December 17 when its walls shook again with song.
Tomorrow: Singing in Mount Zion
Previously in this series:
Part 1: A Church in Need with a Yearning Pedigree
Part 2: No Bell, But a Calling
Part 3: Work Days At The Church
David Cohea is executive director of the Mount Dora-based Live Oak Collective
