Eartha M. M. White and the City She Held Together

There is a photograph of Eartha Mary Magdalene White taken sometime in the nineteen fifties. She is in her eighties, small and precise, standing in front of one of the buildings she ran. She looks, a friend once said, like she is calculating how much more work there is left to do.

White was born in Jacksonville in eighteen seventy-six, the adopted daughter of a formerly enslaved couple who had found their footing in the city after the Civil War. She trained as a singer and performed professionally in her youth, touring with a company that included appearances at the Chicago World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three. She could have built a career in performance.

She came back to Jacksonville instead. What she built in Jacksonville over the next eight decades defies tidy cataloging. She ran a department store, the first Black-owned department store in the city.

She organized labor exchanges that helped newly arrived migrants find work during both World Wars. She opened a welfare home for elderly Black residents at a time when public facilities were entirely closed to them. She organized a tuberculosis sanitarium.

She ran a home for children. She collected food for the hungry during the Depression with a directness that embarrassed the city's white charitable organizations into matching her. She lived to ninety-seven and was still working when she died in nineteen seventy-four.

President Jimmy Carter called her the Angel of Jacksonville. Florida designated her a Great Floridian. The name she carried through all of it appeared in so many contexts, on so many deeds and charters and incorporation papers, that it became a kind of infrastructure in itself.