Eatonville: The First Incorporated Black Town

August fifteenth, eighteen eighty-seven. A group of Black residents in a small community in Orange County, Florida, voted to incorporate their town. They elected a mayor, drafted a charter, established a town government, and named the place Eatonville.

Eatonville is one of the first incorporated Black municipalities in the United States, formed as Reconstruction was collapsing. Its first mayor was the Reverend Columbus Boger. The town charter provided for self-governance and elected officials. The town was not a settlement or a refuge or a compromise; it was a deliberate civic act. Black people voting to constitute themselves as a government.

Zora Neale Hurston, born in Notasulga, Alabama, in eighteen ninety-one and raised in Eatonville, wrote about what that meant to grow up inside. In Eatonville, she said, she did not know she was Black in the way the outside world meant it, because she had never encountered the daily weight of that framing. Eatonville's entire visible world was Black. The police were Black. The merchants were Black. The people who ran things were Black.

The town never incorporated white residents. It was not designed for that purpose.

Eatonville remains incorporated today, with a majority-Black population, on the western edge of the Orlando metropolitan area. It holds an annual Zora! Festival celebrating Hurston and the town's history. The houses on the original streets are modest. The history inside them is not.

A community that incorporated itself as a free and self-governing Black municipality in eighteen eighty-seven, in the American South, during the collapse of Reconstruction, was making a bet on its own survival. It won.