Eatonville, The Town That Refused to Be a Footnote
Near Orlando, Florida
In the summer of eighteen eighty-seven, a group of Black residents of Central Florida gathered on a piece of land north of Orlando and incorporated the town of Eatonville, making it one of the first self-governing all-Black municipalities in the United States. They wrote a charter. They elected a mayor.
They built a church, an Odd Fellows hall, a school. They named the town after a white landowner named Josiah Eaton who had sold or donated the land, but the town itself was theirs: governed by Black officials, policed by Black constables, built by Black labor and Black capital in a state and a time that worked hard to make such things impossible. Eatonville is remembered today largely because of one of its daughters.
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in January of eighteen ninety-one, but she grew up in Eatonville, and Eatonville made her. Her father, John Hurston, served as mayor. The town's front porches, its Saturday-night stomp sessions, its church services and its folk tales became the raw material for what would become some of the most important writing in American literature.
Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in nineteen thirty-seven, opens on the porches of a town that is unmistakably Eatonville, written in the vernacular cadence of people who built something by themselves, for themselves, against the odds. Hurston spent years as an anthropologist studying Black folklore across the South and the Caribbean, working with Franz Boas at Columbia. She collected stories in Eatonville and in the turpentine camps of North Florida and in the cane fields of the Bahamas.
She died in nineteen sixty in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, nearly forgotten. Her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker found it in nineteen seventy-three and had a stone placed. Eatonville still stands.
It still holds its charter. Each January it hosts the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The town that refused to be a footnote made sure its daughter is remembered.
