McCollum Hall: Jazz, Jim Crow, and the Chitlin' Circuit

There is a building in the Dunbar neighborhood of Fort Myers that briefly made segregation disappear. Not legally, and not permanently, but for the duration of a set by Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald, the rope that separated the white and Black sections of the dance hall would, by some accounts, quietly come down.

McCollum Hall was built in nineteen thirty-eight by Clifford Buck McCollum, a Black businessman and his wife Gertrude. It was the commercial and cultural heart of the Dunbar community, the neighborhood that had grown up as Fort Myers's African American population expanded under Jim Crow. Dunbar, originally settled by freed people and their descendants after the Civil War, developed its own schools, churches, businesses, and social life because exclusion forced it to. Safety Hill, as part of the neighborhood was known, was called that, according to local tradition, because it offered safety to Black residents after sundown.

McCollum Hall placed Fort Myers on the Chitlin' Circuit, the nationwide network of Black-owned venues where African American performers could work without navigating segregated hotels, hostile club owners, or worse. Duke Ellington performed here. Ella Fitzgerald sang here. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and B. B. King all played McCollum Hall. The Black professional baseball players who came through town for spring training would come to the hall on their nights off. And some white patrons, in defiance of the law and the custom, came too. When the music was loud enough, the rope came down.

Desegregation in Lee County came slowly and bitterly. The desegregation plan that followed closed Dunbar High School, the heart of the community, and bused Black children across the county to fulfill racial quotas instead of integrating the white schools in place.

McCollum Hall fell into disrepair over the following decades. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a renovation was contracted in twenty twenty-two. The community is still fighting for what it has always been owed.