West Ocala: A Community That Built Its Own World
Near Ocala, Florida
West Ocala is not a neighborhood you stumble through on the way to somewhere else. It is a place that was built deliberately, by people who had no other option.
After the Civil War, as African Americans were systematically excluded from white commercial districts, from banks, from hospitals, from professional society, the Black community of Ocala built its own. West Ocala became the center of that effort.
In nineteen fourteen, the Metropolitan Savings Bank opened here, the first African American bank incorporated in the state of Florida. A year earlier, the community had established a hospital. In nineteen twenty-five, Doctor R. S. Hughes opened the American National Thrift Association Hospital, one of the only medical facilities in hundreds of miles that would treat African American patients. The same year, Mattie J. Shaw started publishing The Florida Watchman, a newspaper she solely owned and operated, one of the few African American women in the state running her own press.
The records here go quiet on how many people went without care before that hospital opened, how many crises were managed in segregated back rooms or not managed at all. The documented history marks the building of institutions; the cost of their absence in the years before is harder to recover.
Howard Academy, the freedmen's school opened in eighteen sixty-six, educated children here for nearly a century, producing Effie Carrie Mitchell, the first African American woman to practice medicine in Florida. The Reverend Oliver Van Pinkston and his son Frank Pinkston became civil rights leaders who organized the Marion County movement through the nineteen fifties and sixties.
West Ocala was designated a historic district in two thousand two. The Howard Academy building now houses the Black History Museum of Marion County. The institutions that community built under conditions of legal exclusion are still being counted.
