St. Pete African-American History

 
 
 

The Historic 20th Century African-American Neighborhoods Of the Sunshine City

 

In the early 20th century African-American people were regularly forced  through city council resolutions and city ordinances to remain tucked away from the city of St. Petersburg's popular tourist areas. In the late 1880s, African Americans helped build the Orange Belt Railway. Blacks left the plantations of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi for a shot at the American Dream through this new epicenter of hospitality, settling in Pepper Town.

The Orange Belt is said to have conceived the city’s tourism. Streets were cobbled away with Augusta blocks, bridges were constructed, and the frontier that once reigned the southern peninsula was submerged, evacuated, and redeveloped. African-American southern migrants naturally settled adjacent to the tracks: Railroad Avenue better known today as 1st Avenue South; Peppertown; 22nd Street South, Gas Plant (Coopers Quarters); and Methodist Town.

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The City of St. Petersburg’s Racial DISCRIMINATION through Policy and Customs

  • In 1913 The Democratic Party conducted a “whites only” primary in a city election. The 1931 Municipal Charter also had a provision for a white primary.

  • Mayor Al Lang would pass a city ordinance in 1917 unifying over 7,000 benches to a solid green color. The city never regulated the use of the benches, but well through the 1950’s police officers enforced an action by custom, to keep African-Americans off the benches. 

  • Former editor-in-chief of the St. Petersburg Times and the chair of the City Planning Board, William L. Straub wrote a letter to then urban planner John Nolan, “ We do not want to zone colored people by law, we are hoping by persuasion and suitable agreement for them not to bring about such correction in their locations as may be found possible.” 

  • 1931 the “Segregation of Races” was a clause in the city's newly founded Municipal Charter.

  • In 1944 the Supreme Court invalidated the “white primary” clause, but it stayed in the city’s charter until the first revision in 1971.