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Friend,
When Suncara Jackson travels from Tallahassee back to the place she will always call home – the historically Black community of Royal in Central Florida – she sometimes shuts her eyes against the glare of the sun and tries to imagine what it was like.
What was it like for her great-great-grandfather Jim Patterson to make his way in the years after the Civil War from the plantation he was born on in Waycross, Georgia, to Royal, where he would become one of the few newly freed Black Americans granted land by the U.S. government under the Homestead Act of 1862?
What was it like for the scores of other newly freed men who settled in Royal, hacking their way through dense thickets of sea grape and prickly pear and, through their labors, into ownership of government-deeded parcels of 40 to 160 acres each?
What was it like for the descendants of the original founders to somehow hold on to their land, even as the promise of the early years of Reconstruction gave way to white nationalist violence, and the few other communities of Black homesteaders in the country were wiped out by racial terror and development-led displacement?
What was it like for the people of Royal to survive when that terror closed in and the Black community in Ocoee, just 50 miles away, was wiped out in 1920 by a white mob? And when Rosewood, another Black community 77 miles away, was burned to the ground three years later?
One thing Jackson can see without closing her eyes is what it is like to live in fear that all her ancestors built in Royal – the rich stories that were handed down to her, the deep sense of family among a community of people who have maintained ties for generations, the pride of having endured – is again under threat.
Last year, it was the turnpike extension the Florida Department of Transportation wanted to route right through Royal. No sooner had residents staved off that plan, at least for the time being, than several plots of agricultural land were rezoned by county officials to accommodate industrial use that could bring pollution and increased traffic to the tranquil community.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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