|
Friend,
Bea Leach Hatler knows something about having a legacy stolen away. She was still in her mother’s womb in 1951 when her father, Edward Hungerford Nye, died of a heart attack at 36 and his erstwhile partner cheated his widow out of her share of their business. The ascendant life Nye had built for his growing family was suddenly shattered.
The cascade of tragedies stole away more than money: It frayed the connection to Hatler’s past. As her mother, alone with two children, struggled through one unhappy marriage after another, the trio spent more time thinking about surviving than about family history. But occasionally, Hatler’s paternal grandmother would visit and tell stories.
“I wasn’t capturing it back then, but I remember her words,” Hatler said of her grandmother, Constance Hungerford Fenske. “I remember her saying, ‘I know you never got to see your daddy. But your daddy’s family was very important.’”
It wasn’t until Hatler was a teenager that she began to understand how important.
That’s when she became close to her half-brothers from her father’s first marriage. They told her about how her great-great-grandparents, Edward C. Hungerford and Anna D. Hungerford, were Connecticut abolitionists. About how their doctor son, Robert Hungerford, had brought medical care in Florida to young Black patients in the years after the Civil War. About how the Hungerfords, after the loss of their son, had donated land to build a school in his name in a Black community in Florida that was governing itself, against the odds.
It all seemed hazy and far away from Hatler’s life in California and the Pacific Northwest, from her battles – first with dyslexia, then, as a young, self-described outcast who had left school and become pregnant at 17 – to climb her way out of poverty. But Hatler never forgot. She felt proud that somewhere – in a faraway community she had never been to – that school remained.
What Hatler didn’t know is that the school property, where famed Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston had studied as a girl in one of the oldest Black incorporated communities in the U.S., had been shuttered. She didn’t know that the local school board in Orange County, Florida, had come into possession of the land on which the school had thrived for more than a century and had been on the verge of selling it to developers in a bid to reap millions in profits. She didn’t know the sale of the school property, which makes up more than 14% of the 1.6-square-mile town six miles north of Orlando, threatened to steal away the legacy of Eatonville, still 73% Black and still proudly under majority-Black leadership 136 years after its founding in 1887.
Read More
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
|
