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Friend, When she first heard the clatter outside her house in Royal, Florida, Etta Johnson Huff didn’t think much of it. At 70, the proud woman who lives on the same land acquired by her ancestors after the Civil War is not easily ruffled. But when she looked out her window that morning this past February, what Huff saw sent her outside in a hurry. Workers hired by the Sumter County government were pulling up the signs that she and more than 150 other residents of the historic Black homesteading community, one of only two still in existence, had put up as part of their efforts to save their heritage. The signs, reading “Community of Royal – Preserve History, Not Industry!” were rapidly filling the bed of a motorized cart, the workers wrenching them out of the ground and flinging them one atop another. Seconds later Huff, still strong for her years, was running. Overtaking the workers, she grabbed as many signs from the cart as she could, fiercely chastising them all the while. The workers said they had been told to move the signs because they were in the county right of way, essentially on public property. Huff and other residents – while noting that dozens of other signs advertising real estate and various services in the right of way had been left untouched – hammered their signs back into the ground, slightly farther back from the roadway. The frustration of that morning was emblematic of the tense push and pull the residents of Royal have been engaged in over the past two years, as they have raced to stave off one threat after another to the history and character of their beloved community, founded by newly emancipated Black homesteaders after the Civil War. Historians say Royal, today home to approximately 1,200 Black residents, may be the only such rural community in the country to survive with its landscape largely unchanged and the original plots overwhelmingly in the hands of descendants of the founding homesteaders. Huff’s story is just one of several collected in an oral history project as part of the community’s efforts to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The project was spearheaded by Edward González-Tennant, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, who is the author of the original nomination to the National Register. The Southern Poverty Law Center provided support to this project by producing a series of videos featuring the residents telling their stories. The videos add texture to what is already a rich historical record of Royal, characterized in the National Register nomination by González-Tennant as “one of the most compelling examples of a rural, historically African American community in Florida.”
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