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During the tumultuous Sixties, when so much history was taking place like sideshows at a state fair, I was admitted to the very newsy civil rights transformation taking place in the Deep South.  Hired by the federal government as a VISTA Volunteer, I was paid less than $50 per week to live and work in the African-American town of Eatonville, Florida.  My job definition – like that of President Obama’s first job when leaving Harvard Law School – was that of “community organizer.”

That $50 per week was low by even the standards of the Sixties, but it was deceiving because I mostly lived off various perks.  I bought cheap food at the Orlando McCoy Air Force base commissary and everything else I bought just as cheaply at the base exchange.  As everyone thought that my white VISTA partner and I must have been the first white people to ever live in Eatonville, we were invited to a lot of meals – one memorable night I went to three dinners within four hours.

We young white VISTA Volunteers and civil-rights workers had to get used to walking across a lot of dirt roads.  The only paved road brought the mainstream traffic through the town largely to get somewhere else.  Like a lot of other households we had to boil a lot of water in the kitchen to take a bath in an outside bathtub.  The city council met inside a side door from the post office, where the postmaster doubled as the city clerk.

Eatonville was almost one hundred years old as an incorporated city by the time I arrived.  It was well known that its incorporation was helped by white segregationists during Reconstruction who wanted to trap the black votes there from getting into white elections.  With all of the town’s longevity, there was still no progress on paved roads for the residents, only the one paved main street for people driving through the town.

Although the Florida governor then was a controversial Republican named Claude Kirk, Republicans were otherwise very much out of the picture in Florida and the Deep South during the Sixties.  They were mainly busy trying to expand and to make as many new friends as possible.  It was the Southern Democrats who were still running things – running thing to the ground, so to speak.

Because the Republicans hadn’t made many inroads in the Southern culture at the time, they also benefited from being innocent of its injustice and tragedy.  Integration under the Southern Democrats was designed to make the experience as unpalatable to Floridian African-Americans as possible.  In Eatonville, for example, “integration” was expressed in bussing the best black students out of Eatonville’s High School and bussing in their exchange some of the most incorrigible white students that Eatonville would now have to deal with from morning to afternoon.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg to how the Democratic Party in Florida turned against its African-American population.

The great high school of Eatonville – which had formerly been known as Robert L. Hungerford High School, named after a great turn-of-the-century Eatonville mayor – was summarily dismantled of its honored academic program and transformed into something called “Wymore Tech High School.”  Suddenly, in this age of Democratic Party transformations, that high school which produced one of America’s greatest writers in Zora Neale Hurston and one of the greatest personalities of Los Angeles in former L.A. Ram Deacon Jones was reduced to a refuge for the least ambitious young people of the area.

The federal programs that were now available through a plethora of Great Society and War on Poverty legislation reached Eatonville in the forms of entitlements.  But these were the most humiliating forms of entitlements, where government relief was exchanged for … for nothing.  The entitlements that came out of the Great Society seemed to be saying “here is help, but don’t bother exchanging anything for it, because you obviously have nothing of value to exchange for our help.”

This was when some serious young African-American people of the South – the Condoleezza Rice kind of personalities – began to embrace the Republican Party for a very different message.  The message of the Republicans that they heard was “we have something here to help you, but just as importantly, you have the qualities that can help us and our nation.”

In any case – perhaps because the Republicans had never been around the Deep South long enough to have made any major mistakes – I began to meet African-American Republicans in Central Florida. Not a lot, but a beginning. If there was something that these black Republican families had in common, it is that they were professionally and socially on track.  They knew what they were doing and they liked what they were doing.

My experience was that African-Americans who gleaned from Republican values and culture benefitted from this gleaning better than practically anyone else.  In any case, I have yet to see any Republican African-American family collapse in such farcical ways as I have seen white Republicans for example lose their bearings like the present Republican governor of South Carolina.  I think this is because African-American Republicans I have known have not taken their party for granted, or anything for granted.

Meanwhile, back in Eatonville, with local Democrats and Republicans collegially working together, the city has risen above the network of dirt tracks written of by Eatonville’s native daughter, Zora Neale Hurston, in her novels “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Jonah’s Gourd.”  Today an important city center has replaced the tiny post office that swept into the town hall room back in my life there when the late Nat Vereen was Eatonville’s mayor.  And the highway AKA main street that used to route Ku Klux Klan night riders trying to terrorize the old, unstoppable city has given way to a street that routes tourists from all over the world visiting the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville.  For that, and other reasons, Eatonville has become Central Florida’s unflinching force.

Chris Sharp- Commentary

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.