Portraits of black history in new book

Using the photos of some of Clearwater's oldest families, two local historians put together a glimpses of everyday life told in snapshots.

By ADRIENNE P. SAMUELS
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 17, 2003

CLEARWATER -- Some might not know that many of the city's original streets were built by black men. Or that a black-owned peacock farm was a major tourist attraction in the 1920s.

Now there's a book that tells all about it.

Two Clearwater residents captured the history of black Clearwater in 128 pages of pictures culled from the private collections of some of the oldest families in the region.

"We did this to give us perspective of African-American life in the early years," said Randy Lightfoot, director of African-American curriculum for Pinellas County Schools. Lightfoot worked with fellow historian Sandra Rooks to put the book together.

The soft cover Black America Series: Clearwater, Florida represents only the tip of the iceberg of local black history.

According to the book's introduction, it does not attempt to provide a scholarly look at the history of black Clearwater. Instead, it provides a "sampling of what life was like."

Many of the pictures are from between the 1890s and the 1980s. Several show the faces of unidentified schoolchildren or unidentified adults at local dances.

The work is split into nine chapters, each highlighting a portion of black life.

Chapter 1 is about early settlers and pioneers. The first picture shows black men paving Osceola Avenue in 1910. The second photo is of Mack Dixon Sr. and 13 of his 15 children. The Dixon family owned businesses here for more than 100 years.

The government chapter shows Oscar "Sport" McCullom standing in front of his squad car in the 1950s. McCullom was one of the city's first black police officers.

Rooks and Lightfoot decided to do the book in 2000 after seeing a similar book about black Tallahassee that was compiled by Rooks' cousin, Althemese Barnes. Lightfoot and Rooks, who together founded the Pinellas County African-American History Museum in Clearwater, had unwittingly completed most of their research. In creating the museum, they had already collected several hundred pictures depicting black life in Clearwater and other county cities.

That meant creating a book proposal, adhering to strict publishing deadlines and completing the long task of identifying as many people as possible in the photos and writing up captions to explain what was happening in each picture.

A lot of work went into getting that information, the researchers said.

"Sometimes we were up to 3 or 4 in the morning to try to make those deadlines," said Rooks, who is also the director of the African-American History Museum.

Added Lightfoot, "The research is the hardest part."

So far, a little more than 500 out of 900 copies of the book have sold.

It's the sort of thing designed to be popular mostly within the city limits, said Carolyn Lemon, Florida editor for Arcadia Publishing in South Carolina. The company has so far commissioned and printed Black America Series books on 150 cities in the United States. The series started in 1999.

Arcadia has published multiple titles about Florida subjects.

It's up to individual researchers to provide the pictures and captions to Arcadia, which then arranges, prints and markets the book.

So far, Arcadia has published Black America Series books on Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Seminole County and Key West. Rooks is going to do a book on St. Petersburg, and another researcher will do Daytona Beach, Lemon said.

"In the South, we find that those are the cities where people are more concerned with preserving their history," Lemon said. "This is what makes it unique."

It's a shame that black history wasn't always considered important enough to include in the historical archives of the county, Lightfoot said.

This book is the beginning of solving that problem, he added.

Said Lightfoot, "We did so much damage by marginalizing people, now we have got to fix it."

-- Adrienne Samuels can be reached at 445-4157 or samuels@sptimes.com

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