Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Words tell way it used to be

A museum's first exhibit will recall people's memories of life in the segregated St. Petersburg of years ago.

By JON WILSON
Published September 24, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Eva Shaw always had the answer when she filled out job applications.

When she came to the space to indicate her race, Shaw always wrote "human."

"I never lived segregated. My mama told me we handicap our children when start talking race. I didn't look at myself as being a race except as human," said Shaw, 68, who has lived in St. Petersburg for about 47 years.

Her memories, and those of about 34 other longtime residents, will become the first major exhibit at the Carter G. Woodson African-American Museum, 2240 Ninth Ave. S.

The display, created by the Front Porch Community Development Association, opens Saturday with a showing from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free, although donations to the museum are welcome.

Two new community-based businesses are catering the event: the Fresh Go Grill and Wild Market, and Edible Arrangements.

The exhibit features panels with printed comments extracted from recorded interviews of community elders, a process that began in January. Eight youths 14 through 16 years old conducted the sessions.

Transcripts of the recordings will be available for students and other researchers, said La'Kesha O'Neal, Front Porch spokeswoman.

Also on display will be memorabilia and artifacts: home-made lye soap, for example, often used instead of store-bought soap; and a wooden coin of the type residents could use in trade at the old Doctor's Pharmacy on 22nd Street S, the segregation-era African-American main street.

The exhibit was the idea of Ginger Baber, the museum's late director. A scholar, Baber was fond of calling the young interviewers "my little anthropologists." She died in April.

[Last modified September 23, 2006, 21:48:21]