What If Eatonville Hadn’t Been Undone?
In 1887, six miles north of Orlando, a small group of formerly enslaved African Americans did something radical: they built their own town. Not just a settlement, but an incorporated municipality. Eatonville, Florida became the first all-Black incorporated town in the United States.
It wasn’t just a safe haven, it was a symbol. A town planned, governed and grown by Black people for Black people. In a post-Reconstruction America riddled with racial violence and economic suppression, Eatonville was proof of concept, that freedom, when self-directed, could flourish.
But what’s often missed in the retelling is what Eatonville represented economically. This wasn’t just about survival, it was about enterprise. Eatonville’s early residents purchased land, started businesses, opened schools, ran churches. It produced intellectuals like Zora Neale Hurston, who would immortalise the town in American literature and had it been allowed to grow free from the…
