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A Shared And Pleasant History

Tribune photo by Julie Busch

The building on the left, now a fellowship hall for Mt. Pleasant African Methodist Episcopal Church, was once the Citrus Park Colored School.

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By STEPHEN HAMMILL, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 24, 2008

KEYSTONE - During a recent worship service at Mount Pleasant African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Delores Washington welcomed some old faces.

"We have some special guests here today," she said, "members of the Citrus Park Colored School, and we're so glad to have them here."

The little white church and the little wooden schoolhouse share a 90-year history; the day's guests were on hand to remember a time when the two were at the heart of the area's black community.

Just off Gunn Highway down a winding dirt road shielded by a row of trees, a 1-acre parcel houses both the church and the former Citrus Park Colored School.

The one-room schoolhouse was operated by the Hillsborough County School Board until its closure in 1948. For a quarter-century, it was a home to black children during segregation.

The original Mount Pleasant AME Church shared land off Gunn Highway with a Baptist church and a cemetery owned by a former slave. At the time, the church also served as a school for black children.

Because of Jim Crow laws, Florida's 1885 Constitution and Supreme Court rulings, the county's black children were not allowed to attend the white-only Citrus Park School.

Around 1918, a fire destroyed Mount Pleasant AME. Some who lived in the area said lightning caused the fire, but others thought it might have been arson.

A Shared History

Charles Walker, a longtime advocate of educational rights for blacks, lobbied Hillsborough County to build a new colored school in 1924. The county agreed but could not provide a faculty or a student body.

Walker set about rounding up both - 13 students and the school's first teacher, Leona Allen Houston. Classes began in 1924.

"It was quite a community," said Mordecai Walker, 83, son of Charles Walker and a student from 1934 to 1937.

Walker said the colored school was concurrently a place of learning and worship. A pulpit stood behind the teacher's desk.

"We didn't have the problems we do now - there was no separate church and state," said former student Vyrle Davis.

The students, from first through seventh grades, studied together.

After morning devotion came arithmetic, then spelling and recess by the large oak tree.

"I was born there," said 71-year-old Davis.

His mother, Eliza, was the school's last teacher, from 1934 to 1948.

On weekends, Davis and his mother lived in Tampa. During the week, they stayed with a family near the schoolhouse.

Though Davis liked the school, he didn't care for the country. "It was bare land for miles," he said. "It was a 20-mile trip from the city - 20 hectic miles."

Some of the children lived a six-mile walk from the school. Most went barefoot.

"I remember my shoes were wearing out," Walker said. "My mother said, 'Stay in school and one day you can afford two pairs of shoes.'"

Teacher and students learned to make do with what supplies they could find - nubs of used chalk and written-on paper from the white schools. There was no pencil sharpener. Walker used a knife.

"Imagine bringing a knife to school now!" Davis said.

Inside some of the textbooks were the words "This book is not to be used in a colored school."

Walker and Davis said there was camaraderie among the teachers, parents and students. They had to help one another because no one else would.

"We learned how to teach and learn at the same time," said Davis, who would become the first black teacher assigned to an all-white school in Tampa.

In 1983, he became the first black superintendent in the Pinellas County school system.

A large percentage of the school's students became educators and school administrators, an impressive statistic considering that, at the time, the county guaranteed them an education only up to seventh grade.

Curtiss Walker Wilson, 79, went to the school from 1934 to 1941. "Coming back around the bend, seeing the church and the schoolhouse, I just thought of all the good times we had," she said during the worship service. "This was the church I joined at age 10."

Wilson would become one of the first black teachers to volunteer for integrated classrooms. Her brother and fellow student, William, was the first black graduate of the University of Tampa.

Holding On To The Past

Mattie James Ford attended the school after World War II. She has been coming to Mount Pleasant Church since then, leading worshippers in the singing of hymns.

"This is my second home," she said. "I cherish these buildings."

New standards in 1947 would spell the end of the school. In 1949 the school board appraised the Citrus Park Colored School property and agreed to sell it to Mount Pleasant.

In 1996, former students made requests of Hillsborough County's Historic Resources Review Board to designate the schoolhouse, now called the Amanda James Fellowship Building, a historic landmark. That year county commissioners unanimously voted for the designation.

Now, the church uses the schoolhouse as its fellowship hall and worship services take place in the chapel built in the early 1950s.

This is Washington's second year as pastor of Mount Pleasant. Current membership numbers just under 40.

She wants to reach out to the black community, which has become spread out over the decades.

"It is beautiful out here and we would love to get some repairs done," she said. "We just need some money."

Unlike the all-white Citrus Park School nearby, which was refurbished with private money to its original look, the old colored schoolhouse shows its age.

Eventually, Washington wants to see Hillsborough County schoolchildren touring the grounds.

"It's good to know about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the children of Florida have history right here in Keystone and they don't know it," she said. "They don't know about the Allens and the Walkers and the Wilsons."

End Of An Era

Those families and others were among the first free black settlers of Odessa, owning more than 150 acres.

Over the decades, as social mores changed, so did the geography. Around the church, the rural landscape transformed by schools, businesses and a regional mall.

"I'm amazingly surprised the way the area has grown," Davis said.

Davis and Walker look back at segregation with a complex mixture of emotions.

Walker remembers whites and blacks shopping together at Fox's Corner, which still stands. "I never heard a derogatory word there," he said.

Davis, however, said there was no such thing as race relations then. "You knew your place, and you tried to stay in it. We had to accept the challenge."

He hung onto his mother's words: "She said, 'If you get an education, they can't take it from you.'"

"Now we wouldn't accept it," he continued. "Separate but equal - no such thing. Now we've got a brother running for president of the United States."

"We realized the day would come," Walker chimed in. "It shows what you can do with an education."

Davis thinks black children today have lost the hunger for knowledge his classmates had.

"I think we give kids too much," he said. "They're saying they can't learn when we say they can."

Walker agreed: "I think the worst thing is for a person to have nothing they want or need. I think the next worse thing is to have everything."

MOUNT PLEASANT AME CHURCH

Location: 9703 Gunn Highway, Odessa

Sunday worship: 11 a.m.

Contact: The Rev. Delores Washington at (813) 920-0859

MOUNT PLEASANT AME CHURCH

Location: 9703 Gunn Highway, Odessa

Sunday worship: 11 a.m.

Contact: The Rev. Delores Washington at (813) 920-0859

Reporter Stephen Hammill can be reached at (813) 865-1523 or at shammill@tampatrib.com.

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