Family, Religion, and Education: A Profile of African-American Life in Tampa, Florida, 1900-1930

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Some years ago a number of historians argued that the urban environment of early twentieth-century America was so destructive for African Americans that it invariably led to widespread poverty, family disintegration, and overall community disorientation.(1) More recently, however, scholars of black urban life in the North and South have countered that this view wrongly discounts the persisting strength of black cultural life.(2) This essay examines the familial, religious, and educational life of blacks in the Southern city of Tampa, Florida, between 1900 and 1930 and finds much evidence to support the latter view. Family, church and school were fundamental institutions within the African American community which worked in concert not only to assure black survival in the face of adversity, but in many instances allowed black people to prosper and advance in spite of a rigid caste system. Because of the strength of these institutions in Tampa, as well as in many Southern and Northern cities, the breakdown of the black community did not occur to the extent that historians once thought. Enduring almost overwhelming misfortune in the forms of economic privation, white supremacy, segregation, disfranchisement, and white violence, blacks developed strong institutions that created and sustained a vigorous, coherent sense of community.

Although scholars have examined the history of African Americans in numerous Southern and Florida cities, surprisingly little has been written about the black community of Tampa, one of the South's most unique cities, well known for its Latin flavor, high quality Havana cigars and Cuban cuisine. During the early decades of the present century, the energy and labor of Tampa's African Americans contributed significantly to the town's dramatic growth into an important multicultural, urban manufacturing center.(3) As a boom town its expansion was nothing short of phenomenal as the overall population leaped from 15,839 in 1900, to 37,782 in 1910, to 51,608 in 1920, and finally to 101,161 in 1930.(4) Despite their origins in the Old South, Tampa and surrounding Hillsborough County have been classified by historians as "largely a product of the New South" because values and institutions from the late nineteenth century dominated life there through the 1920s. Furthermore, this community displayed a number of features commonly associated with other Southern urban regions: outside capital financed its development into an industrial center; Southern-born whites comprised the local elite; and the New South biracial caste system was the rule in race relations.(5) Nevertheless, in some important respects Tampa resembled many Northern cities. Like Pittsburgh and Chicago, for example, in the early decades of the twentieth century it experienced not only a sizable influx of foreign-born immigrants (largely Italians and Hispanics in the case of Tampa) and rural blacks seeking economic opportunity, but also the social and racial tensions that accompanied such circumstances.

Tampa's black population multiplied significantly in the early years of the century as it grew from 4,382 in 1900, to 8,951 in 1910, to 11,531 in 1920, and 21,172 in 1930. Even so, it clearly grew at a slower rate than the white population, declining from about 28 percent of the total in 1900 to some 21 percent in 1930. Additionally, census records reveal that Tampa's black community in those years was of diverse origins: in 1920, 39.8 percent of the city's blacks were born outside of Florida, and in 1930 it was up to 43.7 percent.(6) Tampa appears to have attracted many of its new black residents from the farms and villages, not only from the Florida countryside, but from other nearby Southern states such as Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia as well as from Cuba and the West Indies.(7) They undoubtedly came to escape the insecurity of rural life or to experience the attractions of the metropolis; but above all, they came seeking economic betterment in one of the South's most rapidly expanding municipalities.

As the black population increased, so did white anxiety and fear, resulting in increasing racial restrictions in the Jim Crow racial caste system. Although the early twentieth century was a significant period of reform in most areas of American life, historians have long recognized that "race," the blind spot of the Progressive movement, was the major exception to this generalization. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the "White Municipal Party" carried out a successful campaign to exclude blacks from any political participation in the city's life.(8) In the 1903 lynching of Lewis Jackson, a black man accused of an attack on a white child, white Tampans showed that they would maintain traditional caste arrangements and white supremacy with violence when they felt the use of deadly force was necessary. Recently, one historian has carefully and thoroughly traced white attitudes and behavior toward Tampa's African Americans through the antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow periods. What he and other scholars found was that the turn-of-the-century generation of municipal reformers and social workers in Tampa did little to address the problems created by rapid black urbanization.(9) Furthermore, the Florida legislature, between 1905 and 1909, passed a series of measures that outlawed co-habitation, miscegenation, as well as racial integration in higher education, in jail accommodations, on common carriers, on electric cars, in public waiting rooms, and at public ticket windows.(10)

Living under these harsh circumstances, African Americans in Tampa organized themselves in a variety of ways to promote self-help and advancement. They set up the Clara Frye Hospital for blacks in 1910, the Afro-American Civic League in 1912, the Afro-American Monthly in 1912, the City federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1915, the National Association for the advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1915, the weekly Tampa Bulletin in 1915, and the Tampa Urban League and the Universal Negro Improvement Association [UNIA] in the 1920s.(11) In fact, by the twenties black businesses, newspapers, schools, fraternal orders, clubs and professional organizations had long been permanent elements of African-American life in Tampa.(12) Moreover, the extent of community organization rested in the final analysis on the strength of the fundamental institutions of family, church, and school.

Tampa's African American Family

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, as in other historical periods, the institution of the family was the core of black community life. Indeed, the research of Herbert Gutman and other scholars has shown that the slavery experience of the nineteenth century had not irreparably inhibited the creation of firm family ties.(13) Tampa's African Americans, as they migrated from the rural areas to the city, managed to forge and maintain durable families that withstood all manner of hardship. Federal census data indicate that by 1900 in Tampa and Hillsborough County more than three-fourths of black families with children were two-parent households.(14) These black families, characterized by strong kinship networks, kept alive elements of black …