Orlando in the 80's: Organizing campaigns on public transit & gentrification

While recently passing thru Orlando, Florida we stopped by the Callahan Neighborhood Center in the heart of the city's black community. Today the city is gentrifying the neighborhood. During the early 1980's I helped organize a campaign to save the school that once was the only black high school in the entire Orange County. My 2008 book 'Come Together Right Now' recounts my work in Orlando during that period as we confronted the then racist city leadership. My visit this past week was the first look inside the center since it was renovated many years ago. Below is a chapter from the book.

 

  TAKING ON THE MAYOR OF ORLANDO

 “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”
– Frederick Douglas

I loved working for the Farm Workers Union. I learned how to organize and was inspired by the sacrifices of Cesar Chavez and the other leaders of the movement. I was deeply touched by people like Frank Lewis and Sylvester Evans. They showed me that poor people had more intelligence, spirit, and dignity than any rich person I’d ever met. The union gave me direction and challenges, and answered my prayers for a way to find myself. I’ve never had regrets about those two years with the UFW.

In the summer, there was not much to do at the union hall. Most of the workers went north to pick tomatoes in Ohio or apples in New York. The citrus season was over.

In 1979, on one of those slow, humid summer days a young man named John Hedrick walked into my UFW office. John was just back in town after having been away at college, and was going around visiting the offices of progressive political organizations in the community. He was a solidly-built redheaded guy about twenty-three years old who was from Orlando. He had graduated, done some traveling, and, while on the road, had seen what cities all over the nation were doing to promote public mass transportation. John said that he felt Orlando was doing virtually nothing in this regard and wondered if I could help him pass out some leaflets at the public bus station downtown under the name of the Free People’s Transit Organization (FPTO), a group he had just founded. Since I wasn’t doing anything at the time, and I remembered what had happened the last time someone came knocking on my door asking me to pass out leaflets, I took him up on the offer.

It wasn’t long before John offered me a job. His father was quite wealthy and had given him lots of oil stock money to go to graduate school. John wanted to organize with the money instead, and, offered me a job with the FPTO. When I accepted, the FPTO grew from one member to two.

The FPTO quickly made mass transportation an issue in the community. John and I were a great team. We began by packing the public hearings on transportation planning that no one from the public ever went to. John would get his church bus, visit the senior citizens’ high rise building, and bring a busload of seniors to the meeting. I would get on the phone and call folks associated with other political groups in the community. As soon as the politicians and dull bureaucrats would begin the meeting, we’d jump up and demand the agenda be changed to discuss public mass transit. The senior citizens in the audience would stand and cheer. (All the politicians ever wanted to talk about was more and wider roads. Since the creation of Disney World, the developers had taken control of the county government and needed more roads built in order to make their land holdings in Central Florida even more profitable.) When we attended meetings, our actions were big news on TV and in the paper. One reason was that no one in the county ever organized like this before, and it was exciting. Secondly, John was the son of the local power structure, so he was able to get the attention of the local media. His father was part owner of the local CBS-TV affiliate.

At night, we’d go into his father’s law office and run off thousands of leaflets on the big industrial copy machine and mail them, with law firm postage, to all the decision-makers in the community. During the day, we’d often go to the busiest intersections in the county with other volunteers and hold signs that read, Tired of waiting at this light?; Price of gas out of sight?; We need mass transit, right?; The People’s Transit Organization.

We changed the name of the organization after a while, dropping the “Free” from the name when the politicians got hung up on the fact that we were advocating a free downtown shuttle as a way to showcase and encourage ridership. John had seen other cities doing this during his travels across the country.

It wasn’t long before mass transit became a hot political issue, and local candidates for office, including the mayor, were getting their pictures taken down at the public bus station for their campaign brochures. We made the issue stick and soon enough the city of Orlando had doubled the number of buses on its routes. 

By early1980, I realized that John’s money wouldn’t last forever and I needed to find some other work. I heard about a job that was opening up with a new organization to be called the Council of Community-Based Organizations (CCBO). I applied for and got the job. People knew my work from the People’s Transit Organization. The CCBO brought together social service providers and local black community neighborhood groups. The idea of the organization was to create better relations between service deliverers and those in need. My job was to make sure that poor people had input into the planning and delivery of social services by private organizations and government agencies.

The CCBO began holding its general membership meetings in the spring of 1980 at the state office building just on the west side of the interstate highway, in downtown Orlando. The relatively new state and federal office buildings, side by side, took up an enormous amount of land in the once large and proud black community called Callahan. Many of the old wooden homes were lost to these landmarks of “progress.” I remember that one time when I left the state office building the security guard told me about a touching experience he had recently had. He told me that an old black man came to the state building every day and sat outside on a bench for hours staring at a huge old oak tree that adorned the office tower. The security guard finally got up the courage to ask the old man why he came there so often. Without hesitation the black man said to him, “This was my front porch. I planted that tree.”

The state Department of Labor grant to the CCBO was supposed to last for three years. But in fact it only lasted for one year, and after that I had to become a VISTA volunteer for a year, at a very meager stipend, assigned to the CCBO. The third year, 1982, I was hired by legal services as a paralegal and was assigned to the CCBO.

After a time in this job, I realized the government really didn’t want its poverty programs to succeed. The bureaucracy tried to tie you up into knots doing needs surveys, filling out reports, covering your backside so as not to make any enemies in government, and then going back for more money each year, basically like a dog chasing its tail in a circle. I am convinced one reason we only got one year of funding from the state, instead of the original three promised, was because we were doing something. In fact, we were a royal pain in the ass.

The needs survey was easy. It was supposed to take me several months to complete. I quickly polled our membership. They knew what the needs were. They worked with the poor every day. They were groups run by the poor. The needs were simple. They said, “We need jobs, housing, day care, health care and public transportation.” Big surprise. We had our needs assessment. While the other CCBO groups around Florida were slogging about trying to finish their needs assessments, we moved onto implementation. We began to organize to get the needs met! Isn’t that how you solve poverty?

There was a war on the poor underway at the time. Jimmy Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan. Reagan was claiming that Carter was soft on communism and that our military was weak. So Carter, in his final two years in office, began cutting social programs and putting the money into the already-bloated Pentagon budget. Despite Carter’s claim that the “nuclear arms race is a disgrace to the human race,” he began to do even more to accelerate the arms race. The desire to remain in power will make most politicians change course in midstream. 

At the CCBO, we immediately began to speak out against local, state and national cutbacks in job training funds. Jobs were one of our top priorities. There was little day care or health care for the poor. Housing was limited and of poor quality and the funds for that were getting harder to find. We had recently made some local progress on public transit, but not enough. So, at the monthly CCBO membership meetings I began to ask the membership how they intended to hold onto the little we were getting in social spending unless we publicly fought for it. 

In the May, 1980, CCBO newsletter I wrote that a “People’s Rally for Equity in Social Services” was planned because, “In this political year of budget cutbacks, the easiest areas to cut are the ones where the people are the quietest. This is, of course, social spending. Our community must be involved in the priority-making process. We must identify our friends who have similar problems and needs. We must work together to express these priorities.” A month later, a meeting was held in Washington D.C. that created a National Network of CCBO’s. Unfortunately, it was too little too late.

In fact, the powers that be had already decided years before that the gains of the 1960s and early 1970s were costing the wealthy too much. The civil rights movement, women’s movement, peace and environmental movements, the disability and gay rights movements had all been pushing a more democratic decision making process when it came to dividing the national pie. The 1980s were to be the time of retraction. Cut-back, give-back, take-back were all to become the watchwords for the decade. An attack on poor people’s organizations ensued, and the programs that were about leveling the social playing field would be defunded. One of the first to be attacked was the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA). That was where the money for my job at the CCBO came from.

In Washington D.C., the man who led the attack on CETA was none other than our own Florida Sen. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat who was the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. Sen. Chiles and others very effectively began a coordinated national campaign to “root out the waste, fraud and abuse” in CETA. Big stories with big headlines ran in papers all over the nation about some local neighborhood organization misusing $30,000 in CETA funds, while down the street at the Pentagon they were ripping the taxpayer off by hundreds of billions of dollars each year and getting more money from Congress for doing that! It was enough to make you sick.

My problem as an organizer was twofold. First, those who had jobs in the social service field, while they didn’t like what was going on, were job scared and didn’t want to get too “radical” for fear they would soon be unemployed too. Secondly, poor people didn’t have confidence in the “reform-oriented organizations” like the CCBO because they understood that the clamp was coming down from the top and that the power structure had no intention of listening to groups like ours. People felt powerless.

In July 1980, riots erupted in downtown Miami and soon spilled over into Orlando. The Orlando police quickly set up a military line of operations in the heart of downtown just underneath the interstate highway overpass. This was the dividing line between the black community and the growing downtown tourist mecca that was in full blossom. The riots were met with police and fire hoses. The dejected people returned to their lives, things unchanged, except for the fact that new satellite police stations were set up in the black community. I called these “Community Policing Stations” forts on the Indian reservation.

In August 1980, I wrote in the CCBO newsletter the following: “The recent days’ events in the streets of Orlando once again show how the unaddressed problems in the black community can be reborn in the eyes of the media and politicians at the slightest touch of violence. For years, people in the black community have been working to deal with the issues…but it doesn’t seem like anyone hears the voices until the burning and hurting take place. The political and economic institutions must make a commitment to listen to the people and insist that the black community have an equal opportunity in this community. With equal opportunity must come an equal power to make decisions. The people in the community must be spoken with directly rather than going through white appointed leadership, as is now the case.” These were strong words in Orlando—a total company town. Little changed after the riots.

One black leader in Orlando who impressed me during this time was a young man named Henry Betts. He led a federal agency that was working with the unions to place more black men and women into job apprenticeship programs. Henry was from rural Mississippi and had witnessed the early 1960s civil rights movement up close and personal. He was not worried about what white people in Orlando thought of him. He was full of fight. Henry liked the spirit of the CCBO and became our president in 1980. At one meeting, he asked us what we were going to do about the Callahan School that sat right in the heart of the downtown black community. I knew very little about it, but promised him that I would look into it and bring something to the next meeting. 

 

Sitting on the corners of Parramore and Washington Streets, the old Callahan School building (formerly Jones High School) was the first permanent structure built in Central Florida for black students. Abandoned in the 1960s during desegregation, the city of Orlando bought the property from the School Board with the intent to demolish it and use the land for a fancy hotel and tennis courts. The land on which the school sat was originally donated by a local black man, Dr. Jones, and the community held BBQ’s and bake sales in order to raise the funds to build the large school facility. In the white community, at least three of the old brick schools had been restored for use as cultural centers. Under Henry’s leadership and my organizing, the CCBO developed a proposal to renovate the school and rename it the Callahan Humanities Center. It was our vision that a black history museum could be contained within it, a cultural center with studios for dance and drama and finally, and here was the kicker, that offices of community-based groups would be located inside. That meant the CCBO and other potential hell-raising groups would have a command center, a headquarters. The city was not at all interested.

Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick, one of the politicians who had put a picture of himself at the bus station on his campaign brochure during our People’s Transit days, was our point of focus. The city council would follow him. The city, not wanting to appear to be obstructionist, told us that we’d have to prepare a proposal and come before the council for approval of our plans. So, we worked feverishly to get our proposal in for the January 26, 1981 city council meeting.

I remember this time so vividly because my partner, Becky Acuna, and I were about to have a baby. On December 13, 1980 Julian Vincent Gagnon was born. I was there for the birth, coaching her to breathe and she did very well. I was the first to hold the bloody little boy, and cried with joy. John Lennon had been killed just days before and we named our son after Lennon’s son, Julian. I stayed home as the primary caretaker for the first six months and the best moments of my life were spent feeding and carrying on with Jules each morning. We called him Jules right away because of his propensity for drooling. Drools became Jules.

Back in Orlando, on January 26, 1981 the Orlando City Council voted unanimously to lease the Callahan School to the CCBO for $1 so we could have a chance to raise the more than one million dollars that would be necessary to restore the building. I didn’t know how in hell we would ever do that, but boldly told the city that we had resources available to us. I worked hard with the local Callahan Neighborhood Association to turn out a good crowd for the meeting, and Mary Alice Drew from the neighborhood, a resident there for sixty-one years, told the mayor and council that, “Since the building was built by the community, the community should have it.” Black City Commissioner Nap Ford agreed and stated that, “By approving this, you could turn the corner to improve black and white relations.” Ford had attended the old Jones High School and had a personal stake in the decision. We all left that day feeling quite good about things, but there was just one problem: the roof of the Callahan school had a big hole in it and every time it rained I would lie in bed at night counting the dollars that were being added to the more than a million dollar renovation price tag. How the hell were we really going to do this, I wondered?

Everybody always talked about grants, but few ever tried to write any. Most foundations didn’t fund bricks and mortar. The local historical preservation society in Orlando was not interested in funding a black community’s renovation project. They had white people’s buildings to restore. And the word was out within the power structure: don’t help these radicals at the CCBO. Just let them fade away. We gave them the lease for a year; no one can claim the city isn’t being helpful. Freeze them out!

However, I knew that the city and county governments got large community development block grants from the federal government. I had been to some of their meetings supporting black community groups trying to get sewer and water projects funded. So, I put an application into the city and county pipelines and went to work organizing support.

I knew that we needed to make the Callahan school a household name in the community, and more importantly, we needed to make it a symbol for local black and white relations. City Commissioner Ford had already hinted at that. (I try not to miss too many hints from politicians.) I began organizing a major “Save the Callahan” campaign. I knew that we’d never come up with the million plus dollars, but I thought we had a chance to make the school so popular they’d have to save it. 

We were set to go into the city planning board that was responsible for the community development dollars on April 21 of that year. On March 14, I organized a “Save the Callahan Rally” at the park that sat alongside the old worn-down school. Becky painted a big beautiful banner and we got a local flag company businessman to use his cherry picker van to hang the banner high onto the back of the auditorium of the rundown school. We hung the banner a week before the rally just for the effect. I got everyone I knew to help. Mary Alice Drew and the neighborhood association cooked for days making potato salad, sweet potato pies, and the best BBQ ever seen in the world. White and black friends volunteered to organize games for the local neighborhood kids and we set up a stage on a flat bed truck. City Commissioner Ford spoke and we had a band for entertainment. We counted over 1,000 people in the crowd and we made the evening news and the Sunday newspaper. We were on the record. Even Congressman Bill Nelson (later a Senator from Florida and NASA director) came to work the crowd. I knew we were getting somewhere when the politicians turned out.

Throughout 1982, I worked hard to keep Callahan in the public eye and we got just over $200,000 committed to the Callahan building fund from the city and county community development pools. But, it was a long way from success. We needed to do something more to create the unstoppable momentum that would save the school. We continued to be visible by holding more large rallies in the park and held more BBQ’s and car washes that raised just a couple hundred dollars each for the cause. But I wasn’t looking for money so much as I was just trying to buy time and keep the issue in front of the community. Each rally we organized got us more media coverage. 

In 1982, we were still struggling but we had a stroke of good luck. We met a black woman who was a high school art teacher. She had gone to Jones High School and wanted to help us save Callahan. She shared the vision for what we wanted to do inside the Humanities Center, the black history museum and the space for arts. Katie Wright was her name and I loved her and her big-hearted husband, John.

Katie soon had us out at the school on a Saturday morning taking down the plywood boards from the windows. We painted them with African symbols of life and hope and put them back up over the broken windows. The school sat on a busy street corner and now the Callahan had come alive. It still had a hole in the roof but now the public could see something was happening to the abandoned building. In our CCBO newsletter of January 1983 Katie wrote, “In 1983, we shall build a great trading place called the Callahan Humanities Center. People from all walks of life will acquire a new sense of self-confidence and many kinds of cultural talents will be tapped. Books will be written and published, poets will find audiences, films will be made and shown, plays will be written and performed, paintings will be painted and the arts of drumming and dancing will be shared.”

Callahan wasn’t the only thing I was working on at the CCBO. Ronald Reagan had been elected and dramatically escalated the cuts in social programs in order to support the Pentagon buildup. As we got more radical, the traditional social service providers who had originally belonged to the CCBO began drifting away. They were afraid to speak up about the government cutbacks their organizations and constituencies were facing. They also got money from the local United Way. Local weapons maker Martin Marietta (later renamed Lockheed Martin), and Disney World, were the biggest contributors to the United Way. I kept organizing events to educate and activate the public against these trends, but was seeing very little progress.

One day in early 1983, I came up with the idea of organizing a big cocktail party to benefit the Callahan effort. My idea was to send out invitations that would list prominent people as sponsors. But how could I get these prominent names? I went to City Commissioner Ford and asked him to get the mayor’s signature on a letter that would go out to folks asking them to pay $25 to be listed, along with his name, on an invitation. The mayor was no friend of the project, but had to play along to keep black community leaders off his back. So, he reluctantly signed the letter along with Nap Ford. I had asked my friend John Hedrick to get a list of the 100 most powerful people in Orlando from his father, the wealthy local attorney and a part of the power structure. John’s father gave me a mailing list and we mailed the letter from the mayor to these 100 biggies. About two dozen of them, surprisingly enough, sent in a donation and requested to be listed. When Nap Ford saw the final invitation with these names, along with many others of less prominent Orlando citizens, he was delighted. “Now we’ve won,” he said. I made thousands of copies of the invitation with all these big shot names and distributed them all over the community. The cocktail party made very little money, but we now had publicly shown that some of Orlando’s most influential people supported our project. 

My VISTA year had come to an end and I applied for renewal. However, President Reagan had changed the VISTA guidelines and we were turned down because the CCBO had a history of “radical” activity. We were told by the government that no more VISTA positions would be awarded to groups who were not in the mainstream, like the hospital sewing circle or the gardening club. The folks at legal services had taken great pride in the fact that the CCBO was doing such good community work out of their office, so they hired me on as a paralegal and told me to keep doing what I was doing. 

It had come to our attention that the City of Orlando was working on new downtown development plans that would be turning the entire Callahan neighborhood into a redevelopment zone. Of course, this would eventually displace the black community. The land had become as valuable as gold. With the expanding downtown business district, the once forgotten black neighborhood was now sitting on prized real estate. If we didn’t do something soon there would be no neighborhood left to use the Callahan Humanities Center that we were working so hard to save. We had to expand our organizing. 

I spent days in the county courthouse poring over land title records, finding out who owned all the land in the downtown black community. Mostly it was white slum lords. One of the biggest was K. Don Lewis, a member of the Downtown Development Board that was advising the City Council and the Redevelopment Agency. (Years later his daughter was to work with us in the peace movement.) Once I had an idea of who owned the land and what their plan was for the area, I put together a leaflet showing a bulldozer pushing over a house, and made thousands of copies. I visited every house, apartment and black-owned business in the Callahan/Holden black district and talked to every person I could about what was going on. I invited them to attend the big upcoming meeting at City Hall. It took me over two weeks, but it was one of the best organizing experiences I ever had. We packed city hall with black people, and, in the end the city was forced to build more low-income housing in the Callahan neighborhood. That helped to stabilize the situation, at least for another generation. Mayor Frederick was not happy with the packed city hall. He went out of his way to do his very best impression of a plantation master. He ordered the full house not to applaud after people from the neighborhood spoke. He called in the police and had them stand by the door in order to show that he was serious about throwing out anyone who defied him. I was sitting in the back of city hall alongside a black man who also worked as a paralegal at the legal services office. After each person spoke he and I clapped. The mayor scowled at us, but never called on the cops to remove us.

Each year, just for the hell of it, I entered the CCBO in the annual Disney Community Service Awards contest. Disney awarded $1,000 and $5,000 prizes to groups like the Girl Scouts, YMCA, Meals on Wheels, and mental health organizations—basic non-political groups. Applicant groups got one ticket to the awards banquet. One year I had gone to the banquet just to see what went on. The food was good and Disney had Cab Calloway come sing. This particular year, 1982, I asked another of our CCBO leaders to go. One afternoon, having forgotten all about the awards ceremony, I got a frantic call from the woman who had gone representing us. “We won, we won,” she kept screaming into the phone. “We got the $5,000 award and another special award of $5,000. I gotta go.” I was in a state of shock and couldn’t figure out how in God’s green Earth we could have won $10,000 from Disney! We were the town radicals.

We later found out what had happened. Dr. John Washington, a black political science professor at the University of Central Florida, was on the Disney award selection committee. He had recently been to our CCBO annual meeting and witnessed fifty black folks sitting alongside fifty white folks having dinner together and listening to noted academic Dr. Manning Marable, our keynote speaker. He was impressed. He tried arguing for us to get one of those $1,000 awards but the others on the selection committee wouldn’t go along with it. Apparently Dr. Washington got so worked up about it he had a heart attack and died right on the spot. What else could they do? They gave us the upper level $5,000 award and then threw in another $5,000 extra special gift in the name of the now-deceased Dr. John Washington. There, done, their conscience was clear. 

The inside of the renovated Callahan Neighborhood Center today

The very public Disney award to the CCBO only increased pressure on the mayor and city council to settle the Callahan issue. The mayor decided to offer a deal: the city would save and renovate the Callahan school if the CCBO withdrew from the project. The city feared what would happen if the building became a radical organizing center, especially in this neighborhood which the developers had big plans for. The neighborhood association agreed to the deal, deciding that it was their one chance to save the school. The decision was painful and controversial, but under the circumstances it was a compromise that I accepted. Mary Alice Drew broke the news to me and thanked me for all I had done to help the neighborhood. We remained good friends.

We gave the Disney money to Katie Wright so she could begin to hold some of the black cultural programs in the Callahan park just to make sure that the mayor and the city council would follow through on their promise to renovate the school. Eventually they tore down half of the more than 35,000 square foot building, renovated the rest, and named it the Callahan Neighborhood Center. They put city recreation department staff inside to monitor the pool tables and ping pong balls. But, they also created some meeting rooms, a day care center, and a job training program. They put tables outside so the old men in the neighborhood could sit and play dominoes. And, on the day the building was dedicated Katie, I, and other volunteers that helped us with the campaign all sat proudly and smiled when Callahan Neighborhood Association President Georgia Woodley publicly thanked the CCBO for helping to Save the Callahan. The mayor, who was the master of ceremonies, almost bit his tongue off in anger. We applauded with pride.

 

Standing outside the door of the center which I worked to help save from demolition

A middle-aged black activist who helped us during our Callahan campaign pulled me aside one day for a word. His name was Tim Adams and he ran for mayor several times, trying to bring black community issues into the campaigns. I was near the end of my days working for the CCBO. Reagan was now cutting funding for the legal services corporation because they too had done too much good work representing the poor. Since I was low man on the totem pole at legal services, I was the first laid off. By now it was the spring of 1983. Tim told me that “we have been watching you for some time.” He went on to describe how often, white folks came into the black community to “help us out” but all they did was “take.” He said that the whites soon got a better-paying job and then were off and forgot all about the black folks. He told me, “you didn’t do that".   

Tim Adams went on to tell me that he thought I should work where the real problem was: in the white community. He said the whites had the power, if they wished, to make life better for all people of color. It’s the white folks who needed organizing, he concluded. I was struck by his sincerity and his honesty. I was also struck by his wisdom. I decided, right on the spot, to do just as he advised.

 

Often, during my organizing career, I have had to listen to a room full of white activists moan about the lack of “people of color” in the room. I’ve always tried to remember the Tim Adams’ advice in those moments and suggest to folks that we should keep working in our own communities if we want to help people of color. If we could turn white people against the military-industrial complex, there would be more than enough money available to help the black community pull itself out of its multi-generational dependency on welfare and despair. It’s the whites who control the society. 

 

Bruce