Freedom Towns: A Vast but Largely Forgotten Movement of Black Self-Rule

If you sit on the bench outside Natural Beautiii Haircare in Eatonville, Florida, and stare across East Kennedy Boulevard, you'll see the grassy lot where Zora Neale Hurston's house once stood. Hurston was a novelist and a folklorist, a champion of the culture that African Americans created for themselves, a Taft Republican of a fiercely decentralist and anti-imperialist bent, and a proud daughter of Eatonville, this barely-a-square-mile patch of Orange County that in 1887 became one of the first all-black municipalities to be incorporated in the United States.

Long before the hair salon was here, the place where you're sitting was the site of Joe Clark's store. That shop "was the heart and spring of the town," Hurston wrote in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. "Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths," spreading gossip and telling tall tales and making "sly references to the physical condition of women." Clark himself served as mayor for over a decade; in Eatonville's early days, his shop did double duty as town hall. Buildings and families have come and gone since then, but the community has kept itself alive.

"I didn't appreciate how good it was," says Monica Washington, looking back at her Eatonville childhood in the 1970s and '80s. Washington now lives in nearby Maitland; she and her husband Tommy have just opened Tommy's Kitchen, a restaurant about two minutes' walk from the spot where Joe Clark's store used to be. (I ordered the jerk chicken wings. They're great.) When she talks about the old days, Washington paints an idyllic picture of children playing outside together and looking out for each other. She doesn't think the town has changed that much since she was a girl ("though the kids like to play inside now"). A lot of the people she grew up with still live either in Eatonville or nearby. A lot of their parents and grandparents still have homes here too. It's a close-knit small town, she says, and it feels "like a warm hug."

It's also a living remnant of a vast but largely forgotten movement. From Princeville, North Carolina, to Allensworth, California, black Americans responded to repressive laws and extrajudicial violence by acquiring their own land, building their own institutions, and carving out a space where Jim Crow couldn't easily reach them. Hurston's father moved to Eatonville from Alabama when Zora was a toddler, leaving a stratified sharecropper community and putting down roots in a friendlier environment. Zora didn't realize how unusual their home was until she left for a school in a more conventional southern city. "Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl," she later wrote. "Things were all about the town to point this out to me."

'Unofficial Places by Their Very Nature'

Eatonville was born a decade after Reconstruction ended, but the earliest sparks of black self-rule in Florida appeared far earlier, in the days when the peninsula was a haven for people escaping slavery. Across the South, maroons—fugitive slaves and their descendants and allies—settled wherever geographic barriers created sufficient protection; the swamps of Florida were such a place. But because the colony was ruled by the Spanish, and because the Spanish were often locked in conflict with Great Britain, another path to living freely soon emerged as well.

In 1693, Charles II of Spain issued an edict granting legal freedom to slaves who made their way to Florida and pledged their loyalty to his kingdom and to the Catholic Church. Not every governor of the colony was consistent in following this policy, but it carried enough weight to attract freedom seekers from the British territories to the north. In 1738, some of those immigrants formed the first officially sanctioned free black settlement in what is now the continental United States: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, near St. Augustine. Its residents established homesteads and pledged to help defend the Spanish colony, declaring they would be "the most cruel enemies of the English"; their village lasted until 1763, when the British finally managed to conquer it.

A similar outpost began as a fort operated by the British in Prospect Bluff, out in the Florida Panhandle, during the War of 1812. After the English withdrew, the region's maroons occupied what became known as the Negro Fort, which they held until 1816, when a U.S. gunboat incinerated it with hundreds of people inside. Some of the settlement's survivors fled to Angola, a maroon colony along the Manatee River in southwestern Florida. Angola endured until 1821, when the territorial governor, future president Andrew Jackson, sent troops to destroy it. Many maroons left Florida altogether in the ensuing years, but a guerrilla resistance persisted into the 1840s—and the folklore of that resistance persisted even longer. Almost a century later, Hurston would collect a tale about "a great African medicine man" who is sold into slavery, flees to Florida, joins "the Indian-Negro forces" battling the white slavers, and finally, when the fight is lost, transforms himself into a gator and makes his home in a lake about a mile from the future site of Joe Clark's store.

When emancipation came, it suddenly seemed possible again to establish more visible self-governing black communities. In 1858, the libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner had argued that slaves were the rightful owners of the enterprises where they were forced to work—that they had "a natural right to compensation" for their bondage and that "the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors" would be a good place to get it. Just a few years later, Spooner's angry demand suddenly seemed like a live possibility.

Consider Davis Bend, a Mississippi peninsula where Joseph and Jefferson Davis had owned huge plantations before the Civil War. Jefferson is the more famous of the brothers, as he became president of the Confederacy, but it's Joseph who mostly concerns us here. A devotee of the utopian socialist Robert Owen, he decided to turn his plantation into a model system where the food and housing were better than usual, where slaves could start businesses and own property, and where an in-house judicial system drew its juries, judges, and sheriffs from among the enslaved. This was more humane than the typical slave camp, but it still was ultimately a slave camp. What's notable for our story is what happened in 1862, when Davis fled the approaching Union army: His former chattel stayed in Mississippi and kept running the plantation, this time for themselves.

When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant arrived, he declared that Davis Bend should "become a Negro paradise." Not everyone in the government went along with that high-minded promise—some black residents were evicted to make room for Union soldiers, for example, and the army decided to confiscate the freedmen's tools and animals—but refugees from surrounding areas were allowed to settle and work the land, with impressive results. By the end of the war, Eric Foner wrote in his 1988 book Reconstruction, the old plantations "had become a remarkable example of self-reliance, whose laborers raised nearly 2,000 bales of cotton and earned a profit of $160,000." The former slaves also maintained their own judicial system, and by the summer of 1865 they were making plans to build their own schoolhouses.

Alas: The federal Freedmen's Bureau still retained ultimate control of the property, with white superintendents reserving the right to overrule the black farmers. Meanwhile, Joseph Davis was pressing officials to give him back the land, arguing that the bureau had mistreated the freedmen. There was some truth to that—indeed, Davis' former slave Ben Montgomery, a leader in the freedmen's community, had asked his ex-owner to intervene when the bureau refused to lease the black men a cotton gin. But Davis made his case in ridiculously self-serving terms. "Formerly a negro did not expect a white man would cheat him or tell him a lie," he claimed in a letter to one senator, but "now he expects nothing else."

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson issued Joseph Davis a pardon, paving the way for him to retake the plantation. The aging planter promptly sold the land to Montgomery and his sons, but that saddled their enterprise with considerable debts, which became more oppressive during the economic downturn of the 1870s. Joseph, always the more liberal-minded of the Davis brothers, was willing to make allowances for the circumstances, but he died in 1870. Jefferson Davis was less tolerant: He had never supported the sale, he sued to retake the land, and in 1878 the state supreme court ruled in his favor.

Some Reconstruction governments made an effort to support black land claims. South Carolina established a commission to sell farmland to black tillers; the process was sometimes hobbled by corruption, but it did get some property into African-American hands, which is how the black town of Promised Land was able to put down roots in Greenwood County. More often, smaller versions of the Davis Bend story played out around the South. First, the freedmen took over the plantations and formed self-governing communities—in 1865, for example, the Savannah Republican printed a dispatch from Ogeechee, Georgia, where "each plantation elected a committee of three to represent their respective neighborhood" and where the district "is now mostly self-supporting and will soon be entirely so." Then the old enslavers started reoccupying the properties, and then the freedmen set out to find land elsewhere. Ben Montgomery's son Isaiah made his way about 130 miles north, where he and some others from Davis Bend acquired some land from a railroad and established a new town, Mound Bayou. It was founded in 1887, the same year Eatonville got its charter.

At times this spontaneous migration became an organized movement. As southern governments imposed harsh new racial restrictions and as nightriders tried to terrorize those who refused to comply, black figures like Henry Adams and Benjamin "Pap" Singleton started talking up the idea of moving to Kansas. "The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves," Adams explained. "Then we said there was no hope for us and we had better go."

The people who took up their call, known as the Exodusters, formed several settlements, the most successful of which was the city of Nicodemus. The migration was large enough to spark hearings in the Senate, which reached their most surreal moment when Sen. Zebulon Vance (D–N.C.) pressed Adams repeatedly on whether he practiced Voodoo. ("Didn't you now just a little, Doctor, before you joined the Methodist Church?")

After the Kansas exodus, Edward P. McCabe started promoting the idea of carving an all-black state out of the land that is now Oklahoma. That didn't happen, but several black towns were born there: Boley, Langston, Red Bird, Taft, and more. (The local City Herald advertised Langston as "the negro's refuge from lynching, burning at the stake and other lawlessness.") The sociologist Mozell C. Hill noted in 1946 that fledgling cities on the western frontier tended to fall into three categories: utopian colonies, boomtowns, and "promoters' enterprises." The black towns of Oklahoma, he concluded, mixed elements of all three.

When men like Singleton and Adams called loudly for moving west, they were just the tip of a larger, broader, and mostly quieter quest for a place where black Americans could own their own land and run their own affairs. In Freedom Colonies, a 2005 book about the freedmen's towns of Texas, Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad described two rather different kinds of communities.

One sort resembled the antebellum retreats of the maroons. "At the end of remote roads, along county lines, and down in the river bottoms, few such places had been incorporated, or platted, or even properly listed on county maps," Sitton and Conrad wrote. "These were unofficial places by their very nature, some so much so that the sheriff or the census taker only rarely intruded on their affairs." They might formally own the property, or they might just squat in spaces that no one wanted; they might grow crops, or they might hunt, fish, and live off the land.

The other sort of community emerged when a former master was feeling beneficent. In very rare cases, he might deed some land to his onetime slaves (as in Cedar Branch, Texas) or sell it to them on easy terms (as in the nearby settlements of Hall's Bluff, Wheeler Springs, and Dixon-Hopewell). But sometimes, Sitton and Conrad said, a black settler would show up "with mysterious resources allowing the purchase of land." Other families would soon follow, and a village would be born. Sitton and Conrad offered reasons to believe those figures with unexplained funds were people for whom an old slaveholder felt a twinge of obligation, such as his mixed-race children.

In these Afro-Texan towns, formal government was largely absent. Decades later, extension agents would arrive with agricultural advice, but before then the only constantly present face of the state might be the local public school. And even that was likely to draw heavily on voluntary contributions. The most important institution here was the Rosenwald Fund, founded by the Chicago businessman Julius Rosenwald. He had met Booker T. Washington in 1911, and the two soon conceived an ambitious plan to build schools for black children across America. Hoping to foster self-help rather than smother it, the fund gave seed money only to communities willing to contribute their own labor, land, material, and money to the schools as well. Thousands of places took them up on the offer, many of them all-black towns.

In most of these settlements, the anthropologist Eleanor Mason Ramsey and the landscape architect Everett Fly wrote in 1991, "social organization was rooted in voluntary associations that cross-cut kinship ties. The colonies were essentially extended families." But some of them opted for a more formal governing structure. Incorporation erected a shield against annexation and other external threats. Of course, it also opened the door to battles over taxes, vice laws, and allegations of public corruption. In 1895, a group of Langston residents objected so strongly to a stiff local tax that they threatened to disincorporate the city.

One town that chose formal government was Zora Neale Hurston's home. On August 15, 1887, 27 of Eatonville's earliest citizens gathered to elect their first mayor and five aldermen.

'The Sense of Peace That I Get When I'm Here'

One hundred and thirty-six years later, I am sitting in the sanctuary of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church with Pastor Willie Barnes. This was the church—not the building, but the institution—where John Hurston, Zora Neale's father, served as pastor long ago. "I tumbled right into the Missionary Baptist Church when I was born," Zora wrote; and while her religious views grew more heterodox as she grew older, she still felt an affection for the place. The singing she heard in the pews, she declared, "was finer than anything that any trained composer had done to the folk-songs."

Back then there were two churches in town. Today there are at least half a dozen. This one is the biggest: Barnes estimates that around 3,500 to 4,000 people belong to it, of whom maybe 1,200 are likely to show up either in person or online for any given Sunday service.

If that sounds awfully big for a church in Eatonville—a place whose present population is a little less than 2,300—it's because most of its members do not live in town. The pastor himself commutes from MetroWest, a private master-planned community about 25 minutes away. But he's an active part of Eatonville anyway, having been leading one of its oldest institutions since 1987.

"What's changed here since then?" I ask him.

"Not much," he replies. Then he amends his answer: "Of course, we lost the school."

Eatonville still has an elementary school and some private preschools. But the old Robert Hungerford Preparatory High School doesn't exist anymore. This wasn't just another high school: It had been born at the end of the 19th century as the Robert L. Hungerford Normal and Industrial School, a private institution modeled on Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute (and with a $400 donation from Washington himself). When the county took over the academy in 1951, it accepted a covenant requiring that the land be used to educate black children. But it closed the school in 2009—and though the locals continued to use the property as a community center after that, the county school board demolished the place during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020.

Now there's a dispute over what to do with the vacant land, which makes up about 14 percent of the town. The school board tried to sell it to a developer in 2023, prompting a lawsuit from the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community and a descendent from the founders of the original Hungerford trust. They argued that the government was violating the covenant it had accepted in 1951; they'd like the land to be transferred to a community trust instead. (The developer backed out of the sale in March.)

That has probably been the most high-profile debate in Eatonville recently, attracting coverage from CBS and The New York Times. But there are plenty of other public concerns here. The median household income is only about $27,000. While most of the town's businesses seem well-kept, an extended-stay motel called the Eatonville Home Town Suites is run-down to the point of looking abandoned, aside from the people walking in and out of it; it has sometimes been a bit of a crime magnet too, with both a stabbing and a double shooting in 2021. And the local government has seen some scandal, with former Mayor Anthony Grant—owner of the Home Town Suites—getting convicted of election fraud in 2017. Not long after that, the Orange County comptroller accused Eatonville's community redevelopment agency of directing funds improperly, including a $100,000 loan to a company owned by Grant.

Pastor Barnes thinks the most important local issue is the need for business development. "People who live here work outside of Eatonville," he says. "There's very little of a job market. We've got a few independent businesses, and they're functioning. But you don't have that job market." (One way he hopes to help the local economy: In 2022, his church launched a credit union for the town. It currently has 325 members.)

Jenn Ross owns one of those businesses, a vegan Caribbean restaurant called DaJen Eats. (I recommend the toona melt—that's toona, not tuna, because it's actually made of chickpeas and artichoke. But honest to God, it tastes like fish.) Ross isn't an Eatonville native: She was born in Jamaica, moved to Florida in 2001, studied law, got a corporate job in Orlando, and decided to ditch it and cook instead. Before she opened the restaurant, she was selling vegan food at a gas station; the place was barely a mile from Eatonville, but she didn't realize the town was here until Mayor Eddie Cole started buying her wares. She opened the restaurant in 2018 and came here to live as well.

And she loves it. "My favorite thing about Eatonville is just the sense of peace that I get when I'm here," she says. When she announced online that she was setting up shop in town, she got a concerned note from a social media follower who had heard that Eatonville was unsafe. But that hasn't been her experience. "I walk to work every morning and I get here at 4:00, 4:30, and I've never not felt safe," she tells me. "This really feels like home to me. In every capacity, it feels like home."

Ross has made her restaurant part of local life, offering cooking classes to elementary-school kids and hosting a monthly book club where she curates a menu for each volume the group reads. "I would hope that Eatonville doesn't change as much as it seems to be changing," she says. "I would hope that people find a way to hold onto their homes, to hold onto their family homes and not sell it." She hopes to see more "that really celebrates the rich history of what Eatonville is."

For outsiders, that history is Eatonville's big draw. More specifically, the draw is Hurston. There is the ZORA! Festival every January. There is the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, which sells Hurston's books and showcases African-American artists. Around the corner from Tommy's Kitchen, there's the Moseley House, the second-oldest building in town, maintained by members of Hurston's old sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. Hurston's friend Tillie Moseley lived here, and the place is packed with historical artifacts, which the public can view at regular hours each weekend and by appointment during the week.

"We've had book clubs from all around that make their pilgrimage here to Eatonville," says Rosa Pickett, my Zeta guide to the Moseley House. They tell her they've been reading Hurston, and they say, "I just wanted to touch just a bit of where she was and where history might've occurred."

Not every historic site in town is as well-kept as this one. The oldest structure in Eatonville, next door to the Moseley House, is the original site of the St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal Church. (The congregation now has a newer building across the street.) It hasn't undergone the sort of loving restoration that the Moseley House has. Indeed, it doesn't seem to have undergone much maintenance recently at all. The family that owns it had been hoping to get some funds to restore it, but those apparently didn't come through, and now there is reportedly some disagreement among the owners about how to proceed.

Walk through Eatonville and you'll see other signs of its past—historical markers, a monument honoring Hurston, a display of her books at the library. All this is a relatively recent development. During her lifetime, Hurston's reputation in her hometown was mixed, with some people loving her work (or loving her personally) while others felt she'd written a little too frankly about their lives. On a national level, she fell into obscurity after her death in 1960: Today she is immensely popular and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a staple of high school reading lists, but for a long time she was almost forgotten. When Alice Walker was launching a Zora revival in the '70s, she visited the Fort Pierce cemetery where Hurston had been interred and found that her heroine had been buried in an unmarked grave. A few years after that, in 1979, the Miami Herald's Francis Ward came through Eatonville. The only public tribute he found to the town's most famous daughter was the name of the library.

It was a long way from there to today, when Eatonville's leaders realize that their home's place in American history and literature just might be a tourist draw—especially given that one of the world's biggest entertainment companies has erected another tourist draw just half an hour down the road.

"We've had several families that have come through with children," says Jean Gano, a volunteer at the Moseley House who used to teach at Eatonville's elementary school. "One was writing a book report and then they were just visiting Disney for their vacation."

'An Outsized Contribution to the Fight for Freedom'

By the beginning of the 20th century, whites were starting to notice the black colonies cropping up around them. They weren't always unhappy about what they saw. In 1902, the Birmingham, Alabama, Age-Herald editorialized in favor of the "all-negro towns" emerging "here and there in this State," suggesting that they could be "a chance to learn self-government and better citizenship." That paternalistic tone was sharpened by a hint that such experiments could be a safety valve, able to "satisfy any longing they may have" for political participation. What's more, "A negro who cannot 'get along' in a white town can fall back to an all-negro town."

That idea haunts the history of these towns: the possibility that they might blunt demands for equal rights, or even serve as an alibi for the segregationists. At the 1956 Democratic convention, a Mississippi delegate gave a Canadian reporter an earful about the towns. "If a Nigra has ability," he concluded, "he can become rich." The same delegate pooh-poohed the idea of major reforms, allowing only that "in maybe one or two generations" the races might be "sitting together in buses and things like that. Ah caint see much mo' than that."'

But these places could also serve as safe harbors for civil rights activists, even as bases for their operations. Take Mound Bayou, that little Mississippi town founded by those refugees from Davis Bend. In 1975, the civil rights leader Andrew Young remembered that when "we marched in those glory days…we knew that there was the little hospital at Mound Bayou that would care for us." The hospital in question had been built by a mutual aid organization called the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, and in 1942 it had hired a new chief surgeon, T.R.M. Howard. In the ensuing decades, as he worked first in that hospital and then in a clinic he opened across the street, Howard would found the state's most influential civil rights group, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which organized boycotts and rallies, launched the activist career of Medgar Evers, became a center of organizing to protest the racist murder of Emmett Till, and kept a stockpile of weapons for self-defense.

"This little community made an outsized contribution to the fight for freedom vs. Jim Crow," says David Beito, the co-author of T.R.M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer. As it did that, it showed how successful a black town could be. It had several thriving businesses, including the state's preeminent black-owned bank; the citizens were clearly capable of self-governance, given that much of Mound Bayou's public business was conducted in New England–style town meetings. Crime was so low that they razed the local jail, relying instead on what Beito calls "an informal system of adjudication, negotiation, and consensus to control crime and resolve disputes."

An African-American town could look rather different to a black observer and a white one. Take Robbins, Illinois, a rustic suburb founded in 1917 after land speculators made a bad bet on some property near Chicago and were ready to sell it cheap. (One of its first mayors, Samuel Earl Nichols, was the father of Nichelle Nichols, a.k.a. Star Trek's Uhura.) The 1949 Negro Motorist Green Book sang the place's praises, exulting that "Ninety-five per cent of the more than six thousand inhabitants OWN THEIR OWN HOMES" and urging readers to visit to "TAKE A LOOK AT AN EXPERIMENT OF WHAT NEGROES WORKING TOGETHER CAN DO." A year later, the white writer Sidney Lens filed a more sour report for The Reporter, shrugging at the town's high homeownership rate (by his account two-thirds rather than 95 percent) because so many of the homes were substandard. He acknowledged that the town gave "each citizen an abundant feeling of belonging, of being a recognized somebody with recognized rights." But he preferred to dwell on the ways that life there was unattractive, and to suggest that the town's leaders liked the "opportunity to play big fish in a little pond."

Lens wasn't wrong that Robbins faced problems, of course. In particular, the town had persistent difficulties with drainage and flooding, a byproduct of the fact that it was built on low and swampy land. Lots of these towns had this problem, since this was often the only land available to black buyers. In the long run, that could spell doom.

The recent documentary Eroding History, directed by André Chung and written by Rona Kobell and Sean Yoes, shows how this played out on Riley Roberts Road, an unincorporated African-American hamlet on Maryland's Eastern Shore. (Full disclosure: Kobell is my wife.) Freedmen started acquiring land there in the 19th century, and for a while it was thriving; it had the one beach in the area that was open to black families, where you could swim, eat seafood, watch a baseball game, and enjoy concerts by James Brown, Otis Redding, and other stars. But the bay has been slowly consuming the community. The cemetery outside the Macedonia United Methodist Church is so flooded that coffins have risen to the surface. When I visited Riley Roberts Road in 2021, I saw the remnants of a Rosenwald school filled with water and weeds. The last handful of homeowners understand the neighborhood is doomed. At this point, they'd be happy to save the graves.

Other towns disappeared long ago. Sometimes that was inevitable, particularly on the frontier, where you couldn't always be sure you were settling in agriculturally appropriate land. The Nebraska Sandhills proved inhospitable to black and white homesteaders alike, and their rows of crops gave way to ranches; the black farmers who built the town of DeWitty had created a working community, but they couldn't overcome what nature had dealt them. "By 1936 nearly all of its settlers had sold out to ranchers," Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld write in their 2023 book The First Migrants (Bison Books). "Everyone moved away." More broadly, the depopulation of much of rural America was sure to affect what were, after all, mostly rural villages—and of course that decline was going to hit the people with the bad land first and worst.

And some towns were murdered. In 1923, a white mob invaded the black community of Rosewood, Florida, about 130 miles northwest of Eatonville, and burned almost every building to the ground. Incorporation wasn't an impervious shield. When the white town of Sanford, Florida, wanted to expand in the direction of the black town of Goldsboro, it lobbied the Legislature to revoke both towns' charters; in 1911, once that was accomplished, the Sanford imperialists were awarded a new charter that granted them the Goldsboro lands. When the East Texas Oil Field was discovered in 1930, Sitton and Conrad wrote, "every black land deed came under predatory legal scrutiny."

This threat of encroachment, incidentally, helps explain Hurston's most infamous piece of writing. In 1955, she sent the Orlando Sentinel a letter protesting Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision declaring the segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Deriding "the belief that there is no greater delight to Negroes than physical association with whites," Hurston proclaimed it "a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association." Other papers around the South eagerly reprinted the letter. In 1960, a few months after Hurston's death, Sen. Richard Russell (D–Ga.) invoked her on the Senate floor—not to honor her literary or anthropological achievements but to ruminate that "a Negro authoress who lived in Florida" ("I do not recall the name") had criticized the Supreme Court's decision. The conservative outlet Human Events touted Hurston's words as proof that not all "members of the Negro race in America desire desegregation."

Hurston's views on desegregation were, in fact, more complicated than that. A year after her Brown letter, she wrote to a friend about the NAACP's work for Autherine Lucy, a young woman whose admission to the University of Alabama had been rescinded when the college discovered she was black. As a legal matter, Hurston sided with Lucy, declaring that "the University of Alabama is supported by state funds, and so any resident of the state is entitled to attend." More broadly, she said that "as a Negro…I cannot be in favor of segregation." But she had mixed feelings about the case, partly for tactical reasons but also, more importantly, because "there are two magnificent Negro institutions of learning in the state of Alabama," Tuskegee and Talladega, that Lucy could have attended instead. Hurston wanted equal rights, but she didn't want that to come at the expense of what black people had built for themselves.

Which brings us back to that threat of encroachment. While most black Americans supported the Brown decision, there was a fair amount of opposition in the all-black towns, where people worried about losing control of their schools. I would not want to reduce Hurston's views here to her Eatonville background, as she was perfectly capable of breaking with received liberal opinion on her own. (Her other letters to the Sentinel in the 1950s included at least two defenses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as well as an argument that the U.S. should have stayed out of World War II and let Hitler and Stalin "weaken each other down.") But it's telling to compare her comments about Brown to the fears expressed in those Texas towns that Sitton and Conrad described in Freedom Colonies. In the '60s, they wrote, "freedmen's settlements often fought school integration to the end, sometimes in strange political alliances with white segregationists." Integration, those black Americans feared, might mean death for "their own independent community schools." Desegregation didn't have to mean those academies would close, but many were indeed swept under by a wave of school consolidation.

Encroachment aside, the civil rights era hastened the decline of many black towns just by making them less necessary. The more possible it was to pursue opportunities that once had been largely reserved for whites, the more likely the towns' younger citizens were to leave. While there's still plenty of appetite in the black community for governing your own affairs in a rooted community, not everyone wants to do that in a remote flood plain.

But some towns survived. Eatonville kept up its lively local life for years: Joe Clark's store gave way to Club Eaton, where musicians from Duke Ellington to Tina Turner would play when they came through the area. ("You'd go to a club in Orlando," Pickett remembers, "and when they shut down, then you'd come over to Eatonville because they were open longer.") And the town kept pairing that Saturday-night energy with a Sunday-morning spirit. When Hungerford Elementary School hired Jean Gano to teach, back in 1984, the principal first asked her: "You're from New York. You're not on those drugs, are you?"

'Eatonville's Feeling of Unity'

Before I flew to Florida to report this story, I asked Reason cartoonist Peter Bagge if he had any suggestions for my visit. Bagge wrote and drew Fire!!, a graphic novel relating the life of Zora Neale Hurston, and he gave a talk in Eatonville after the book came out. He told me that he liked the local library but that the place as a whole had been a letdown: "The town's been swallowed up by Orlando—just a nondistinct lower-class suburb now."

I can see how it would feel that way in the daytime. There's a constant whir of traffic down East Kennedy Boulevard, as anonymous cars travel from one Orlando outpost to another. Attentive drivers may know they're passing through a place called Eatonville—the archway announcing "Historic Town of Eatonville" might give it away—but they wouldn't necessarily think there was anything special about it.

But in the evening, the place feels different. The crosstown traffic eases, and the residents return from their jobs. Cyclists wheel by. Kids play in the side streets. (I guess they haven't all moved inside.) It feels less like a highway and more like a home.

In Mules and Men, her collection of southern black folklore, Hurston recounted a 1927 visit to Woodbridge, "a Negro community joining Maitland on the north as Eatonville does on the west." Woodbridge differs from Eatonville, she explained, in that "no enterprising souls have ever organized it. They have no schoolhouse, no post office, no mayor. It is lacking in Eatonville's feeling of unity. In fact, a white woman lives there."

So I drove up Maitland Boulevard to see what was left of Woodbridge. I found most of the residue tucked behind some generic Florida sprawl, in a spot no driver would discover without deliberately seeking it out. There were a few houses. Some dirt roads—rare around here. A couple of guys were outside chatting, one black and one white. A dog prowled around. I was just a few minutes' walk from the buzzing traffic of U.S. Highway 17, but this little spot surrounded by big trees felt like it had been dropped in from another county.

You could tell there was some history here, in the sense that some quirky wrinkle in time must explain why this wooded hideaway exists. But you couldn't tell what that history was, and you probably wouldn't think that this had once been a place with a name. The closest I saw to a historical marker was back on Highway 17, where the old village temple, New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, was now squeezed between a storage facility and a Porsche dealership. A sign outside noted that its dining room dated back to 1956.

Eatonville isn't like that. Eatonville is alive. It might not be as healthy as it could be, but there is a real town there.

When you explore the history of these black colonies, it's hard not to dream of a different path we could have taken in Reconstruction and its aftermath. A timeline where the plantations were turned over to the men and women who had been enslaved there, like Spooner demanded; where licensing and apprenticeship laws did not bar the freedmen from other trades; where broadly applied "vagrancy" statutes did not keep them from seeking work or pleasure elsewhere. A place where black liberty and self-rule were not shunted off to tiny towns located on the least productive land.

The people of Eatonville didn't get that alternate history. But they did get the feeling that Ross called a sense of peace, that Washington called a warm hug. They got a community, with all its texture and affection and memory.