#Thread:

I come across documents and images with captions that describe Black settlements as shanty towns or homes as shacks. Whenever I find these descriptions...after I jot “How dare you?” into the margins…I think of a quote by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.

It's from Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ essay in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520285958/nonstop-metropolis

This is the quote.

@kashaamcc sent me a DM a few wks ago. She was doing community outreach in an area called Pleasant City in Florida. She said she’d never heard of it until she had to go there for work.

An elderly Black man told her about how Pleasant City came to be.

It wasn’t pleasant.

After a few searches/flipping through propaganda in the form of “history”…Pleasant City’s origins came to light.

PC is a strip of land in West Palm Beach, FL carved out by a 1900s land developer that sold Black people lots for $150+.

Here’s the thing…they already had land.

1000+ families made their way to Florida in the mid 1800s to build the Florida East Coast Railway. They also helped to build Royal Poinciana Hotel—an extravagant wooden hotel built in the 1890s with hotel entrances for private railway cars.

#webuiltthis

The Black families built a settlement nearby. It was called “Styx.” While building the infrastructure of the area, they built one for themselves too—establishing businesses, schools, mutual aid societies, churches and more.

Here’s one of the families from the area. The Peppers Family. 1906.

Source: https://cbs12.com/amp/news/local/the-history-of-pleasant-city

Here are newspaper clippings from the early 1900s that highlight Styx as a:

-“factor”
-“darkies an easy-going, fun-loving race”
-having neighboring “palatial homes/world-famed hotels” vs. “houses built from driftwood, dry-goods boxes, and sticks”

When the hotels, mansions, and play areas were built for white residents…they decided that the nearby Black settlement was a “problem.” The flourishing community was driven to West Palm Beach/Pleasant City from their homes.

Articles claim that some Black families remember a fire. They say that they were given a party for the laborers, and while they danced, some of their homes burned. Others remember just being evicted. The latter was from a Peppers sister that died in 1995. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/local/post-time-pioneer-photos-give-glimpse-palm-beach-mysterious-styx/V0O7PV4qOadhQPKmxCIXGN/

Other aspects of the 2016 article dismiss Black family recollections as lore, clinging instead to the recollections and artifacts of the people who oppressed them. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/local/post-time-pioneer-photos-give-glimpse-palm-beach-mysterious-styx/V0O7PV4qOadhQPKmxCIXGN/

Two words stick out like a sore thumb: SHANTY TOWN.

And again my heart says, “How dare you?”

While some of the structures were razed, others still stand as memories of a Black community moved and suppressed…a railroad built with hands rarely credited, fortunes amassed with the help of those displaced, and powerful legacies diminished to lore and shanties.

Another reservation, if you will—with street names that don’t quite align with the truth…with people that have a history that needs telling.

And an elder that told @kashaamcc that the world should know.

Here are photos of Pleasant City, today. Shots by @kashaamcc.