Halle Plantation, Palm Beach, Magnolia, Green Book, Holiday Inn

There is a large high end development, a planned community of expensive homes and shops near Gainesville, Florida names Halle Plantation. The original plantation is remembered through Historic Haile Homestead, which is now a museum. The museum honors both the white landowners as well as the enslaved workers who built the home and worked the fields. It is not quite an ode to Gone with the wind that so many of these places are.

And yet, I wonder, whenever I drive through the very white neighborhoods and business district, what do these folks think about the name, about the history, about the fact these communities are almost all white or at least almost all non-Black?

There are other places in Florida and elsewhere with plantation in their names. Some of these places were named prior to the end of jimcrow, which is no more forgivable, but more understandable. Yet, one wonders that they have not updated the name, or made some other change.

But then this made me think, what is the best way to honor the land where great and extended atrocities occurred? First on native lands, and then with our fellow humans, stolen and enslaved for generations. Should we pretend nothing happened and name our neighborhoods happy bright sounding places like Meadowlark Acres? Or should we, as the folks who built out Halle Plantation, call out the place for what it was?

Contrast this with the history of say Palm Beach, Florida, where the shanties of laborers who settled on the barrier island were burned to the ground in 1912, to make way for Flagler’s vision (though Palm Beach never was an island until they cut an inlet to saw it off from the mainland to the north.) Because the white owned and Flagler-beholdened papers of the time never mentioned the fire, a lot of revisionists are trying to pretend it never happened. Whatever the case, Palm Beach become and has stayed one of the whitest towns in the south. Today it is over 91% non-Hispanic white and of the nearly 9,000 people who live there year round, and the additional 25,000 who winter there, 55 are black Americans. There is no mention of the Black community of over 2,000 workers who were removed, either by simple eviction or by arson, depending on who you believe. There is NO REMEBRANCE.

Other than deeding the property, or at least a large portion of it to the descendants of the enslaved workers of Halle Plantation, and the burned out families of Styx (the unofficial name of the shanty village on Palm Beach) what is the best way to handle the evil history of every square inch of American soil? Certainly a deeding, or at least creating a corporation that is deeded to the families where the current landowners pay a monthly rental to the trust would be preferable to what is going in both locations, (and thousands of others), and then, there is the question of what is owed to whom regarding the real first settlers, the Native Americans/First Peoples who were there before.

Halle Plantation got me to thinking about a few other things regarding especially the south and racism. Magnolia is a common street name in the south. The mention of the beautiful flowering trees conjures up in the minds of most white southerners a veritable cornucopia of pleasant images. There are dozens, if not hundreds of such words, each with its pleasant series of connections. And yet, I wonder how many words, Magnolia, among them, bring up much less pleasant associations for southern Black Americans, or even Black folks who have southern connections. It is hard to imagine two peoples who share as much culture, as Black and white southerners, who perceive so much of that culture in very ways.

Thinking on this, I ended up at Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn actually had a pretty progressive history, including the first Black owned franchise in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1971, but throughout the 1950s and 1960s and in lots of places into the 1970s, black Americans had to rely on the now famous Green Book to get around the country.

As a little boy in the 1960s, we would travel throughout the south. We never stayed in Holiday Inns, because we couldn’t afford them when there were mom and pop places for half the price, but if we had the money, we COULD have stayed there. It never crossed my mind that the nearly all white world I traversed in a world that was nearly half populated by Black Americans was by design. I never calculated what it would have been like if our finances had been the same, but our skin was darker.

Still trying to sort through how we got here and what we need to do, other than advocate for a fair reparations plan. That I do, I support a wealth tax and an income tax surcharge to generate about a $Trillion per year to compensate Black Americans. By my calculations, a reasonable reparation would be $1 million per man woman and child, paid out over a 20 year period. This is not some kindness, this is the actual amount Black Americans, particularly have been defrauded by whiter society, and especially those who come from “Old money” in the east, north, south and west of the country.

I would love to hear your thoughts, especially, if you are a Black American, who might can expand my understanding, and also my fellow light skinned Americans. But be forewarned, if you come to speak against reparations or to defend any part of the hateful racist system, or to deny your privilege, you will not be tolerated.