Local civil rights pioneers will join to give an oral history of their journey

Clockwise from the upper left are: William Buddy Vernon, Austin Long, Juanita Cunningham, the Rev. Lorenzo Edwards and the Rev. Clarence Cotton Sr.

By Andy Fillmore
Correspondent
Published: Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 6:30 a.m.

They are five local people whose lives and careers today might seem noble but fairly ordinary.
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Jacqui Janetzko/Ocala Star-Banner

Juanita Cunningham is seen at her residence on Northwest 14th Street in Ocala, Fla., on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. Cunningham was a prominent teacher in Marion County and is being honored at Black Ocala, an oral history, in the Webber Center at the College of Central Florida on Tuesday at 7 p.m. (Jacqui Janetzko/Star-Banner Correspondent)

But in the 1940s, '50s and '60s in Ocala, there was nothing ordinary about black men and women who aspired to be school principals, to be master craftsmen, to run businesses, or earn doctorate degrees.

The five — educator Juanita Cunningham, businessman Austin Long, contractor William “Buddy” Vernon and the Rev. Clarence Cotton Sr. and the Rev. Lorenzo Edwards — were pioneers in the battle for racial equality, said Jerone Gamble, coordinator of senior services at the College of Central Florida.

Sometimes those battles were fought in the courts and in peaceful protests, but much of the progress achieved in those turbulent times owes to the determination of people who blazed paths in their fields of endeavor.

“They were role models and stories of success, in spite of discrimination,” said Gamble.
Gamble will join the five Tuesday as they discuss their journeys and share their insights during a program called “Black Ocala: An Oral History” at the College of Central Florida.

The event will examine the culture that spawned a generation of the black leaders in Ocala and discuss how that culture has changed and may now be lost on the youth of today.

Here is a sample of what they will say:

A family of firsts
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed Juanita Cunningham's graduating class at Bethune-Cookman College in 1958, and it made a lasting impact on her, she said.
[Watch a video of Juanita Cunningham.] http://video.ocala.com/video/2185283536001
King spoke about loving your enemy, black or white, and discussed the tenets of his civil rights movement of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.
“Love and education are the keys,” she recalled him saying 55 years ago.
Cunningham was born and raised in Hawthorne, then moved to Miami after marrying her husband, James C. Cunningham. The couple came to Ocala in 1951.
“James was the first elected city councilman since Reconstruction,” she said.
He was the first black president of the Ocala City Council and operated Cunningham's Funeral Home while she became an educator. He died in 1985.
Her oldest son, James C. Cunningham Jr., now a lawyer, was “the first black president of Florida Blue Key” at the University of Florida law school, she said.
But those successes didn't come easily.

“We took care of each other. We shared,” she said of the black community. “There was a strong work ethic passed along from the parents and adults. My teachers encouraged me to do the best I could do. I was told (by teachers and family) I needed to go to college.”
Cunningham was named assistant principal at Vanguard High School in 1975 and principal in 1984. She said she treated the black and white students “with love” while administering punishment and parental advice “they may not get at home.”

Lost sense of community
When the Rev. Clarence Cotton Sr. describes the closeness of the black community in Ocala in the late 1940s and 1950s, he makes a motion with his arms like a hug.
[Watch a video of Clarence Cotton Sr.] http://video.ocala.com/video/2183132553001
“We had a spirit of sharing. It was key,” said Cotton, 75, an Ocala native and Baptist minister with post-graduate studies in secondary education administration and theology.
“People were always willing to help each other. Teachers knew the parents, and adults took an interest in the children. My high school football coach helped keep an eye on me,” he said.
But Cotton said construction of the bridge on State Road 40 just west of Pine Avenue around the late 1960s “killed the neighborhood” and displaced many homes.
By 1961, “at the height of segregation, sit-ins and nonviolent demonstrations, during a night of unrest, I rode around town telling people to be careful, and the police told me to go home and park the car or they would arrest me. I went home and got a truck and kept driving around telling folks to take care,” Cotton said.

“After an incident where black students were arrested following the displaying of a rebel flag at a local school, my response was, if you are going to wave something, wave the red, white and blue. Yes, the rebel flag has a place, but it's in the museum or history books,” Cotton said.
In 1972, Cotton moved to Greenville, S.C., and served for 38 years in the school system, including administration of a middle school and a high school. He returned to Ocala in 2011, still overseeing a group of associations sponsoring 72 churches. He expressed concern for a loss of the “emphasis on public education” in the community he saw in past generations.

The consequences of integration
The Rev. Lorenzo Edwards, pastor of Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in downtown Ocala since 1968, said Ocala's black community of the 1950s and '60s was more vibrant and cohesive than today.
[Watch a video of Lorenzo Edwards.] http://video.ocala.com/video/2183070608001
“Everyone knew everyone,” and every parent and teacher had concern for every child, Edwards said.

West Ocala then was a place alive with family businesses like Hub's Dry Goods and Crompton's Store, and entertainment clubs such as the Blue Note, Club Bali and the Brown Derby, where folks met and socialized. He said Saturdays on Broadway was an “all-day affair,” especially for families from the country.

“Now there is some splintering in the community,” he said, noting that the clubs are gone and most commerce is done outside the community because “since integration, patrons don't care where the store is located.”

He graduated from the segregated Howard High School in 1955 and then moved to Newark, N.J., and lived with an uncle and worked at the Ford Motor plant.
Edwards returned to Ocala around 1958 and worked at Camp and Sons meat packing and later Swift Company. He met and married his wife of 55 years, Barbara Ann Clark. The Ocala native served on the Ocala City Council, twice as chairman, was president of the local branch of the NAACP and was dean of Minority Affairs at Central Florida Community College.
Edwards recalls the civil rights era.

“I stood up along with my friends and community for our rights in nonviolent, peaceful protests but I was never physically touched,” Edwards said.
“Rev. Frank Pinkston was president of the local NAACP, and we all looked up to him. He went around the area speaking to residents about knowing and understanding our rights,” Edwards said.
“Some of the black men formed the ‘hunting and fishing club' to act as security guards for Rev. Pinkston,” Edwards said.
Edwards participated in the sit-in protest at McCrory's (formerly on the corner of Magnolia and Southwest Broadway) in 1960. During the sit-ins, black patrons who had been refused service at lunch counters previously took a seat and refused to leave until they were removed or arrested.
Edwards was arrested when he helped pick up trash near one of the protest sites.

Grocer and pioneer
Using $665 in savings, Austin Long opened a grocery store in west Ocala in the late 1940s during segregation in spite of warnings from friends.
[Watch a video of Austin Long.] http://video.ocala.com/video/2183391760001
“I had to go pick up the groceries at first from the white wholesalers who didn't think a black man could make it in the business,” Long said. “I had the Lord as my partner. With faith in Him, I could do the impossible.”
Long, 97, ran Long's Grocery, adjacent to Howard Academy, from 1947 until he sold the store in 1986.
“The neighborhood relied upon Mr. Long's store,” Cunningham said.
“Long's Grocery was a place where you could get anything. We sold work clothes, 15-cent hamburgers, hot dogs, pints of milk and some dry goods,” Long said.
He extended credit and locals came in there to pay their utility bills.
Long was born in Marianna and left school in the fifth grade.
“My mother passed away in 1924 and left a family of eight children. I didn't attend high school,” he said.
By 1941, he was serving with the U.S. Army in World War II in the South Pacific. He returned home and worked for the city “for 10 cents an hour” but after six months decided to become his own boss.
“I had saved up $665 cutting fruit and other jobs and used that to open Long's Grocery with my wife Mary Queen, who passed away in 1960,” he said. “Most businesses operated by black people were restaurants, beer taverns and barbershops, but I wanted to run a grocery store.”

The determined tradesman
William “Buddy” Vernon inspired many in his community when he became a skilled mason and licensed building contractor in 1948.
[Watch a video of Buddy Vernon.] http://video.ocala.com/video/2183508303001
“I was a block mason and learned how to lay block and calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle to square up a building,” said Vernon, 88, also an Ocala native.
“A lot of people thought blacks weren't qualified masons. We fought a lot of things with the Lord's help. One of my high school teachers, Levi Alexander, said, ‘You can be what you want to be if you want to be something.' I always remember that,” Vernon said.
Vernon said he was working on a Victorian-style 1890s house remodel job early in his career when two white co-workers shunned him. The general contractor replaced the whites with black workers as Vernon kept steadfastly working the job.
“I had a family to take care of,” he said.
Vernon married his wife, Dorothy, in 1942 and served in the Pacific during World War II. He said he experienced unfair treatment in the service but praised the assistance of the G.I. Bill for his education. He later was one of the founders of Veterans of Foreign Wars Brady-Owens Post 7193.
He called his return to Ocala after military service “a hurtful part” of his life.
“The restaurants and other establishments had white and black entry doors,” he said. “When one of our children was born in the hospital, we could use the delivery room, but as soon as he was born, we had to go out back to a wooden building.”
Vernon operated Vernon's Masonry from 1948 until 1963, then formed the Vernon and Isham Company.
Vernon built homes and did masonry work on Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church and several other churches, and did commercial projects, including the Ocala High School and Dr. N.H. Jones Elementary.
Vernon said he did not experience any cases of extreme violence here during the transition away from segregation, but there was mistreatment.
“There was evil in people's hearts that only the Lord could change,” Vernon said.
Reflecting upon his experiences in the turbulent times Vernon said, “Thank God it turned out all right.”

Knowledge as a weapon
Jerone Gamble credits influences in the black community of the 1960s with his desire to pursue higher education and with igniting his interest in the arts.
“Parents and teachers in the 1950s and 1960s in Ocala encouraged and helped children. The center of the world for most of us was our church,” said Gamble, an Ocala native and 1967 graduate of Howard High School, Bethune-Cookman College and Yale University, and an ordained minister. “I remember helping my father plant sweet potatoes. He told me to get an education because what you have in your head, no one can take away.”
Now, Gamble said, “We can get young black adults to college but, especially black males, we can't get them through college.”