NEW COLLEGE CONNECTS TO NEWTOWN…VIA TROLLEY
BY BILL WOODSON, DEAN OF OUTREACH/ CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICER
From left, New College students Joey Daniels, Steven Keshishian, Rolando Tate, and Daria Paulis; with community historian Jetson Grimes.
Sunday August 25th, shortly after 10:30am, the trolley left the New College of Florida parking lot with 22 New College students, plus a handful of faculty, staff, a few community members, and even an infant! Vickie Oldham’s “Newtown Alive!” trolley tour was under way. The tour brought over 100 years of Sarasota history to life for New College students, faculty and staff. The evolving relationship of Sarasota to its black community was front and center, looking back all the way to 1884. That’s when the Reverend Lewis Colson, a formerly enslaved man, first arrived in Sarasota. Reverend Colson found work as an assistant to engineer Robert E. Paulson who first surveyed and platted the community that grew into the city of Sarasota. Colson personally drove the first stake. The trolley tour included a stop at the Rosemary Cemetery, where Reverend Colson and his wife Irene are the only blacks in a burial ground that even to this day remains white-only. The tour also stopped at Lido Beach, where students learned how in the 1950’s blacks risked harassment or worse, using “wade-ins” to advocate for the right of blacks to use Sarasota beaches. Tour stops also included Overtown, Five Points, Jetson Grimes’ Newtown Historical Gallery, and Greater Hurst Chapel AME Church. One of the high points of the tour was at Booker High School. Vickie Oldham, aided by community scholars Whit Rylee, Walter Gilbert, and Jetson Grimes, described the connection made between New College students and Booker, when Newtown students boycotted classes in protest against school board plans to close the school and bus Newtown students to Riverview and Sarasota High School. Booker weathered the storm, and the students stayed on track with their studies, thanks in part to New College students, who taught in Freedom Schools held Newtown community during the boycott. Walter also described attending history seminars as a grade school student—the seminars were taught on the New College campus.
Walter initial skepticism turned to surprise as he found that white New College scholars actually had a thing or two to teach him about black history. There is another link connecting Newtown and New College. Professors Uzi Baram and Erin Dean, along with several New College students, played important roles in developing the research and conducting interviews with Newtown residents that would ultimately be captured and shared both through the trolley tour and the Newtown Alive! website. Sponsorship of the tour was supported by the Mellon Foundation’s New College and the Cross College Alliance in the Community (“Mellon II”) grant. Some of the students will be leveraging their trol ley tour experience as a point of departure in a fall class taught by Prof. Jessica Young, The City in World Literature: Globalized Gentrification.
