By Spessard Stone
Canter Brown, Jr. and Barbara Gray Brown present the third of a series of biographical profiles of African American families of Tampa and Hillsborough County, Florida in their recently published Supplementary Genealogical Records Of the African American Pioneers of Tampa And Hillsborough County.
The "Introduction" provides a mini-manual of the problems encountered by researchers of
black families and contains a selected list of books with background information on slavery in
Florida and the Tampa Bay area in particular. To those ignorant of the history of slavery, especially daunting is the statement by Rev. Sam C. Craft, a white Baptist minister of Bartow, who with the Civil War’s ending in 1865, recorded of the emancipated slaves, “We advised them all to make the very best arrangements they could with their former owners to secure for themselves and families permanent homes and not a single one, that we know of could be induced to enter into any arrangement to remain at their old homes.”
Featured in Supplementary Genealogical Records are twenty-six families, many of whom were related by marriages, from a cross section of economic and social positions, including laborers, farmers, nurses, teachers, public officials, ministers, and a physician.
Families chronicled are: Blakely, Caesar, Carrington, Clarke/Jackson, Doby, Ferrell, Fleming, Hamilton, Henderson, Hicks, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jackson, Johnson, Larry, Mathews, McCray, Norton, Orr, Rogers, Saunders, Smith, Stephens, Stevens, Story, Tucker, and Williams, of whom all are worthy of remembrance, but several are noteworthy.
Andrew Jackson Ferrell, Sr. (c1872-1936) was from 1901-1905 pilot on the steamship Manatee and served from 1905-1922 as a clerk in the U. S. Customs Service at Tampa. He then became a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which he became presiding elder of the West Tampa District and later supervisor of the St. Petersburg and Manatee districts. His wife, Sarah Powell Ferrell, was a revered teacher and a leading spirit in the Urban League.
George Petigrew Norton (1865-1933) was a medical doctor and also a successful businessman. He, along with Andrew J. Ferrell and others, helped organize Tampa’s Negro Board of Trade in 1914, and in 1922 Dr. Norton aided in the organization of the Central Industrial Insurance Company, of which he served as its president.
James W. Rogers, Sr. (1871-1938), a native of the Bahamas, migrated to Key West and then to Tampa where he was cigar maker. Marion Matthews Rogers, his wife, helped organize one of the first branches of the NAACP in the South. Their daughter, Christina Rogers Saunders-Jackson (1898-1991), was the mother of Robert W. Saunders, Florida field secretary of the NAACP from 1952-1966, then chief of civil rights for the southeastern region at the U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity, and finally director of Hillsborough County’s office of equal opportunity.
This booklet, like its predecessors, is a memorial to the spirit of African American pioneers of Tampa.
Supplementary Genealogical Records is a 100-page paperback with thirteen photographs, bibliography, and notes.
It costs $6.95 and can be ordered by calling 813-228-0097 and asking for Agnes at The Tampa Bay History Center, 225 South Franklin Street, Tampa, FL 33602, The Tampa Bay History Center.
Note: I received this book from Canter Brown, Jr. on February 23, 2002, read February 23-24, and posted review on this web site on February 26. This review was published in The Herald-Advocate (Wauchula, Fla.) on March 14, 2002.
February 26, 2002