Teaching Piano Lessons for 80 years. At 95-years old, Elba Ruilova still teaches piano lessons four afternoons a week from her west Tampa home. She began teaching when she was 15.
In another town, maybe, you could think of a few racist county workers as just an isolated bunch of idiots.
Slurs like the ones hurled at the Hernando County Utilities Department's black employees? Threatening to bury one of them in a hole as a "joke''? Displays of nooses? The clueless supervisor who thought any of this could be smoothed over with a handshake?
You could read about it, shake your head and turn the page.
Not here, though. Not with our history.
Hernando had more lynchings per capita between 1900 and 1931 than any other county in the United States, according to the Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties by Charles S. Johnson.
Segregated neighborhoods were once mandated by Brooksville's zoning law. The city's sewer plant was built next to the county's only school for black children. A federal grant to fix substandard housing in south Brooksville was divvied up by white contractors in the mid 1980s.
When I moved here a few years later, a lot of white residents still thought that taking you aside for a racist joke was just being friendly. I once watched a drunken former School Board member at the Fireside Inn spout hateful slurs while a crowd of drinkers laughed and egged him on.
But you know what?
I hardly ever hear that kind of talk anymore. And the racially fraught blowups over issues such as naming a street after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? I haven't seen that in a while, either.
You know what else?
The county and especially Brooksville, the seat of most of Hernando's racist sins, seem a lot better for it.
No more weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk. We have trees and flowers now, and freshly painted storefronts — the look, at least, of a more prosperous and friendly town.
Is it far-fetched to draw this connection?
Not according to residents of Marion, Ind., who widely blame the city's depressed economy on a double-lynching in 1930, writes Cynthia Carr in a 2006 book, Our Town.
"Logically, rationally, Marion's problems had to be simply economic,'' she wrote. "But that isn't what people there told me during those first couple of days. They thought the lynching did it.''
And think about it. What outside investor is drawn by a reputation for racism? How many talented young black residents will want to stick around?
Doesn't racism sap community pride? Doesn't it reinforce a community's self-image as backward and ignorant?
Putting this behind us, like recovering from alcoholism, can't be fixed with one good deed, but by refraining from bad ones over time. It seemed like we were finally on our way.
That's why I think these workers did us all a disservice. That's why they didn't just shame themselves. They brought all of us down with them.
[Last modified: May 06, 2008 10:36 AM]
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