ST. PETERSBURG, Florida — On Aug. 4, 1946, the same day the W.J Littles’ of ½ 11th St., returned from their “trip to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee,” Nat Cherry, his wife Willie Mae and their daughter Doris returned from a visit to his brother, Reverend L.M. Cherry in Jacksonville.
Both the Littles’ and Cherry’s trips were recorded in a subsection of The St. Petersburg Times called “Arrivals and Departures.”
In St. Petersburg’s “Deuces” — or 22nd Street in the city’s Jordan Park District — it was common practice to know about the comings and goings of the people around you, with Black journalists at The St. Petersburg Times covering their community extensively.
Today, newsrooms are shrinking and community is becoming harder to define. According to Rice sociology professor Tony Brown, “the world is shrinking while the nature of community is expanding.”
Where a weekly paper like The St. Petersburg Times once formed part of the edges of a homogenous Black community in the Deuces, Brown says today increased diversity and wider social networks mean community exists along different lines.
While there are many positives to this long tail of community, like the creation of niches that simply did not exist before — Facebook groups for people with rare diseases for example — it is worthwhile to remember the Nat Cherry’s and 22nd Streets of the past.
These people and places that contributed in their own organic ways to moments of resistance and from their place in history remind us when faced with adversity, it is just as important to remember as it is to reinvent.
Reporters for the Black pages in the Times and the constituents they covered, like Nat Cherry, worked together on a community paper that intimately tracked their personal lives, prioritizing proximity as a news value above all else.
For instance, when Nat was hospitalized for an unspecified illness in 1939, it was reported in a subsection of the Black pages called “With The Sick.“
“Nathaniel Cherry of Emerson Avenue and Twenty-Second street is confined to Mercy Hospital. He is improving nicely,” it read. In that same issue, a Rev. J.J Heath, who had ”been ill for quite some time,” was also said to have made his return to the pulpit after a successful recovery.
When the Black pages were first introduced in 1939, the same Rev J.J. Heath praised them, calling their inclusion “a forward movement.”
“We were planning to drop the Times, and never will we now, with such constructive news, and to think, a whole page,” added Mattie Gardner, a club and social leader in the community.
Without these sections, the only way news about people like Nat Cherry or W. J. Littles or Mattie Gardner could creep into the newspaper, was through crime; either as victims or suspects, according to a Tampa Bay Times article in 2016 entitled “Area newspapers slow to cover African-American communities.”
For example, 22nd Street won the cover of the July 20, 1937, edition of The St. Petersburg Times when it was invaded by Klansmen. The Klan protested the rallying of the Black vote in support of a civil service referendum backed by police chief R. H. Noel,7 “that might have paved the way for recruitment of Black officers,” according to a 2002 Tampa Bay Times article.
“More than 200 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan climaxed their march through the south side negro district last night by burning two crosses,” a photo caption read. They burnt one cross in front of the home of Charlie Williams, a train porter, political activist, and alleged “bolita king” of St. Petersburg. Bolita was a mob-controlled game based on the Cuban lottery, in which participants bought numbers in hopes of winning a jackpot.
Some believe Williams supported Black businesses in the Jordan Park district with loans sourced from his bolita earnings.
Urban legend recalls Williams facing down the Ku Klux Klan from his stoop with a machine gun, or a shotgun in some versions, and turning them away. Some versions of the story even had him blowing apart their flaming cross with his weapon.
Without the Black pages, dubbed at first “News of Negroes of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County,” the memories of 22nd Street and of people like Nat Cherry would not exist in the same way. They would be limited to Klan invasions and petty thefts.
So when Doris Anita Cherry, Nat’s daughter, became Doris Anita Hardeman, it was a Black Times reporter named Cal Adams who was sent to document the event for the paper. According to Adams, when guests walked in, they heard the piano arrangements of St. Petersburg locals W. E. Dixon, Herman Howard, Bernice Williams and Mrs. Josephine Clark. They also heard the stylings of an out-of-towner, Miss Irene G. Miller of Chicago.
They saw Nat give his daughter away in her “silk shantung suit of ice blue,” and white felt cloche, then marched together to the Jordan Park Community Center around the block for the reception. There Doris and her new husband Oscar Hardeman cut their “three-tiered cake,” with its “elaborate trimmings of rosebuds and greenery. Her mother Willie Mae Cherry, in her smoke gray dress, wearing a “corsage fashioned of pink carnations,” received guests.
Right in the middle of the Great Migration, as Southern African Americans left their homes in large numbers for better jobs, better treatment and overall better lives up North, Jordan Park, as reported in the Black pages, began to thrive. 22nd Street, the district’s core, saw the emergence of new Black businesses and modern affordable housing.
“A garden spot in an otherwise drab section,” a report on the community by the St. Petersburg Housing Committee read. “The dwellings in it are known for their cleanliness; the well-kept lawns and shrubbery advertise the pride the tenants take in their new homes; the orderliness and community spirit of the people are evidences of better citizens,” the report continued.
Houses in the Jordan Park District, built in 1940 and 1941, were a welcome diversion from the homes that preceded them in Methodist Town and Pepper Town, the former Black neighborhoods situated in the heart of St. Petersburg before housing segregation.
“Poor repair, roof bad, doors sag, need to get water from neighbors, no plumbing,” one report read about the slum-like conditions in Methodist Town.
“One story frame house, poor repair, needs painting inside and out, no sink, single faucet on back porch shared by two families, no bath or electricity, needs major repairs,” another added.
After Jordan Park was built, families that lived in the old Black neighborhoods, sometimes without running water or electricity, could move into three, four and five-bedroom homes, for 12, 13 and 14 dollars a month, respectively.
Along 22nd Street, the residents of the almost 446 newly constructed units could catch a movie at Royal Theater, visit their choice of physicians, dentists and lawyers or visit Henderson’s Soda Fountain after school for a treat.
“All the buses from Jordan Park were filled with Black residents,” said Betty Harden, a resident of Jordan Park in the 1940s and 50s. “I was never told to sit in certain seats,” she finished.
Nathaniel Cherry could have been on one of those buses with Harden. He was a porter at the Union Bus Station in St. Petersburg for 24 years and a member of the Elim Seventh Day Adventist Church, as well as the Grand Union Pallbearers Lodge, according to a 1955 St. Petersburg Times article.
The Cherry House, at 2231 14th Ave. South was a staple in their St. Petersburg community. There, his wife Willie Mae Cherry hosted Women’s Christian Temperance Movement meetings, and Nat himself sold tickets for Greyhound bus tours for Black folks. At the time, many attractions were segregated and green books were the only way for Black people to avoid embarrassing or dangerous vacations.
On more than a few occasions, Nat helped connect his community to Florida’s parks and other natural attractions.
He was the porter on the April tour of the Bok Towers and Cypress Gardens excursion in April 1952, before helping to organize a trip to Paradise Park in May. Along with Cal Adams, the same journalist who would later attend and document his daughter’s wedding, Nat and 200 other people went on the Bok Tower trip.
According to Adams, the group pulled into Cypress Gardens at exactly 11:35 am. They stayed until the water ski show, after which they headed to Spook Hill, a visual illusion that made cars appear to roll uphill. Finally, it was off to Bok Tower, where carollineur Anton Brees dedicated a song to the “negroes of Florida” from his bell tower.
For the following month’s trip to Paradise Park, “Cherry advised tourists to take along baskets and make use of the excellent picnic facilities offered,” in a write-up promoting the trip in The St. Petersburg Times. “See Silver Springs, from Paradise Park,” an ad read.
Paradise Park was an equal but separate version of Silver Springs, Florida’s biggest natural attraction at the time. In fact, the same natural springs that fed Silver Springs Park fed the waterways of Paradise Park.
When Nat wasn’t on his bus, he found other ways to participate in his community; like the “Pineapple Sip” he hosted alongside his wife for the benefit of the local Seventh Day Adventists School. When a new teacher, Mrs. Winifred Robinson, was hired for the school, it was the Cherrys who took her into their home. Fresh out of college and Buffalo, New York, they gave her a place to stay.
In 1949, Nat participated in, and won, the “Annual Men’s Popularity Contest” sponsored by First Baptist Institutional Church, raising $77.32 out of a total of $166.87. In January 1955, after completing his 24th year as a porter, Nat was released from the Riverside Sanitarium; he had been there since November of the previous year. This time, in a section called “About People You Know,” Nat attributed his quick recovery to the “more than 150 Christmas, New Year’s, and get-well cards he had received during his confinement.
In that same issue, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Smith were reported to have staged the Rosa Royal Chapter No. 110’s Annual Coffee Hour, “opening up their homes to “a large number of friends and neighbors.”
Later that year, on Oct. 14, 1955, Nathaniel Cherry died at home at the age of 56. According to his obituary in the Times, surviving him were his wife Willie Mae, their daughter Doris, his sisters Mary Cherry and Easter Cherry, and his brother Rev M.L Cherry.
On Jan. 6, 1959, his sister Easter, who migrated with him to St. Petersburg from Bartow, Florida, died in a St. Petersburg hospital. After his passing, his wife continued her involvement in the church and his daughter, now a Hardeman, became it’s kindergarten director.
With integration, places like Nat’s 22nd Street ceased to be the center of Black life across the country. For instance, East Waco, Texas, where Black Wacoans were relegated for decades thrived around Elm Street on a very similar timeline. In the same way that businesses had left 22nd Street by the 1990s, they had left East Waco; Paul Quinn College, one of the first HBCUs in the South, was its greatest loss.
With the communities gutted, then came the highways. I-10 through Elm Street and I-75 through 22nd Street. Nails in the coffins of once thriving Black communities.
East Waco, however, did not have the Black pages, nor did it have a Cal Adams. As a result, it’s difficult to find its Nat Cherrys and Willie Mae Cherrys. As gentrification eats away at more and more of the memories of East Waco, and other communities like it year after year, the example set in Jordan Park becomes more and more relevant.
Today, even though houses in the Jordan Park District are being torn down, a $93 million affordable housing project is slated to be completed by 2024; a redevelopment in the spirit of what once was.
Featured image: Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash
Edited by James Sutton
