Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is ‘community’ — the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.” In many ways, the history of African Americans in the Tampa Bay area is the history of communities.

There is nothing quite as inspiring as a community of teachers and students. The Citrus Park Colored School collection includes historical resources about an African American school built in 1924 on Gunn Highway in Citrus Park.

Downtown Tampa’s Jackson Rooming House was located close to the thriving business district and nightlife areas in Tampa’s African American community. Famous performers like Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald are said to have stayed at the house. An important part of that history has been preserved with the use of 3D modeling by USF Libraries Digital Heritage & Humanities Collections (DHHC) and the Tampa Bay History Center.

The Jordan Park collection includes materials about the construction of the St. Petersburg Jordan Park housing development just before World War Two. It would be in and around those new homes that a close community of neighbors would form during the 1940s and 1950s. The Hillsborough County Progress Village collection also preserves the early history of a housing development community founded during the middle 20th century.

A number of years ago the journalism department at the USF St. Petersburg campus created a “Neighborhood News Bureau” to report and write about St. Petersburg’s African American community. The NNB has donated a collection of old photographs about the history of the community they cover.