Last week we finished reading A Dream of Freedom, the focus title for our Civil Rights thematic unit of study. Through our study of the Civil Rights Movement we learned about the Jim Crow laws and segregation in cities such as Birmingham, Montgomery, and Atlanta, but I wanted my students to know what it was like right here in Plant City, Florida, during that era. As I have for the past three years, I invited my dear friend and retired Tomlin media specialist Susan Elijah to speak to both of my reading classes about what it was like to grow up as a black child in Plant City during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mrs. Elijah shared her life story from birth through college and career with us. She was born in Tampa because Plant City only had hospital facilities for white people. Her grammar and high school education here in Plant City was segregated while she attended Simmons Elementary and Marshall High School. She explained how Plant City itself was segregated with the color lines being the railroad tracks that divided it running north and south and east and west. She recalled how blacks could work at the lunch counter in McCrory's dime store and in the kitchen at Snellgroves, but they couldn't sit at the lunch counter or in the dining room. If they wanted to buy food they had to go to the back door. Mrs. Elijah played trumpet in the Marshall High School band, and when it came time for the Strawberry Festival parade one of Plant City's two high schools led the parade and one was at the end. Of course Plant City High School was always at the front of the parade, and Marshall brought up the rear behind the horses. Mrs. Elijah summed everything up by saying that looking back she can see how unfair segregation was in our town during the civil rights era, but all things considered she said she still had a happy childhood growing up in Plant City.
