A museum housed in the building it is about is unusual. This one is housed in the building that is the evidence.
Curtis Elementary School was a school for African American children in Clearwater, named after the educator S. W. Curtis. It is now the headquarters of the county’s African American history museum.
The segregated school became the place where the history of segregation is kept. There is no exhibit that makes the point as efficiently as the address does.
Before you go
The museum is temporarily closed for renovations. That is stated on its own site, so check curtismuseum.org or call 727-266-3390 before driving over.
The address is 1101 Marshall Street, Clearwater, Florida 33755. It is also listed as the Pinellas County African American History Museum at the Curtis, and some directories carry it simply as the Curtis Museum.
When open it has run on a limited schedule with modest admission for adults and young people, which is typical for a museum of this size and funding.
A closure for renovation is usually good news for a small institution. It means somebody found money and the collection is being looked after.
Research centre, more than a display
The phrase the museum uses about itself is research centre for the study of Black history, culture and life in Pinellas County, and that framing should change how a writer approaches it.
It describes its holdings as a repository of historical and cultural information and physical artifacts relating primarily to African Americans in this county.
For most subjects in Pinellas there is a published account somewhere to start from. For this one there frequently is not, which makes a repository the beginning of the work instead of a supplement to it.
That is the practical situation. A county whose Black history is substantially unwritten has one institution whose job is holding the record, and it is in Clearwater.
Toast to the Legends
The museum runs an annual event honouring pioneer African American families, and the format is the interesting part.
Family members bring a display of their own artifacts and give an oral account of the family’s contributions. Not a lecture about the community, and not a curator interpreting it. The families present their own material and speak for themselves.
That is oral history being produced in public, once a year, by the people who hold it.
Anybody working on a Pinellas family, Black or otherwise, should understand what that model demonstrates. The material exists in households. Somebody has to create an occasion for it to be brought out, because it does not arrive at an archive on its own.
It is the same argument I make in recording a parent or grandparent yourself and in what to do with a box of unlabelled photographs. The records will wait. The people and the boxes will not.
The Heritage Celebration
The museum is the lead sponsor of the Florida African American Heritage Celebration, which brings students from several Pinellas County schools together on the last Friday of each February.
It is held at Pinewood Cultural Park in Largo, which is the same 182-acre complex that holds Heritage Village.
That placement is worth noticing. The county’s living history museum and the county’s African American heritage celebration occupy the same ground once a year, which is a better arrangement than either institution operating as though the other did not exist.
The museum also runs Children’s Magical Village, a programme of workshops covering traditional African culture.
Because these run off-site and on a calendar, they continue whether or not the Marshall Street building is open, which is the practical answer to the renovation.
S. W. Curtis, and why a school carries a name
The building is named for an educator, and in a segregated system that fact carries more weight than it would elsewhere.
A community that was not being served built its own institutions and then named them after the people who did the building. A school named for a local educator is a community’s own judgement about who mattered, recorded in the only medium available.
Compare that with how most public buildings in this state got their names, which is donors, developers and politicians.
For anybody researching, the naming is a finding aid. Schools, churches, halls and streets named after individuals in Black neighbourhoods point at people whose lives were considered significant locally and who frequently appear nowhere in a county-level record.
Start with the name on the building and work outward. It is one of the few research routes into this material that costs nothing and can be done from a car.
What the record already shows
Some of this county’s history is in the public record and belongs in any honest account of it.
When the Mirror Lake Carnegie library opened in St. Petersburg in 1915, it refused Black residents access. From 1944 it permitted basement access only.
The James W. Johnson branch opened in 1947, after Mrs. S. M. Carter formed an interracial committee and lobbied the city to build it. A separate library existed because a group of people organised until the city agreed.
Those two facts sit inside the history of a library system I have otherwise written about warmly across this whole series, and both belong in the same account.
In Clearwater, the North Greenwood library serves the neighbourhood that has been the centre of Black community life in that city for generations, and carries a cultural display of its own.
Where else to research this subject
While the Curtis building is closed, several other holdings are open.
The Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum in St. Petersburg is the companion institution on the other side of the county.
The John F. Germany library in Tampa holds one of the largest genealogy collections in the southeastern United States, a Tampa Bay obituary index covering 1855 to 1990, and a history publications index covering 1925 to 1999, all free with no card required. Obituaries and local newspaper indexes are frequently the only surviving documentary trace of a life the official record ignored.
The Burgert Brothers photographic collection, held on the same floor, covers this region from roughly 1850 to 1963. A commercial studio photographed whatever it was paid to photograph, which means its frames caught streets, storefronts and passers-by incidentally, outside the choices a historical society would have made.
And the Heritage Village archive in Largo holds 3,500 volumes on county history and genealogy alongside 8,500 photographs, which I have covered in the wider museum piece.
Writing a history that was not kept
This is the harder methodological point and it applies well beyond this county.
An archive records what an institution chose to keep, and institutions kept records about the people they considered their business. A community that was served separately, or not at all, appears thinly in the official record and not because it was thin.
So the research runs differently. Church records instead of city records. Funeral home ledgers. School yearbooks from schools that no longer exist. Fraternal and benevolent society records. Black newspapers. Insurance policies. Property deeds, which recorded transactions the newspaper did not report.
And oral history above all, because a gap in the documents is frequently a presence in somebody’s memory.
That is why a museum describing itself as a research centre matters more here than the word would suggest elsewhere. It is not duplicating a record that exists somewhere else. In many cases it is the record.
The neighbourhood around it
Marshall Street sits in North Greenwood, which has been the centre of Black community life in Clearwater for generations.
That is worth knowing before a visit, because the museum is not a building parachuted into a convenient location. It is in the neighbourhood whose history it holds, in a school that neighbourhood’s children attended.
A few minutes away, the North Greenwood library serves the same area and carries a cultural display of its own, alongside the ordinary business of a branch library.
The two together are the practical starting point for anybody working on Clearwater specifically. Library for the published material and the reference staff, museum for what was never published.
And walk the streets between them. Church buildings, former businesses, halls and houses carry dates and names, and a neighbourhood that has been continuously occupied for a century has its record standing in it.
How to approach it
Contact first, and with a specific question. That applies to every small archive and doubly to one currently working through a renovation.
Ask what they hold instead of telling them your subject. Curators know their own finding aids and a narrow question gets a useful answer where a broad one gets a polite one.
Ask what they do not have, too. A small institution will tell you plainly, and it saves a month.
If your subject is a specific family, ask about Toast to the Legends. Families who have participated have already assembled material and spoken publicly about it, which is a considerably easier starting point than a cold approach.
And offer something back. If your research produces dates, names, photographs or corrections the museum does not hold, send them. That is how collections of this kind grow, and it is the only form of payment most of them can accept.
Children’s Magical Village, and who the programmes are for
The museum runs workshops on traditional African culture for children, alongside the schools programme in February.
A small institution choosing to spend its limited capacity on children instead of adult visitors is making a decision about time horizons. Exhibitions serve whoever walks in this year. A schools programme is an attempt to produce people who will care in thirty years.
That is the same calculation behind every children’s programme in this series, from The Story Garden’s weekly story times to Cultured Books operating as a pop-up to get books to children where they already are.
For a writer with a Pinellas subject, the schools angle is also a research route. Teachers who have run these sessions for years know which families in their catchment hold material, and that knowledge does not exist in any catalogue.
It is a longer road than an archive visit and it produces things an archive cannot.
Why this one belongs in a series about writing
Because the gap is the opportunity, and that is not a comfortable sentence but it is an accurate one.
Across this series I have argued that Ybor is the densest square mile of material in the state and that most fiction set in Florida writes the postcard version. The same argument applies here with more force.
A county of this size, with this much documented settlement history, whose Black history has one dedicated institution and very little published work, is not a subject that has been exhausted. It is one almost nobody has started.
The families are here. The buildings are here, including the school. The museum exists and states that research is what it is for.
What is missing is people doing the work, and that is the only part a writer can supply.
Getting the details right
A closing note on accuracy, because this subject punishes carelessness more than most.
Use the names people used for themselves and the names institutions carried at the time, and say when they changed. A school, a church or a neighbourhood that has been renamed carries two records under two headings, and missing that loses half the material.
Date everything precisely. Segregation in this county was not a single condition across a single period. A library that refused access in 1915, allowed basement access from 1944 and had a separate branch built in 1947 is three distinct situations inside thirty-two years, and collapsing them into one is inaccurate in a way that matters.
Attribute claims to their source, particularly anything from an oral account. Testimony is evidence and it is not the same kind of evidence as a deed.
And check with the people whose history it is before publishing, which is ordinary practice for anybody writing about a community they do not belong to and is the sort of courtesy that also improves the work.
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