At the current site of much of downtown Jacksonville’s sports district, there once sat a thriving Black neighborhood known as East Jacksonville, or the Eastside.
The area featured Jacksonville’s first hospital for Black residents, as well as several prestigious Black schools.
The street now known as A. Philip Randolph Boulevard was then called Florida Avenue and featured a lively commercial corridor made up of businesses owned mostly by African-Americans.
It was a center of business activity for Jacksonville’s Black community during the unfortunate days of Jim Crow laws in the South. And, along with LaVilla, it was also where many of the most prominent Black residents in Jacksonville lived.
Once segregation laws came to an end in Jacksonville, the area’s activity began to slow down slightly. The nearby construction of the Gator Bowl, now known as TIAA Bank Field, in the late 1940s also contributed to the corridor’s deterioration.
The area was further plagued when Hurricane Dora hit Jacksonville in 1964, damaging buildings and bringing looters.
But the final nail in the coffin of this historic business corridor came in 1969 when a race riot took over the area.
On October 31, 1969, a white delivery truck driver went into a business along Florida Avenue to make a delivery. While he was inside, a Black man named Buck Riley allegedly began attempting to rob the delivery truck.
The truck driver was made aware of his truck’s contents being pilfered and sprang out of the storefront brandishing a gun. Riley was shot at, suffering a bullet wound to his leg.
As he fled, Riley ran toward a crowd that included several children. The truck driver fired at Riley again.
With post-segregation tensions already rising in a city less than ten years removed from Ax Handle Saturday at the time, and the visual of a white man shooting at a group of Black children, conflict was inevitable. The crowd grew quickly, eventually bringing around 300 people into the street.
The fighting took over Florida Avenue, with the crowd tearing apart and setting fire to storefronts, turning over trucks, and firing off gunshots. Most of the storefronts that were damaged were those of Black-owned businesses.
It was a culmination of years of racial tension, and one of multiple race riots in the city that decade.
The city closed off Florida Avenue, and the mayor ordered a task force to look into civil disorder. The police did not charge the truck driver or Riley.
Not much ended up being done by the city to help fix the massive amount of damage done to the Eastside neighborhood and the Florida Avenue corridor.
After the riot, the community was never the same. Businesses moved away from the once-flourishing commercial corridor, and the Eastside neighborhood entered a sharp decline.
A 2001 study by the City of Jacksonville’s Planning & Development Department referred to the area as having been “in a state of decline for years, with deteriorating housing conditions and declining quality of life.”
The area has seen improvements in the form of a rebranding of Florida Avenue to be named after civil rights figure A. Philip Randolph, who was once a resident of East Jacksonville, and the development of the sports district.
Today, a small group of businesses still remain along A. Philip Randolph Blvd., but most of the storefronts look worn down.
Things may have turned out differently for the neighborhood, though, if not for the damage that occurred during the riot of 1969.