A sharp pain struck Marie Johnson one afternoon. She was ill, and it was an emergency.
Her husband, Bill Johnson Sr., picked her up in the family car — a ’51 Cadillac, green and white — and they sped to the hospital.
The Johnsons were among the most successful families in town back then, in the early 1950s. They owned the Savoy bar and hotel on Central Avenue, and four homes in the neighborhood. Yet when Marie Johnson arrived at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, she was not brought into the main building, but rather to a set of wooden military barracks outside.
The barracks were where black patients were treated in those days. And SMH was no different from most institutions of the time, when racial segregation was the rule.
This was the reality that confronted residents of Newtown, Sarasota’s historic and largely black community. In time, generations of activists — many of them well-known men such as John Henry Rivers and Ed James II — would come along to fight for equality.
But before them came a group of activists that Newtown historians would call the Colored Women’s Civic Club.
Years before the more-famous triumphs of the civil rights era in the 1960s, the women of this club won some early victories in Sarasota.
The group began during World War II, successfully lobbying for a serviceman’s club for black soldiers who weren’t allowed to mix with other enlisted men. The club later became a recreation center, to be rebuilt as the Robert L. Taylor Community Complex.
Many of the women also led Red Cross volunteer programs and efforts to stop tuberculosis, a feared killer in Newtown in those times.
With a core group tested in those experiences, the Women’s Club took on many more challenges over the next 30 years, becoming the early political leadership of Newtown.
Through their efforts, black patients would be admitted to the hospital — indoors. The group also pushed state officials to open up Myakka River State Park to black residents, started voter registration drives and made possible the Booker High band.
“They were the original activists,” said James, who in the 1980s was involved in a federal lawsuit that reformed city elections, leading to Sarasota’s first black mayor. James credits his own work, in part, to the guidance of his grandmother, Mary Emma Jones, who had been an influential member of the Women’s Club.
“And all of these other things evolved out of that,” he said.
It was a case of appendicitis that brought Marie Johnson to the hospital. In those days, the disease was serious, but she was treated and recovered.
Because of that episode, Johnson could speak from experience when the Women’s Club took up the issue of hospital segregation.
Johnson was a junior member of the club, in many ways a who’s who of prominent women in Newtown.
Among them was Jones, who ran the taxi stand and barbecue spot on 27th Street. The Jones place, with one of the city’s first phones and a Western Union office, was a hub of activity long before the road was called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
No official records of the Women’s Club exist. The club apparently did not keep minutes or a formal roster. But people in Newtown remember the regulars: Lessie Jackson, Alease Suarez, Mattie Kate McCoy, Mamie Baker, Lottie Humphrey and others. Maggie Phillips was a “quiet, but powerful voice” in the group, James remembers.
Each was an authority figure in her own right, and brought particular skills and resources to the group. Many also were involved in other civic clubs, such as the Elks and the Lily White Security Benefit Association, a nonprofit run by black residents in Tampa. The Lily White group provided medical care to poor black people throughout Southwest Florida.
The Women’s Club often met at Mamie Baker’s house on Church Avenue, and they did things the old-fashioned way. A few men attended meetings. Children were sent away to play and spared hearing the serious matters under discussion. The ladies often dressed up. Lace doilies and the good silver were brought out.
But for all the finery, this club meant business.
“They were assertive women. As a group, they were a formidable group,” said Ruth Thomas, one of those children sent off to play during the meetings. Thomas is now the principal at Wilkinson Elementary. Her mother, Mattie Kate McCoy, and aunt, Mamie Baker, were members of the group.
“They would go to City Hall. They did what they had to do,” Thomas said. “They had to fight for their rights as colored people.”
Some of the women and their husbands ran dry cleaners and restaurants. Some, like McCoy and Baker, were domestics in the homes of more affluent white people in town. In that way, the group could count on a network of connections across the city and all the way to Siesta Key.
At a time when there was little or no public participation for black residents, women like McCoy and Baker depended on personal relationships with their employers in elite white society to make themselves heard.
“These people had contacts,” said Sarasota Mayor Willie Shaw, who can rattle off the names and addresses of most of those old-timers because of his youth delivering newspapers. “In their own quiet way, they each worked for the power structure. And they could. It was a different time. You had old money here, which would make sure that certain things got done.”
The wealthiest white residents back then were invested in the community, Shaw said. Though they were at the top of the social hierarchy, they would listen to a housekeeper from Newtown whom they’d known for decades.
Alease Suarez, postmistress of Newtown, added another dimension to the club, Shaw said. “She brought a lot to the table.”
From her position, Suarez got to know just about everybody. In the 1950s, she could usually be seen in the post office front window, signaling to passers-by if they had mail or not, said her son, Carlos Suarez.
“When my sister would be left to run the post office sometimes, it would drive her up the wall, because she didn’t know the signals,” said Carlos Suarez, 83.
Alease Suarez also ran the USO club for black soldiers, which the Women’s Club had convinced the War Department to provide. After the war, she helped convince the authorities to let Newtown keep the club for use as a a rec center. Later on, the Robert L. Taylor Community Complex was built there.
In a time before mass demonstrations, such feats were accomplished through quiet pressure. These were church women — mothers and grandmothers — and their moral authority was at times difficult to resist, even for stubborn white officialdom.
“You had to respect those ladies,” Carlos Suarez said.
Backbone of Newtown
The memory of the Women’s Club is respected among today’s activists in Newtown, said Trevor Harvey, president of the NAACP chapter in Sarasota.
“The legacy that they left, in my eyes, is the women almost being the backbone of the community,” Harvey said. “It was a group that did grass-roots efforts. They were just as involved in the struggle as the men were back then.”
The same methods the women used to establish the USO club worked when they took on segregation at SMH and Myakka State Park, and when they fought for a band at Booker High.
Marie Johnson’s experience at the hospital would have been the norm. “Blacks could not be admitted to the hospital no matter what their condition was,” James said.
Hospital’s history records that in 1926, soon after its founding, money was allotted to build a ward on the building’s “lower floor” for black patients. In 1945, more money was sought to build a “separate patient entrance to the African-American ward which is currently reached by going through the operating room.”
The same history is silent on space for black patients in later decades, but Newtown residents are consistent in recalling the barracks encountered by Bill and Marie Johnson in the 1950s.
Back then, blacks could also visit Joe Holton’s Hospital downtown — essentially a large doctor’s office on Main Street. Later on, some Newtown residents enrolled in the Lily White fraternal organization, which operated a hospital in Tampa and sent ambulances for patients in Sarasota.
That all changed sometime around 1962, when SMH began loosening up on segregation and admitted black patients in the building. Segregation was eliminated sometime later.
Exactly how the Women’s Club accomplished that feat was unrecorded, and most of the women’s grown children living in Sarasota now do not know the details. The story has survived as neighborhood lore.
Powerful and prideful
Much the same is true where Myakka State Park is concerned. Marie Johnson’s son Bill remembers clandestine visits there with his father, Bill Sr. In his childhood, any blacks caught fishing in the park would have faced a fine — they weren’t supposed to be there at all. Across the South, most state parks of the era were for whites only.
Black laborers had carved Myakka’s recreational areas out of the wilderness, only to find themselves and their children barred from entry.
Then one day, sometime in the 1950s, Johnson’s father told him they didn’t need to hide. “He said it’s OK, we could go.” They walked in with their fishing poles just like any other father and son.
At least partly through the influence of the Women’s Club, Myakka was one of the first Florida state parks to integrate. In the Jim Crow era, it was the only one open to blacks in the southern half of the state. Nine others were far to the north, according to a University of New Mexico study in 2007. Myakka had been opened up well ahead of the rest of the state park system in 1964.
Like many children of the Women’s Club, Johnson didn’t know the why and how of it, but benefited directly from those early efforts. He grew up playing at the rec center and visiting Myakka. And he played first chair alto saxophone in the Booker High Band, which was established in 1951, also thanks to the women’s group.
The school principal in the 1940s had long resisted the calls of parents who wanted a band for their children. Eventually, they grew tired of his stalling.
“The ladies decided; they went straight to the superintendent of schools,” Ed James II said. “In six weeks, Booker band was on the field.”
The ladies had arranged, through their contacts, to hire the school’s first band director, Alexander Valentine, who was just leaving Bethune-Cookman University. He became a fixture at Booker, while the band grew to be a point of pride in Newtown.
In the first years, when the band took part in city parades, members were forced to march at the back of the line, behind the elephants. An ugly memory remains for Mayor Shaw of the large piles the elephants left in their path.
That, like other fights, would have to wait for another day. Black residents still feared harsh repression for civil rights activism. But the Women’s Club set an example that empowered their children, and their children’s children.
“They were very powerful, very purposeful, and very prideful. They did not divert from their goals,” said Thomas, the Wilkinson Elementary principal.
“That has been my whole life. I miss those ladies. Those were good times.”