It’s a day to cheer freedom and a vital founding father
This year Father’s Day falls on June 19, or Juneteenth, which has grown from its Texas roots to become the most popular annual celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. A day dedicated to fathers and freedom seems a fine time to salute a founding father of democracy in Central Florida: Gustavus Christopher “Gus” Henderson. Born to enslaved parents near Lake City in 1862, he moved to Winter Park in 1886, where he soon made history.
“If it were not for Henderson’s efforts, the incorporation of Winter Park would not have taken place on October 12, 1887, and Hannibal Square may not have been included within the city limits of Winter Park,” notes Fairolyn Livingston, chief historian of the Hannibal Square Heritage Center.
In that 1887 election, Henderson really got out the vote. He encouraged Black voters — not yet silenced by the Jim Crow repression to come across the South — to support Chicago banker Loring Chase and his partner, Oliver Chapman, in their efforts to officially start a city.
In 1887, 22 years after the end of the Civil War, Winter Park had more Black registered voters than white ones. “Those who made their homes to the west of the South Florida Railroad’s tracks that split the city listened when Henderson asked for their votes for Chase’s incorporation effort,” historian Jim Robison has written, “and the election of Winter Park’s first (and only) African Americans, Walter B. Simpson and Frank R. Israel, as aldermen.”
Activist and editor
Henderson did more, too. In 1889, he established a newspaper, The Winter Park Advocate, the second Black-owned paper in the state, which continued for about a decade and was read by both Black and white residents. Eventually he and his family moved to Orlando, where he founded that city’s first Black-owned newspaper,
the Florida Christian Recorder.
“Gus was successful because he valued the written word and education,” Livingston has said. That made it a natural fit to name scholarships for students at Valencia College’s Winter Park campus after Henderson, as Livingston suggested, in a program that began in 2019.
Since then, you may have read or heard of Henderson. Randy Noles has featured him in Winter Park Magazine, quoting Livingston’s pioneering work
on Henderson and highlighting the scholarships, and the Orange County Regional History Center’s magazine featured him in a 2020 article by Whitney Broadaway. Professor Julian Chambliss of Michigan State University (formerly of Rollins College) has brought attention to Henderson and the Advocate (see advocaterecovered.org).
Henderson witnessed a bitter follow-up to his 1887 success, by the way. In 1893, the Florida Legislature granted a petition by white residents to remove Hannibal
Square from Winter Park’s city limits. “Hannibal Square was not a part of incorporated Winter Park again until 1925,” Noles has noted. But Gus Henderson’s legacy, he also notes, lives on through pride and activism in Winter Park’s west side. Henderson deserves all the recognition we can give him.
Juneteenth’s origin
Only about two decades before Henderson moved to Winter Park, the news of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, reached Galveston, Texas, after more than two years.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” reads an order that Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger of the Union Army read in Galveston on June 19, 1865.
These days, news seems to travel almost too fast, with the split-second click of a “send” button, but in the 1860s, it could take a long time for life-changing words to travel across the continent. By June 19, 1865, the Confederate capital of Richmond had fallen, President Lincoln had been killed and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was on its way to ratification. And in Florida,
young Gus Henderson was beginning a life of possibility and achievement.
Women in the spotlight
A recent Flashback highlighted pioneering Central Florida architects Ida Annah Ryan and Isabel Roberts, whose designs included a pathbreaking bandstand that was a centerpiece of Orlando’s Lake Eola Park from the 1920s into the 1950s.
On June 22, we can learn more about Ryan and Roberts in a free program at 7 p.m. at the Winter Park Library. Titled “Isabel Roberts’ Pavilion in the Water: The History of the 1924 Lake Eola Bandstand,” it’s presented in partnership with the Orlando Foundation for Architecture.
The program includes two short documentary films about the architects by Clare Vickery of Fort Lauderdale. The films feature contributors from the Orlando area, including John Dalles, Debra Lupton, Gregory Stock, Rebecca Talbert and yours truly. To register, visit Classes & Events at WinterParkLibrary.org.