Historic Second Avenue

Background of Historic Second Avenue Project Video 2013

The Historic Second Avenue Project interviews began in 2012 to research the vibrant African American community located on what is now known as Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. In the video, local individuals reveal the breadth and scope of the area’s atmosphere and amenities that, during segregation, provided for everyone’s needs. Research into the local community is ongoing and perhaps insight regarding revitalization without gentrification can be obtained.

What comes to light in these series of interviews is how the implementation of Urban Renewal in the early 1960s fundamentally and irrevocably altered that sense of community. Daytona Beach was one of many adversely affected cities in Florida. Other neighborhoods, for example Overtown in Miami and Progress Village in Tampa were places where the “term ‘blight’ was used as an economic descriptor in real estate terms that denoted property in which value no longer appreciated, regardless of that property’s appearance or structural integrity”. In Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, Region edited by Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuck (2011), suggests that urban renewal politics and policies were influenced by institutionalized racism when the term ‘blight’ might also have been a “cultural signifier for a people, usually black, who themselves had no value or at least no values” (p.181).

B-CU Mass Communications student Mark Gottlieb served as editor and History major Daremoni Jones hosted interviews with former Daytona Beach City Councilmen, Mr. James Huger and Mr. Bernard Smith, business owner Ms. Patricia Hamilton Heard, Tanya Jenkins, Minnie King, Carretta King Butler, and others who tell some of the history of Second Avenue in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Featured Biographies

Bernard Smith, Jr. was born in Daytona Beach, FL, in the building which would eventually become the General Studies building for Bethune Cookman College; at the time, it was the area’s black hospital. His father had a close friendship with Mrs. Bethune, and she actually visited the family in the hospital after Mr. Smith’s birth.