Eartha Mary Magdalene White was the daughter of formerly enslaved woman Clara English White, and this mother-daughter team served Jacksonville’s black and white residents for more than 100 years.  The Whites made an enormous impact on their community but like many African American women, the story of their historical impact has been largely ignored.

 

Clara founded the Union Benevolent Association to serve black soldiers after the Civil War ended.  Her daughter Eartha was a contemporary of fellow Jacksonville native James Weldon Johnson, and attended the historic Stanton School, Florida’s first school for blacks.  Eartha later studied opera in New York City, touring America and Europe with Johnson’s brother, Rosamond Johnson as both were members of America’s first black opera company.  Upon the death of her fiancé Eartha returned to Jacksonville and in1904 established the Clara White Mission in honor of her mother.  It is still serving meals to Jacksonville’s homeless and needy today.

 

Eartha White was a singer, teacher, entrepreneur, civil rights and women’s rights activist, community organizer, historian, and animal lover.  In addition to the Clara White Mission, she established a one-room schoolhouse for the children of slaves, Jacksonville’s first playground for black children, an orphanage, a tuberculosis hospital, Jacksonville’s first retirement home for blacks, a nursing home, an art museum, and a community farm. She founded the Colored Citizens Protective League, was the historian for the National Negro Business League her entire life, and a leader in the National Association of Colored Women. She worked with Mrs. Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson Kennedy, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, and Eleanor Roosevelt.  In 1971 at age 94 she was appointed to the President Nixon’s National Center for Voluntary Action.  She died in 1974.

 

In partnership with the Eartha M.M. White Museum, the Clara White Mission, the Black Masonic Temple of Jacksonville, the Jacksonville Historical Society and Special Collections at the University of North Florida library, the team will animate for the screen a large and well preserved treasure of archival photographs and primary sources to tell this story. Young women from the community will be the series narrators. Actors will read from the many letters in the collection.  The mission museum and other historic buildings still stand, where interviews will be conducted with community members and history experts. Music choices will guide the moods and themes as the story unfolds across ten decades.

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Adonnica Toler, Director of the Eartha White Museum in Jacksonville, describes the museum’s contents: