The Tampa Housing Authority and the Tampa Bay History Center announced Monday they are teaming up to create Tampa’s first Black history museum.
The museum will be built in the former St. James Episcopal Church in the Angkor district, a restored historic structure that retains its original appearance.
The exhibit is still in preparation, but program director Ashley Morrow and staff at the Tampa Bay History Center plan to cover a wide range of topics, said Fred Hearns, the organization’s black history curator. It will include accounts of Tampa’s black music, churches, neighborhoods, food and fashion through the centuries, with a particular emphasis on historically black neighborhoods, businesses and cultural gathering places along Central Avenue.
“There’s something for everyone,” Hearns said, “and there’s so much history in Florida that we haven’t yet explored.”
The exhibit will include both artifacts from the Tampa Bay History Center’s collection and oral histories collected from Tampa residents. The museum will take about 18 months to open, according to history center CEO CJ Roberts. In the meantime, he and Hearns are encouraging Black residents to come to the museum and talk about what they’d like to see in the museum, he said.
The Tampa Housing Authority spearheaded the restoration of the building that houses the museum, which most recently served as a medical clinic, and the authority took pains to recreate the way it looked when it was built in 1921. In 1895, an older building on the site served as a shelter for Bahamian and Afro-Cuban immigrants, according to State Rep. Diane Hart (D-Tampa).
“St. James has been a cornerstone of this historic neighborhood,” Hart said, “and I think about their story and how their struggles are often romanticized or forgotten entirely.”
Leroy Moore, the housing authority’s chief operating officer, said the museum plans to preserve certain parts of the building as it adds exhibits. Overall, the authority spent about $2 million on the restoration, which came from a federal grant and a local grant from the Society for Historic Preservation.
Attending Monday were Mayor Jane Kastl, County Commissioner Gwen Myers and Tampa City Council Member Gwen Henderson. Henderson said the building has personal meaning to her because after researching family records, she discovered that her father had slept in a corner of St. James Church before serving in the Korean War.
“This area, the Scrubs on Central Avenue, is so significant because it’s so deeply rooted in the family history of formerly enslaved people,” Henderson says. “Now we’re able to capture how incredible this space is.”
