Walter Gilbert on Growing up in Newtown, Community Activism and the State of DEI
This article originally appeared in Sarasota Magazine. To read the original article, click here.
“Everyone should have an opportunity to be as good as they can be. We all have to be willing to stand up and say some things out loud.”
Walter Gilbert. Image: Jesse Clark
Since childhood, fourth-generation Sarasotan Walter L. Gilbert has modeled the community-minded elders of Newtown, where he was born and raised. Newtown was where Gilbert’s grandmother told him stories about how Overtown—the town’s name prior to Newtown—was a thriving Black community. Newtown was where he grew up with family and neighbors who had a clear vision for the neighborhood’s future. Newtown was where he tagged along with his mother when she attended community meetings and came to know the neighbors who influenced Gilbert for the rest of his life, including the late Neil Humphrey, a Newtown entrepreneur, and the late John Rivers, a past president of the local NAACP, a position that Gilbert himself came to hold years later.
Today, nearly six decades later, Gilbert—now an elder in the Newtown community himself—is known for his service. He has been a vocal advocate for the recognition of important Black Sarasotans, and in 2023 was the organizer for the Gilbert Mural Initiative, which honored Lewis and Irene Colson, Sarasota’s first Black settlers, who were hired to plat the town, in the Rosemary District. Colson also founded Sarasota’s first Black church, Bethlehem Bible Church, and Irene offered health and midwifery services to the community.
With Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Gilbert also spearheaded the recognition of Dr. John Chenault, the first Black doctor to have practicing privileges at the hospital. He also had a plaque dedicated to his sixth grade teacher, Dorothy Smith, at Southside Elementary School. Smith was the first Black principal at a white school in Sarasota after segregation.
Today, at 72, Gilbert is the vice president for diversity and inclusion at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. He also sits on many boards, is a football coach for the Sarasota Sailors and is a member of the North County Civic League. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your memories of growing up in Newtown?
“Because of the way the Jim Crow system was set up, the Black community had to be all-inclusive. We had our own school, churches and business district with grocery stores, laundry, restaurants and bars.
“The community was safe, loving and nurturing. My teachers could be at my dining room table at night. If I acted up in school, they could be at the house telling on me before I even got home. Our teachers loved and cared for us because they knew us. They were getting us ready for what was coming: living in a different world from our safe community. But we didn’t know that’s what they were doing.
“My sixth-grade teacher, Miss Dorothy Smith, taught us many things that couldn’t be found in a book. I love Shakespeare because she exposed us to it. She took us to the Asolo Repertory Theatre when Black kids could not go there and demanded that they let us in. She taught us about Chinese culture and that our history didn’t start on the shores of America.”
What was it like growing up in Sarasota overall during that time?
“Until about 1971, if you were Black in Sarasota and wanted to buy a home, you had to buy in Newtown. Your money wasn’t good anywhere else.
“When I was born, in 1951, Black people weren’t allowed to be patients at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, so my mother couldn’t go there to deliver me. I had to be delivered by midwives in our community. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, [the hospital] couldn’t lock us out anymore because a public facility, which received federal money to operate, had to be open to everybody. That’s the first year that Blacks could use the hospital like everyone else.
“A Ku Klux Klan division had a strong hold in the State, and one of the biggest was in Palmetto. Its impacts can be seen today. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map by State shows that Florida has 114 hate groups. The only other state that has more is California, with 117.
“We knew that once we went outside [the cocoon of Newtown], there was a different world out there. There were rules that we had to follow to be safe, to get home in the evening. That was a struggle. It’s hard to respect rules that make no damn sense and that are demeaning to you as a person.”
How did things change after integration?
“It didn’t get easier, and it was not what we expected—although, sometimes I wonder what we expected because before segregation we couldn’t go downtown and get a hamburger or go in certain stores or to the beaches. Integration was a one-way street, especially for the businesses in Newtown’s business district.
“Suddenly we could shop in their stores and eat at the lunch counter. [White people] took our money, which was now going outside of the Black community. But nobody came to Newtown.
“We’re finally understanding how we lost on that deal, and we’re doing things differently now, but we got the short end on the long spin.”
In 1979, you became the president of the local NAACP. Did you have any safety concerns?
“I was raised up in community meetings. My mother took me to almost everything. She was very active, so that community involvement was always there for me to absorb, and I did.
“When I was asked to become the president of Sarasota branch of the NAACP, I was like, ‘OK, that’s cool, right?’ I called my mother to tell her the news and she said, ‘Well, you need to come over to the house.’ Any time my mother said that I’d think, ‘Uh-oh.’ When I got there, she said, ‘So they want you to be president of the branch?’ I said, ’Yes, ma’am.” Then she said, ‘You know that they kill NAACP presidents, don’t you?’
“When my mother said that, it gave me pause. I had not thought about that possibility. She made me promise that every night, when I was home safe, I would call her. I did that every night for three years, and it kept her happy.
How do you feel about the current state of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)?
“What’s happening with DEI is just like when politicians took the term ‘woke’ and made it a nasty thing. Black people have been using that term since the end of the Civil War because it was a new awakening. You’re woke from being lost in that slave mentality. We were woke, and we kept getting woke. It’s a shame that [politicians] took that term and made it distasteful.
“It’s sad that people in positions of power are willing to destroy something that works—and that works for the betterment of everybody—just to stay in power.
“My mom used to say, ‘Son, everything comes around.’ Meaning: everything comes full circle so we’ve got to keep treading. Don’t be ashamed to say you’re in favor of diversity or that you want to be inclusive to everybody. Everyone should have an opportunity to be as good as they can be. We all have to be willing to stand up and say some things out loud.”
What would you like your white friends or acquaintances to be doing right now?
“Don’t look at me and think that I’m just some Black guy. Consider me individually, not in the way that world says to. Consider me. Think for yourself - it makes a difference.
“Here’s the perfect example. Look at the faces of the people in the photos when Ruby Bridges went to her first day of school in 1960. That 6-year-old girl walked with federal agents while a crowd of people were jeering at her and yelling slurs. Why? Was that because their neighbors or granddaddies said that was how they were supposed to feel?
“I want to know how those people really felt about that little girl. Did they ever consider she was a girl just trying to go to school?
“But that’s what it means to be Black. Sometimes white people don’t get it because they could go to any schools or stores. For the Black community, there had to be someone who was the first. And being the first is like being on the front lines of war. We have to fight for an inch of respect.”
Listening to Black Voices is a series created by Heather Dunhill