- April 24, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
When Belinda Davis married her husband and they got their own house, she told her great grandmother all about the new house plants she'd bought.
Her great grandmother — Mabel Rose Baker, whom Davis described as "thrifty," a result of living through some of the hardest times in the history of the United States — questioned her decision.
"She says, 'Why are you buying those plants?'" Davis recalled. "She says, 'You can't eat them.' In other words, you shouldn't be buying plants because it's a waste of money. ... It's not like mustards, collards, green beans."
Born on Jan. 10, 1893, Baker was one of six children of Laura and Rev. William Amos Rose, two of the earliest Black settlers in Ormond Beach. The Roses, both fishermen from the Palatka area, came down the Halifax River one day when Baker was three months old and saw Ormond. They decided it would be their family's home.
And it has been.
Davis is part of the fifth generation of the Rose family. For the past two years, she has been working to preserve her family's history.
It was her cousin, who also still lives in Ormond, who encouraged her to do so. It would be a big undertaking, and at first Davis was unsure if she had the time for it.
"That's when she told me, 'Listen, we have to tell it,'" Davis said. "'We have it have it documented if we want [people] to know that our families settled here and they thrived here.'"
The city of Ormond Beach has two historically Black neighborhoods between the Halifax River and U.S. 1. The community north of West Granada Boulevard is the Sudan neighborhood, and the one south is Liberia, named after the ancestral countries of the Black freed slaves who settled there between 1880 and 1900.
The Roses lived in Liberia. Both William Amos and Laura Rose were missionaries and helped grow the historic New Bethel AME church at 115 S. Yonge St., Davis said. William Amos Rose also delivered milk by bicycle, and Laura Rose, who wad half-Indian and half-Black, worked for many German families in town at the time, including the Sterthaus and Ellicott families.
Laura Rose was also friends with Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Davis said that, according to her family's stories, Bethune visited Rigby Elementary, the Black school in Ormond at the time. The school is now home to the PACE Center for Girls.
Baker was known as a sickly child at the time. Now, the family knows she was diabetic. It was because of her sickness that Laura Rose and Bethune became close, Davis said.
"The story is she was one of the first kids that ended up going to Bethune Cookman," Davis said. "She took music classes."
Bethune founded her school, which was first called the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute For Negro Girls, in 1904.
Bethune died about a week before Davis was born in 1955. Laura Rose died that week as well.
"So I never got to know them," Davis said. "I never got to talk to them, but through the stories, I feel like I knew them."
But Baker was always proud to say she knew Bethune. Though, Bethune wasn't the only civil rights activist Baker met in her lifetime. In a Daytona News-Journal article from Jan. 18, 1988, she recalled how she once attended a meeting in Chicago where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.
She even shook his hand.
The article highlighted Baker's role as the grand marshal for Ormond Beach's first and only parade in honor of King. She was 95 years old.
Baker was full of stories. She recalled being invited to The Casements as one of Bethune's students by John D. Rockefeller to sing and recite poetry. She often laughed when she would tell her family that he always invited Bethune to sit by him.
"And that was just unheard of at the time," Davis said.
Davis held on to these stories. She spent a lot of time with her great grandmother at her house at 245 S. Washington St., where she lived for 75 years.
"I always visited her," Davis said. "I don't know why — maybe because I was the oldest of this generation, and I wanted to make sure I got everything that I could from her."
Davis fondly remembers instances where they would cook together, and she would be peeling potatoes by Baker. No fancy potato peeler — just a knife.
Her great grandmother would admonish her.
"She said, 'You're taking all the potato off with the skin," Davis said. "You're not doing it right. You're wasting."
As Davis said, Baker was thrifty.
And the family never went without food, and they always had a nice place to live, no matter the civil unrest that surrounded them.
"[Baker] remembered the time streets were wooden — all wooden," Davis said. "She remembered the times when the rocks were always thrown at them, when they walked places they weren't [welcome.]"
One time, Baker needed to buy a stove and tried to borrow money from a local banker. The banker initially refused her because she was Black; but as she was leaving, someone recognized her as Laura Rose's daughter. Only then was she allowed to borrow the funds.
"She was a little hurt by it, but because we were all raised to love, we got through it and still flourished regardless," Davis said.
Baker lived to be 100 years old. She died on April 29, 1993 at Halifax Medical Center. At the time of her death, she was one of Ormond's oldest minority residents and had been honored as such during the city's centennial celebration in 1980.
Her husband Everette L. Baker and their five children all preceded her in death. According to her obituary, she left behind a family line consisting of nine grandchildren, 22 great grandchildren and 27 great-great grandchildren.
Thirty years have since passed, but the family remains united.
Davis began holding a family reunion about 23 years ago. The reunion takes place every two years in Ormond Beach, and about 200 people attend. Baker's descendants and extended family live in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Colorado, Texas, Mississippi, California and abroad.
"Two years, we met down south," Davis said. "One year, we met in Atlanta, but everybody said, 'Oh no, this is our home.'"
Davis moved away in 1974, but returned in 2009 at her husband's suggestion. A family member of hers still owned some of the original property purchased by the Roses in the early 1900s, and Davis and her husband bought the land from them and built their home.
Since then, she went back to school. In 2011, she obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Central Florida, and later graduated with a master's degree in clinical social work in 2014.
She's since founded a nonprofit — called Healthier, Wealthier, Wiser, Inc. — to provide seminars on preventative measures to remain healthy, manage diseases and educate the community on how to navigate through the health care system.
And of course, in her spare time, she researches her family history and hopes to one day write a book. She'd also love for Ormond Beach to have a museum of African American history. Should that take place, she wants to make sure her family's history is compiled and ready to go.
If Baker could see what Davis is doing today, Davis said she'd laugh.
"She would be so proud," she said. "She was always proud of her grandchildren."
