FLFlorida Famous People

The unmarked grave in Fort Pierce

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, but she grew up in Eatonville, incorporated in 1887 as one of the first self-governing all-Black towns in the country, and she wrote it into nearly everything she published. She drafted Their Eyes Were Watching God in about seven weeks in 1937. She died in a welfare home in Fort Pierce in 1960 and lay in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker went looking for it in 1973 and paid for a stone. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings bought an orange grove at Cross Creek in 1928, wrote The Yearling there and took the 1939 Pulitzer for it. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a Minneapolis native who arrived in Miami in 1915, published The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947 and fought drainage schemes for the rest of a 108-year life.

Jacksonville wrote the anthem, Daytona built the school

James Weldon Johnson wrote the words of Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing in Jacksonville in 1900 for a school celebration of Lincoln's birthday; his brother John Rosamond set it to music and the NAACP adopted it two decades later. A. Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City in 1889 and raised in Jacksonville, organised the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, forced Franklin Roosevelt to ban discrimination in defence plants by threatening a march in 1941, and directed the March on Washington in 1963. Mary McLeod Bethune opened a school for girls in Daytona Beach in 1904 with five pupils and a dollar and a half; it became Bethune-Cookman University, and in 2022 her statue replaced a Confederate general's as one of Florida's two in the National Statuary Hall. Harry T. Moore, who ran the state NAACP, was killed with his wife Harriette by a bomb under their bed in Mims on Christmas night 1951, their 25th wedding anniversary.

Births that surprise people

Sidney Poitier was born in Miami in 1927, months premature, while his Bahamian parents were in town selling tomatoes. The accident of location made him a US citizen, which is how he could return at 15. Bob Ross was born in Daytona Beach in 1942 and worked as a carpenter before the Air Force. Faye Dunaway was born in Bascom, a Jackson County town of a few hundred, in 1941. Jim Morrison was born in Melbourne in 1943 to a naval officer who later commanded the fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin. Ariana Grande grew up in Boca Raton, and Tim Tebow was born in the Philippines to missionary parents and raised outside Jacksonville.

The sound of the state

Ray Charles was born in Georgia but grew up in Greenville, Florida, lost his sight by seven, and learned to read music in braille at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine. Tom Petty grew up in Gainesville, met Elvis on a film set in Ocala at about eleven, played in Mudcrutch with Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and rebuilt that band as the Heartbreakers in Los Angeles in 1976. Gloria Estefan reached Miami as a toddler after her family left Cuba, and the Miami Sound Machine became the first Latin crossover act to hold American pop radio. Lynyrd Skynyrd formed in Jacksonville in 1964 around Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington and Allen Collins.

No president, one territorial governor

Florida has never produced a president. Andrew Jackson did it backwards: he took the territory from Spain in 1821 and served a few months as military governor before returning to Tennessee and reaching the White House eight years later. Donald Trump, born in Queens, moved his legal residence to Palm Beach in 2019, which made Florida a president's home state without its having produced one. The state's other Capitol statue is John Gorrie, an Apalachicola physician who built a machine to make ice around 1845 to cool his yellow fever patients, patented it in 1851, never raised the money to manufacture it and died poor. Henry Flagler, a Standard Oil partner from New York, ran his railroad down the Atlantic coast and out over open water to Key West by 1912.

The playing fields

Deion Sanders was born in Fort Myers in 1967 and is the only person to have played in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. Emmitt Smith came out of Escambia High School in Pensacola and retired as the NFL's career rushing leader. Chipper Jones grew up in Pierson and spent 19 seasons with Atlanta. Alex Rodriguez was born in New York but raised in Miami, where he played at Westminster Christian. Richard and Oracene Williams moved the family from Compton to West Palm Beach in 1991 so Venus and Serena could train full time.

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