Eight city blocks of Tampa's College Hill neighborhood will turn into an open-air history lesson Saturday morning, when historian Fred Hearns leads a 90-minute walking tour past a cemetery the city nearly lost forever, a high school rebuilt through one man's advocacy, and the Little League fields that launched the career of Dwight “Doc” Gooden. The College Hill Black History Walking Tour runs from 10 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, starting at the C. Blythe Andrews Jr. Public Library at 2607 E. Dr. MLK Jr. Boulevard, with tickets running $15 to $25.
Hearns, who serves as curator of Black history at the Tampa Bay History Center and Tampa's Black History Museum, is leading the walk, according to Creative Loafing Tampa. The tour is more than an academic exercise for him. He spent 32 years with the City of Tampa's Department of Community Affairs, serving as its director until 2007, before the Tampa Bay History Center appointed him its first curator of Black history in October 2021, per the Tampa Bay Times. He is also a lifelong East Tampa resident who personally led the alumni campaign to rebuild one of the tour's key stops, Middleton High School.
According to Creative Loafing Tampa, College Hill traces back to the late 1800s, when Black families began purchasing lots there after being promised that a college for Black students would be built nearby. That college never opened. Despite the broken promise, the neighborhood grew into a thriving community of more than 5,000 residents by the 1920s, the outlet reports, and College Hill remains one of Tampa's most important neighborhoods today.
A Cemetery the City Almost Lost for Good
One of the tour's stops, Memorial Park Cemetery, is more than 100 years old and serves as the final resting place for many of Tampa's Black leaders, Creative Loafing Tampa reports. Established in 1919, the cemetery contains roughly 6,000 graves, including World War I veterans, Negro League baseball players, civic developer Richard Doby, and former school board chair Doris Ross Reddick, according to a City of Tampa proclamation marking its Hillsborough County historical marker dedication in July 2024.
The cemetery's return to public hands came only after a scare. In May 2023, the Tampa City Council unanimously voted to buy back the 20-acre burial ground for $100,000 after the city had accidentally lost the abandoned, segregation-era cemetery to a real estate investor in a court tax-deed auction for just $18,000 earlier that year, as reported by FOX 13 Tampa Bay.
A High School Rebuilt, a Newspaper Still Printing
The walk also stops at Middleton High School, which opened in 1934 as Tampa's first high school for Black students. Court-ordered desegregation busing converted it into a junior high in 1971, and it sat that way for decades until an alumni campaign led by Hearns brought it back as a high school in 2002, according to the Historical Marker Database. The school's civil rights ties run deeper still: in February 1960, roughly 40 students from Middleton and Howard W. Blake high schools launched Tampa's civil rights sit-ins at the downtown F.W. Woolworth lunch counter, a demonstration that pushed city leaders to form a biracial committee that desegregated local lunch counters by that September, per the City of Tampa.
Tour-goers will also pass the Florida Sentinel Bulletin, a newspaper with roots stretching back to 1919 in Jacksonville before it was resurrected on Tampa's Central Avenue in 1945 by C. Blythe Andrews, according to the office of the U.S. House of Representatives. The paper merged with the Tampa Bulletin in 1959 and remains one of the few Black-owned newspapers in the country with full in-house printing operations. The tour's starting point, the C. Blythe Andrews Jr. Public Library, honors that same publisher; the branch opened in June 1989 in an 800-square-foot double-wide trailer as the College Hill Branch Library before moving into a permanent building in 1994 and being renamed in his honor in 2010, per Wikipedia.
From Belmont Heights Estates to a Little League Powerhouse
The route also runs through Belmont Heights Estates, an 860-unit mixed-income neighborhood whose first phase opened in September 2002 with federal and municipal officials on hand. The project was funded by a $32.5 million HUD HOPE VI grant awarded in 1997 to demolish the deteriorating College Hill Homes and Ponce de Leon Courts public housing complexes, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Perhaps the tour's most storied stop is Cyrus Greene Recreation Center, home to Cyrus Greene Park, acquired by the City of Tampa in 1931. The park served as home field for Florida State Negro Baseball League teams through the 1940s and 1950s before becoming home to the Belmont Heights Little League after its founding in 1968, according to the Historical Marker Database. That Little League program went on to reach the Little League World Series championship games in 1975, 1980, and 1981, winning the Junior League World Series in 1982, and it launched the Major League careers of Dwight Gooden, Gary Sheffield, Derek Bell, and Carl Everett — a lineage Creative Loafing Tampa notes drew tour attention to those same fields.
Rounding out the route are stops at the Lee Davis Community Resource Center and College Hill Cemetery, according to Creative Loafing Tampa's rundown of the walk. The tour marks another appearance for Hearns following his turn discussing city history and archival preservation at Tampa's 137th birthday kickoff at City Hall, an event Hoodline covered in a 2024 report on the celebration. Photography from the tour is credited to the Tampa Bay History Center.
