The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Avon Park lost a fifth of its Black population in the 1930s

The decennial federal censuses of 1930, 1940, and 1950 document the demographic trajectory of Avon Park’s African American community across two decades of economic contraction and wartime recovery.

Avon Park

1930 1940 1950 1960
Total population 3,355 3,125 4,612 6,073
Native white 2,361 2,342 3,263 4,372
Foreign-born white 66 40 53 116
Negro 928 743 1,293 1,584
Other races — — 3 1
Black share of the town 27.7% 23.8% 28.0% 26.1%

Change 1930 to 1940: the town lost 230 people, 185 of them Black. Change 1940 to 1950: the town gained 1,487, of whom 550 were Black — the Black population rose by 74 per cent in ten years while the town as a whole grew by 48. In the 1950s, growth continued: between 1950 and 1960 the town gained another 1,461 residents (+31.7 per cent), with the Black community growing by 291 to 1,584 (26.1 percent of the city).[census-1960-t22]

Sources: 1930, Table 16 of the Florida chapter of the 1930 population volume;[census-1930-t16] 1940, Table 30 of the Florida chapter of the 1940 characteristics volume;[census-1940-t30] 1950, Table 38 of the Florida chapter of the 1950 characteristics volume;[census-1950-t38] 1960, Table 22 of the Florida chapter of the 1960 population volume.[census-1960-t22] All four tables cover places of 2,500 to 10,000, which is the band Avon Park fell in across all four counts.

The town’s whole loss in the 1930s was Black. Avon Park had 230 fewer people in 1940 than in 1930. One hundred and eighty-five of them — four in five — were Black. The native white population was within nineteen people of where it had been.

And in the 1940s it came back, faster than the town did. The war, the airfield, the Lodwick flying school and the post-war citrus expansion put 1,487 people into Avon Park between 1940 and 1950, and 550 of them were Black. The Black share of the town, 23.8 per cent at its low point in 1940, was back to 28 per cent by 1950 — higher than it had been in 1930.[census-1950-t38]

Sex and age

In 1930 the town’s Black population ran male: the census gives 305 Black men and 260 Black women aged 21 and over.[census-1930-t16] By 1940 that had reversed, and sharply. Table 30a of the 1940 volume gives Avon Park’s whole nonwhite population by age and sex:[census-1940-t30]

Male Female
All ages 345 398
Under 5 37 40
5 to 9 39 37
10 to 14 41 41
15 to 19 22 42
20 to 24 18 34
25 to 29 38 36
30 to 34 25 39
35 to 39 28 37
40 to 44 22 31
45 to 49 20 14
50 to 54 11 19
55 to 59 6 8
60 to 64 15 7
65 to 69 14 7
70 to 74 2 3
75 and over 7 3
21 and over 205 230

Read the male column downward and the town’s young men are missing. There were 41 Black boys aged 10 to 14 in Avon Park in 1940, and 22 young men aged 15 to 19 and 18 aged 20 to 24. Nothing like that happens to the girls of the same ages — 41, 42, 34. Boys who grew up in Avon Park in the 1930s left it as soon as they could work.

What this means for the elections of 1949 and 1951

In 1940 Avon Park held 435 Black residents of voting age, 205 men and 230 women.[census-1940-t30] Nine years later, in September 1949, the Atlanta Daily World reported 317 registered Black voters in the town, of whom 297 voted.[adw-1949-09-25]

The 1950 census does not let this be sharpened. Its table for places of 2,500 to 10,000 gives ages for the whole population, not by race, and its nonwhite characteristics table stops at the county level.[census-1950-t38] What can be said is that the Black population of Avon Park grew by three-quarters between 1940 and 1950, so the number of Black adults in 1949 was well above the 435 of 1940 — perhaps six or seven hundred.

The order of magnitude is still the point: something around half of Avon Park’s Black adults were on the register in 1949, and 94 per cent of those registered turned out. In the Jim Crow South in 1949 that is a high figure, and it is the fact that makes the Junior Chamber of Commerce registration drive, the 1949 result, and the city council’s attempt in 1951 to cancel the whole precinct intelligible as a sequence rather than as three separate curiosities.

Highlands County

Table 22 of the 1940 volume prints 1940 and 1930 side by side for every Florida county, so the county figures for both years come from one table.[census-1940-t30]

1930 1940 Change
Total population 9,192 9,246 +54 (+0.6%)
Native white 6,275 7,117 +842
Foreign-born white 236 185 −51
Negro 2,677 1,944 −733 (−27.4%)
Other races 4 — −4
Black share of the county 29.1% 21.0%
Aged 21 and over 1930 1940
All 5,532 5,635
Negro, male 1,055 584
Negro, female 660 563
Negro, total 1,715 1,147

The county’s total population did not move — fifty-four people over ten years. Underneath it, the white population grew by about eight hundred and the Black population fell by seven hundred and thirty-three.

The 1930 sex ratio says what the 1920s Black population was doing here. In 1930 Highlands County held 1,055 Black men aged 21 and over and 660 Black women — a surplus of nearly four hundred men. That is the signature of a labor force, not a settled population: the turpentine camps, the crate mills, the citrus groves and the boom-time construction sites of the 1920s. By 1940 the surplus was gone (584 men, 563 women), and so were four hundred and seventy-one Black men of working age. The work had ended with the boom and the freeze years, and the men went where the work was.

Avon Park held more than a third of the county’s Black population at both counts — 928 of 2,677 in 1930, 743 of 1,944 in 1940. It was the largest Black community in Highlands County.

Industrial Origins and Demographic Shift

The sharp demographic swings between 1930 and 1950 reflect the changing industrial structure of northern Highlands County. During the late 1910s and 1920s land boom, timber and naval stores operators (such as the Hagan Naval Stores Company and local lumbermen) actively recruited Black laborers from Alabama and Georgia to work in turpentine stills, logging camps, and sawmills, producing the large male demographic surplus recorded in 1930.[maxwell-1976]

When the naval stores industry contracted, timber stands were cut over, and boom-era construction ceased during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this transient wage-labor force dispersed. In the 1940s, the revival of the citrus industry, establishment of the Avon Park Army Airfield and Lodwick Aviation Academy, and expansion of truck farming attracted a more settled family population, driving the 74 percent rebound in Avon Park’s Black community by 1950.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, Florida, Table 16: Composition of the Population, for Incorporated Places of 2,500 to 10,000, page 422 (1932)
  2. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 2, Florida, Tables 22, 30 and 30a, pages 53, 120 and 123 (1943)
  3. United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 10, Florida, Table 38: General Characteristics of the Population, for Urban Places of 2,500 to 10,000, page 10-71 (1952) · official
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1960, Volume I, Characteristics of the Population, Part 11, Florida, Table 22: Characteristics of the Population, for Urban Places of 2,500 to 10,000, page 11-65 (1961) · official
  5. Associated Negro Press, in the Atlanta Daily World, Negroes Swing Mayor's Election In Avon Park, Atlanta Daily World, 25 September 1949, page 3 (1949)
  6. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book

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