The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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What segregation paid at Avon Park, 1950

This bundle can now say what the color line was worth in money. The published census volumes tabulate occupation, industry and income by race, county by county and for towns of Avon Park’s size, and the figures below are read off those tables.

The work

In 1950, of Highlands County’s 881 employed Black men, 490 — fifty-six per cent — were “farm laborers, except unpaid, and farm foremen.” It was the largest single occupation by a wide margin. Of 479 employed Black women, 208 — forty-three per cent — were private household workers, that is, domestic servants in other people’s houses.[census-1950-fl-general]

Taking the county’s Black workforce as a whole, 623 of 1,360 employed people, or forty-six per cent, worked in agriculture, forestry and fisheries — overwhelmingly citrus. Six hundred of them were classed as farm laborers.[census-1950-fl-general]

The pattern was already set a decade earlier. In 1940 the county counted 548 wage-earning farm laborers and foremen against only 162 farmers and farm managers — most of the agricultural work was done by men who owned none of it. Of the county’s 687 Black men aged fourteen and over, 522 were employed, and 476 of those, ninety-one per cent, were wage and salary workers rather than employers, owners or family workers.[census-1940-fl]

Avon Park’s own town table for 1950 shows the same shape without the racial split: “farm laborers and foremen,” 269 of 1,151 employed men, the largest specific male occupation in the town, ahead of craftsmen at 173.[census-1950-fl-general]

The money

Median income in 1949 for Highlands County’s Black families and unrelated individuals was $949. For all Highlands County families and individuals of every race it was $1,792. The gap is $843 a year, and the county-wide figure is dragged down rather than up by the Black households inside it, so the distance between Black and white was wider than $843.[census-1950-fl-general]

Six hundred of the county’s 1,220 Black families and unrelated individuals — very nearly half — reported under $1,000 for the whole year.[census-1950-fl-general]

What that meant on the ground

Set these figures beside what the manuscript schedules show household by household in Avon Park itself. The Black neighborhood’s recorded occupations run: picking and loading fruit at citrus packing houses; maids in private homes and hotels; laundry and dry-cleaning; cooks and waitresses.[census-1950-ed-28-8] The aggregate tables and the individual sheets describe the same town from two directions and agree exactly.

They also explain the schooling figures already in this bundle. Highlands County’s 1,815 Black adults in 1950 had a median of 5.2 years of schooling, and the whole county held twenty-five Black high school graduates and fifteen college graduates. A workforce held at fifty-six per cent farm labor on under a thousand dollars a year is what a school system starved of buildings, terms and teachers produces, and it is also what keeps children out of school to work. The two findings are the same fact seen at two ends.

A caution about the word “county”

The income and occupation figures above are Highlands County, not Avon Park alone, because the 1950 volumes tabulate race by county rather than by town for places this size. Avon Park held roughly a third of the county’s Black population — 1,293 of about 3,500 — and its Black residents worked in the same citrus economy as Sebring’s, so the county figure is a fair proxy. It is not a measurement of the town, and should not be quoted as one.

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, United States Census of Population 1950, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 10: Florida (1952)
  2. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 2: Florida (1943)
  3. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-8, Avon Park city (1950)

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