{"id":21085,"date":"2025-10-26T11:09:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T11:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/21085\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T11:09:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T11:09:25","slug":"makeover-will-tell-florida-black-history-in-a-parramore-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/21085\/","title":{"rendered":"Makeover will tell Florida Black history in a Parramore museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

A $2 million renovation will begin soon on the Wells\u2019Built Hotel, once the lone haven for Black travelers in segregation-era Orlando and now a museum where that history resonates.<\/p>\n

In its heyday, from the 1920\u2019s through the 1950\u2019s, the 20-room, two-story brick hotel on South Street in Parramore rolled out welcomes to legendary Black musicians like Count Basie, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and BB King; and athletes like boxer Joe Louis and baseball star Jackie Robinson. All were forbidden by Jim Crow laws and the color of their skin from staying overnight at Florida hotels with white guests.<\/p>\n

The musicians played the \u201cChitlin\u2019 Circuit,\u201d a network of small venues including Club Eaton in Eatonville and the South Street Casino in Orlando\u2019s Parramore neighborhood where rising Black artists starred on stage. The circuit drew its name from a soul-food delicacy on the club menus.<\/p>\n

Thurgood Marshall, a crusading civil rights lawyer who became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, also stayed at Wells\u2019Built in 1949 while he challenged guilty verdicts of young Black men falsely accused of raping Norma Padgett, a white 17-year-old housewife in Lake County. The notorious case of the \u201cGroveland Four,\u201d documented in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilbert King book \u201cDevil in the Grove,\u201d helped shape Marshall\u2019s career and define for 70 years the image of Southern bigotry and racial injustice.<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Wells\u2019Built<\/p>\n

Wells\u2019Built Museum in Orlando, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, displays of important artifacts and memorabilia related to Black history in Central Florida. The museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Exhibits<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Plaque<\/p>\n

Plaque on the exterior of the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Evidence<\/p>\n

Evidence from the Groveland Four case at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Bessie<\/p>\n

Bessie Coleman exhibit at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Zora<\/p>\n

Zora Neale Hurston exhibit at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\"Mary<\/p>\n

Mary McLeod Bethune exhibit at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

Show Caption<\/p>\n

1 of 13<\/p>\n

Exhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

Expand<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Negro Travelers\u2019 Green Book,\u201d a register of hotels and restaurants that welcomed people of color in the racially hostile South, helped Marshall, then a lawyer for the NAACP, and his legal team find lodging in Central Florida at the \u201clittle hotel in Parramore.\u201d<\/p>\n

These priceless connections to history live on at today\u2019s Wells\u2019Built, where proprietor Elizabeth Thompson Grace is helping to fulfill her community\u2019s story \u2014 and her family\u2019s own narrative \u2014 by preserving and upgrading the hotel building, which anchors the Parramore Historic District, now located in the shadow of The KIA Center.<\/p>\n

Grace, 48, president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League, took the reins of the renovation project from her mother, Geraldine Thompson, the longtime Central Florida lawmaker, educator and civil rights champion who died unexpectedly in February.<\/p>\n

\"StateState Sen. Geraldine Thompson at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in Orlando on May 14, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

Grace\u2019s vision of the project is the same as her late mother\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Both noted the former hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it needs to be a place where we can celebrate the contributions of African Americans in our area so the names of those who paved the way for the rest of us in Orlando and Central Florida don\u2019t get lost,\u201d Grace said, reciting a long list of trail-blazers, including Dr. William Monroe Wells, who built the hotel, and Mabel Butler, 98, who died last month. \u201cWe want to be sure to bring all their stories forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wells moved from Georgia to Parramore in 1917 as a 28-year-old doctor and became both a healer and Black business leader in the community west of downtown Orlando. He privately financed and built both the hotel and the South Street Casino, which, contrary to its name, functioned as a social club and community center, not a gambling house. It hosted wedding receptions and other celebrations.<\/p>\n

He put up his money because white-owned banks were unwilling to invest in his venture.<\/p>\n

Wells was one of a few Black doctors in Orlando and, for a period during World War II, its only one.<\/p>\n

He was credited with delivering 5,500 babies in his career before he died in 1957.<\/p>\n

Butler was the first Black woman elected to Orlando City Council and the first Black person elected to the Orange County Commission<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Wells\u2019Built is one of those special places where history feels close enough to touch,\u201d said Joy Wallace Dickinson, who wrote the \u201cFlorida Flashback\u201d column for the Orlando Sentinel for nearly 25 years. \u201cIt reminds us how, even in the hard times of segregation, people built dignity and hospitality into the heart of their community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former hotel closed after Wells died but has been a museum since 2001 when Grace\u2019s mother reimagined its future.<\/p>\n

\"ExhibitsExhibits at the Wells\u2019Built Museum, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, chronicle Black history in Central Florida, with displays of important artifacts and memorabilia from the region. The Orlando museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

She collected artifacts that told the story of Central Florida\u2019s Black community, then built simple exhibits to display them. The renovation plan envisions improvements to those presentations, in hopes of drawing visitors and even tourists the cramped facility has so far struggled to engage.<\/p>\n

Before her death, Geraldine Thompson harbored brief hopes of a grander center for the local Black community, as she pushed to locate a Florida Black History Museum in nearby Eatonville. With state leaders choosing to place that facility in St. Augustine instead, a rebuilt Wells\u2019Built must play the role.<\/p>\n

\"Wells'BuiltWells\u2019Built Museum in Orlando, pictured on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, displays of important artifacts and memorabilia related to Black history in Central Florida. The museum is in the midst of a $2 million renovation funded by tourist-tax revenues. (Rich Pope\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A stroll through its rooms shows the possibilities. One exhibit spotlights Mary Bethune Cookman, the educator, philanthropist, humanitarian and civil rights activist who started a private school for African-American students which later became Bethune-Cookman University. Dr. Wells was a pall-bearer at her funeral.<\/p>\n

Another highlights daredevil aviatrix Bessie Coleman, who lived in Orlando<\/a> in the 1920s and thrilled crowds with loop-de-loop aerobatics. Coleman was determined to soar over prejudice and traveled to Paris to learn to fly because U.S. flight schools would accept neither blacks nor women. Dubbed the \u201cQueen of the Air,\u201d she was the first African-American woman to earn a pilot\u2019s license.<\/p>\n

But not all artifacts depict triumphs.\u00a0 Authentic documents detail an 1860 auction of first-rate mules, hogs, wagons, carts \u2014 and 18\u00a0 \u201cvaluable Negroes,\u201d including Little Joe and Simon, trained blacksmiths, and Cupid, a sawyer, who was strong and skilled in cutting logs.<\/p>\n

The funding pitch to Orange County that won $2 million in tourist tax funds\u00a0for the museum cited its close proximity to Eatonville, one of the first self-governing all-Black municipalities in the nation. It predicted the Wells\u2019Built would become a center for individuals interested in genealogy, storytelling and music that \u201cprovides the sound track for African American life\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dr.Dr. William Monroe Wells exhibit at the Wells\u2019Built Museum in downtown Orlando, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. <\/p>\n

Eatonville is one of the proposed sites to house the state of Florida Museum of Black History.<\/p>\n

(Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda\/ Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

The plan is to create an experience with technology \u201cto provide immersive storytelling and draw people into the African American journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

The facility also has more mundane needs that the money will meet \u2014 including HVAC work, flood mitigation, bathroom and elevator repairs, and handicapped-accessible entrances and pathways. Expansion of the overstuffed museum space could come through renovation efforts on Wells\u2019 historic home, adjacent to the hotel and now sealed with plywood boards, which is also part of the eventual vision.<\/p>\n

For Grace, the project carries deep meaning in the memories it offers of her mother, whose legacy she hopes to complete.<\/p>\n

Without Geraldine Thompson, she said, the hotel almost certainly would have met the wrecking ball.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is her legacy, just the fact it still exists,\u201d Grace said.<\/p>\n

shudak@orlandosentinel.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A $2 million renovation will begin soon on the Wells\u2019Built Hotel, once the lone haven for Black travelers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,266,139,141,140,109],"class_list":["post-21085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}