Eatonville, Florida

"The Gilded Six-Bits" is set in Eatonville, Florida, which was the first incorporated all-black town in the United States and also Hurston's real life hometown. Such voluntarily segregated towns, growing out of a post-Civil War phenomenon known as "race colonies," offered blacks the opportunity for political independence and some measure of freedom from the oppression of the wider racist culture. The area—now part of Orange County, Florida—was developed largely by white Northern veterans of the Civil War, with blacks coming there initially for work opportunities. A few progressive whites sold small parcels of land to African Americans with the purpose of allowing them to build their own, new community. Twenty-seven founders incorporated Eatonville as a town in 1887. It was designed with civic and community principles in mind, with a school and church at the town's symbolic center. Though racial segregation was the...