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Museum director looks to the past


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Feb. 13--Geraldine Thompson is at the epicenter of black history in Orlando.

She oversees Black History Month events every February, orchestrates Martin Luther King Jr. observances, participates in the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville, sponsors Juneteenth celebrations recognizing the end of slavery and runs the Wells'- Built Museum of African-American History and Culture in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood.

So in 2001, her year of loss, she turned to the past to assuage her grief.

That year, her only sibling, a younger brother, died in January. In March, her 80-year-old mother passed away. A month later, she lost an aunt. In May, her pastor died.

Needing something to focus on, she listened to the voices of ghosts -- transcribing oral-history tapes of black residents made in the 1970s and '80s.

One was the deep, measured voice of I. Sylvester Hankins Jr. talking about the Klan march through Parramore in the 1920s and the black "leaders" who assured white officials that Negroes were satisfied with the way things were.

"Negroes have never been satisfied. They're not satisfied now," said Hankins, a civic leader and physician.

Hankins, who was 95 when he died in August 2001, is among six people who will be honored Friday at Thompson's annual Trailblazers Banquet.

She started it in 2000 to honor key figures in local black history and to raise money to restore the home of William Monroe Wells, one of Orlando's first black doctors.

"She is sincerely dedicated to the collection of African-American history. She's very tenacious about what she is doing. That is a trait to be admired," said Sara Van Arsdel, director of the Orange County Regional History Center.

Her admirers call Thompson tenacious and focused. Her detractors call her controlling and egotistical.

Maybe both groups are right.

You don't start out as an unwed, teen mother and end up as a college graduate, teacher, community-college administrator, tour-guide operator, political candidate, author, historian and museum director without some grit in your gizzard.

Born Geraldine Fortenberry on Nov. 18, 1948, in New Orleans, Thompson grew up poor in the South Florida community of Perrine. Her mother worked as a domestic. Her father was a construction worker. At 15, she became pregnant.

Her high-school teachers regarded her as just another bright girl whose life was short-circuited by a teenage pregnancy. Her mother didn't share that opinion -- Geraldine was going to college.

"She was very upset, but she was very supportive," said Thompson, 57.

Thompson's mother was one of 15 children, and Geraldine grew up in a house filled with aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. At 9, she was cooking for the family. Later, she did the reading and writing for illiterate family members.

"I became the writer for the family. That was my job," she said.

The writer of the family got a scholarship to study journalism and education at the University of Miami. One of about 125 blacks in a student body of 18,000, Thompson joined the Black Student Union and participated in demonstrations.

When she met law student Emerson R. Thompson Jr. in 1970, Geraldine thought Emerson was too full of himself. Emerson thought Geraldine was too serious. Six months later, they wed.

The couple moved to Orlando in 1972. Emerson Thompson would become a judge on the 5th District Court of Appeal. Geraldine Thompson would teach school before taking an administrative job at Valencia Community College, where she stayed for 24 years.

While at Valencia, she organized black-history events but was dismayed at the lack of information on local leaders.

"I found it extremely difficult to find local individuals who made significant contributions to Central Florida," she said.

In 1983, she joined the Central Florida Society of African-American Heritage, which was collecting oral histories. When that group dissolved in 1990, Thompson helped found the Association to Preserve African-American Society, History and Tradition. Known as PAST Inc., the organization was instrumental in acquiring the dilapidated Wellsbilt Hotel.

It took two years and more than $680,000 for PAST to restore the first hotel for blacks, which had been built by Wells, the black doctor, in the segregated Orlando of the 1920s.

Downstairs in the renamed Wells'Built Museum are exhibits of people and places long gone. Upstairs, are 12 offices, half of them rented, and a bedroom restored to the period when the building catered to musicians on the "Chitlin Circuit."

Within the black community, Geraldine Thompson is known as a woman who gets things done -- her way.

"I hate to relinquish control of a project that is important to me," she said. "I want it done right, and I don't have time to take two hours to explain it."

Few argue with her achievements. Not everybody agrees with her approach.

Activist Mercerdese Clark complains that Thompson hasn't always reached out to the community or followed its desires.

She and Thompson disagreed about the Wellsbilt project, which Clark and others thought should have included space for training students in the performing arts.

"She does come across as if to say, 'This is my turf. Don't step on it. This is the way I want it to be,' " said Clark, president of the Carter Street Neighborhood Association.

At work, Thompson is all business: calm and efficient. At home, she collects butterfly objects, listens to Mahalia Jackson, reads John Hope Franklin and eats the chitlins her husband won't touch. She likes sweet-potato pie and just about anything barbecue. When the couple go out, she wears Estee Lauder perfume and loves to dance.

To her three adult children -- Laurise Thomas, 42; Emerson R. Thompson III, 31; Elizabeth Thompson, 29 -- she is a strict but loving mother.

"She likes to be in a position of authority and give direction. And she's very good at it," said Emerson R. Thompson III, an accountant.

Thompson's own life was given direction in that year of grief. The voices on the tapes found their way into the book manuscript in the left-hand drawer of her office desk. Toward the Paved Road, a work in progress, refers to Division Street as the old boundary between black and white.

Those voices of the past did more than provide a diversion from grief. They gave Thompson a deeper appreciation for the struggle and survival, strength and sacrifice of the people who came before.

"There are a lot of people who worked really hard to make this a community you want to come to and live in," she said. "You need to understand who they were."

Jeff Kunerth can be reached at jkunerth@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5392.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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