To the chagrin of local historians, Tampa is probably better known for Jose Gaspar, a fictional pirate, than for any figures who actually existed. But a city project currently underway aims to highlight some of those individuals — namely, past members of City Council. Jennifer Dietz and her colleagues in the city’s archives and records department have been writing biographies about all 320 people who have served on Tampa City Council since 1849, when local leaders first tried to make Tampa an official city. The resulting book, a companion to a recent history of the city’s mayors, is due out this summer to coincide with the centennial of City Hall as well as Archives Awareness Week (July 12-18). Dietz let us in on some intriguing stuff about the city and those who shaped it.
Tampa’s current council configuration is less than 30 years old.
The city started out at just a fraction of its current size, and the makeup of its leadership evolved as it grew. “The very first beginnings of Tampa really only included the downtown Tampa area that we know now,” Dietz said.
As the city gradually added land mass, the council also shifted. “It had many different variations,” Dietz said. “At times it was called the board of aldermen or the board of representatives. In the early days of the city council, they were only elected for a year, and then it became two years.”
Now there are seven council members, three who represent the entire city and four who represent distinct districts, a composition that has been in place since 1987.
The council voted to dissolve itself. More than once.
In 1869, a group of council candidates ran on the “No Corporation People’s Party” platform, which sounds distinctly Tea Party-esque today.
They were elected, says Dietz, “based on their promise to dissolve the government,” and declined to take their oaths of office. “And so they basically disbanded the government doing that, and it didn’t reorganize for [a few years] or so after that.”
The city’s government was dissolved and reinstated several times before 1887, when a special act of the Florida Legislature established the City of Tampa.
City government in Tampa’s early days was more diverse than you might think.
Reconstruction-era Tampa wasn’t as divided as it would become in the 20th century. “A lot of people don’t realize how diverse it was,” Dietz said. The first African-American council member was Cyrus Charles, who was elected with the No Corporation Party in 1869 and went on to become a county commissioner. In 1887, when Tampa officially became a city, the council had an African-American member, Joseph Walker, as well as one of Spanish descent, Candido Angel Martinez Ybor, son of Ybor City founder Vicente Martinez Ybor.
The situation changed when Jim Crow laws were enacted, and the city went nearly a century without an African-American council member. The first woman to serve was Catherine Barja in 1971 and the first African-American woman to do so was Gwen Miller, who was elected in 1995.
Curtis Hixon isn’t just the name of a cool park.
Sure, it’s where tons of cultural events happen these days, but its namesake is a former councilman who went on to become a three-term mayor from 1943-1956, when he died in office. He was instrumental in the purchase of land that’s now home to Tampa International Airport, and was also known for mapping Sulphur Springs.
Two councilmen wound up going on to become governor.
The first was Ossian Bingley Hart, who was on the council from 1860-1861 (terms were one year back then) and became governor in 1873, but died in office barely a year later. Hart was openly against secession and fought for African Americans’ voting rights. As a lawyer in Tampa in 1859 he defended an African-American man facing a questionable murder charge. The case was on appeal when the defendant was killed in a lynching. The Jacksonville Times-Union recently called Hart “the real Atticus Finch.”
The other councilman to serve as governor, Henry Laurens Mitchell, was on the other side of the spectrum. The former Confederate soldier served on the council at the same time as Hart and was governor from 1893-1897.
Tampa may add a third to the list if Mayor Bob Buckhorn, a former councilman, successfully runs for governor, which observers say is likely to happen in 2018.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2015.